ABSTRACT
The word atmosphere is derived from the seventeenth-century Latin Atmosphaera that combines the Greek atmos meaning ‘vapour’ and sphaira meaning ‘sphere’. The literary critic Steven Connor traces the Greek atmos to the original Sanskrit atman, meaning ‘breath’, ‘life’, or ‘soul’, and notes that the earliest recorded English usage is in a scientific tract by the Anglican clergyman and philosopher John Wilkins, first published in 1638, concerning whether the moon might be habitable. The theoretical standpoint offered by Anderson points to the influence of Deleuzian-Spinozist formulations within cultural geography and also draws on a range of other sources including phenomenology and historical materialism. The cultural geographer Jurgen Hasse offers a similarly broad definition of atmospheres extending from meteorological phenomena such as the ‘heavy atmosphere’ of an impending thunderstorm to the presence of ‘urbanity’ and different manifestations of urban life.
