Writing London: Volume 3: Inventions of the City

by J. Wolfreys

Overview

This book stages a series of interventions and inventions of urban space between 1880 and 1930 in key literary texts of the period. Making sharp distinctions between modernity and modernism, the volume reassesses the city as a series of singular sites irreducible to stable identities, concluding with an extended reading of The Waste Land .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780230008953
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	07/12/2007
Edition description:	2007
Pages:	262
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

Julian Wolfreys is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at Loughborough University, UK. He was previously Professor in Literature at the University of Florida, USA. His teaching and research is concerned with 19th- and 20th-century British literary and cultural studies, literary theory, the poetics and politics of identity, and the idea of the city. He is the series editor of Transitions and has written many course texts for Literature students, notably The English Literature Companion .

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: of invention and the singularities of the city of London The Hieroglyphic Other: The Beetle , London, and the Anxieties of Late Imperial England The 'tortuous geography of the night world': the 'productive disorder' of the Noctuary Text Between Seeing and Knowing: Amy Levy, Arnold Bennett and Urban Counter-Romance 'All the living and the dead': Urban Anamnesis in John Berger and Iain Sinclair 'Concatenated words from which the sense seemed gone': The Waste Land Afterword Works Cited Index

Editorial Reviews

'Julian Wolfreys' series of Writing London books goes from strength to strength. This volume contains admirable readings of the way a series of writers 'invent' London by way of telling stories about particular locations within it - including wonderful chapters on London at night, on Richard Marsh's The Beetle , on Amy Levy and Arnold Bennett (he revived an interest in Bennett for me!), on John Berger and Iain Sinclair, and, last, on Eliot's The Waste Land . The Eliot chapter is by far the best essay on The Waste Land I have ever read. It is a genuine tour de force, as is the whole book.' - Professor J. Hillis Miller, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine, USA

From the Publisher