Reading London's Suburbs: From Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith

ISBN-13: 9781137342454 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 239 str.

Ged Pope

Opis

This book offers a lively overview of London suburban fiction over the last 180 years. Close readings and discussion of work by Dickens, the Grossmith brothers, H. G. Wells, and on through Orwell, Stevie Smith, V. S. Naipaul and Zadie Smith, provides a comprehensive account of key recurring approaches and themes. Suburban fiction highlights the complex connections between place and writing, and focuses on the activities individuals necessarily undertake to make place legible and habitable. Much fiction, looking in at the suburbs from without, anxiously tends to present the popular mass suburb as comprising a key set of problems associated with modernity: as being unknown and unknowable social space, as soullessly repetitive and empty, as lacking familiar co-ordinates of specific place and cultural tradition. This book explores why the suburb, in much fiction, is seen to fail in its primary function of offering a knowable, habitable landscape, a home, or even a tenable sense of identity.

Recenzje

“Despite the countless studies that have been published on London and its geographical and cultural make-up, Ged Pope is clearly correct in identifying the city's suburbs as an as yet under-researched area. His volume sets out to address this gap by adopting a very broad perspective, both in terms of the time frame (as indicated in the volume's subtitle) and with regard to the kinds of texts selected.” (Merle Tönnies, Anglistik, Vol. 28 (1), 2017)

Spis treści

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction: 'Where is Clapham? Does Clapham even exist?': Suburban Invisibility 1. "Houseless–Homeless–Hopeless!": Suburbs, Slums and Ghosts 1830 – 1870 2. 'A World of Mud and Fog': The High Victorian and Edwardian Suburb, 1880 – 1914 3. 'The Third England': Suburban Fiction and Modernity, 1918 – 1939 4. 'Your Environment Makes as Little Sense as your Life': Post-War Suburbia 1945-1980 5. 'I Tried to Work Out Where I Was': Contemporary Suburbia Conclusion: 'All Stories are Spatial Stories' Notes Bibliography

O autorze

Ged Pope teaches on the English Literature degree course at London Metropolitan University.