“Look Elsewhere”: Literal Foreshadows in English Literature

This essay presents material from a book I am writing about shadows in literature and visual art, a book aimed at explaining how shadows communicate to us. Here I focus on the use of shadows in English literature, particularly Shakespeare and Dickens. Critics have paid little attention to the narrative quality of shadows, but from Plato’s allegory of the cave, through Christian typology, and on into techniques of literary foreshadowing in the novel, shadows play a key role in directing our attention toward future developments. The shadow-substance tension that underlies so much writing about human perception forms an integral part of this process, guiding readers toward a substantial “something” — an object, an event, a revelation—elsewhere in space or time that will fulfill the expectations raised by the chimeras of the present moment