Regimes of language and light in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Green Tea'
Abstract
While positioning and contextualising the short story ‘Green Tea’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu in relation to existing Le Fanu scholarship, this article seeks to explore further the textual reflexivity for which it is renowned. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of regimes in the audio and the visual, in particular, through an attention to the interrelationship of the scopic, auditory and textual regimes of ‘Green Tea’, and to the manner in which writing is explicitly figured as both the source of disjunction and the site of interpenetration of the regimes, it is suggested, in conclusion, that a specific understanding of allegory can provide a fresh perspective on ‘Green Tea’ as an archive of the regimes of language and light of its time.