London's Underground Spaces: Representing the Victorian City, 1840-1915

ISBN-13: 9780748676071 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 256 str.

Haewon Hwang

Opis

Provides an innovative approach to articulate what 'underground' meant to the Victorians. The construction of London's underground sewers, underground railway and suburban cemeteries created seismic shifts in the geography and the psychological apprehension of the city. Yet, why are there so few literary and aesthetic interventions in Victorian representations of subterranean spaces? What is London's answer to the Parisian sewers of Victor Hugo or the unflinching realism of Emile Zola's underworld? Where is the great English underground novel? This study explores this elision not as an absence of imaginative output, but as a presence and plenitude of anxiety and fears that haunt the pages of Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Bram Stoker and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The way in which these writers negotiated the dirt and messiness of underground spaces reveals both the emergence of Gothic, socialist, and modernist sensibilities, and the way all modern cities deal with what is unseen, intangible and inarticulable. The inclusion of illustrations of Victorian maps, cartoons, photographs and art bring the period to life.
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Spis treści

Table of Contents; Acknowledgements; List of Illustrations; Introduction; Spatial Practices and Realignments; Digging through the Layers; Which Way to the Underground?; 1. The Incontinent City: Sewers, Disgust and Liminality; The ‘Great Unwashed’ and the Incontinent City; Literature of Filth/Visions of the Sublime; Tainted Love: Prostitutes and Sexual Contagion; Reading the Body of the Prostitute; Imperial Impurities/Foreign Filth; Embanking the Empire: Literature of Otherness; Beyond Cleanliness; 2. Tubing It: Speeding Through Modernity in the London Underground; Spatial Annihilation, Production and Representation; Recuperating Meaning in the Underground; Temporal Dislocations; Failure and Psychological Disjunctions; Disembarkation; 3. The (Un)Buried Life: Death in the Modern Necropolis; The Disposal of the Dead: Shifting Attitudes towards the Corpse; Geographies of the Dead; Resurrection, Resurrectionists and the Revenant; Feminine Resurrections and Spectral Dispossessions; Underground Mourning, Memory and Memorabilia; Final Exhumation; 4. Underground Revolutions: Invisible Networks of Terror in Fin-de-Siècle London; Infernal Machines and Diabolical Plots; ‘Fenian Fire’: Unfolding the Revolutionary Plot; Middle-class Socialists and Anarchic Aristocrats; Domesticating Terror; Language of Rebellion/Performing Terror; From Individual Action to Existential Inertia; After the ‘Revolution’…; Conclusion; Bibliography.