Chapter 1/ Infinite London: the London-ness of London.- Chapter 2/ The Disintegration of London in Alan Moore’s Psychogeography.- Chapter 3/ Peter Ackroyd’s Sensuous Detective Method in Hawksmoor.- Chapter 4/ Writing Psychogeography, Writing London through a Screen Darkly: White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings .- Chapter 5/ London-ness: a Marriage of the Literary and the Psychogeographical.
Ann Tso is Instructor of English at Lethbridge College, Canada. Much of her research concerns popular re-imaginings of world cities, particularly theories of worlding and alternate histories. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Neo-Victorian Studies, TheLiterary London Journal, and Journal of Narrative Theory.
This Pivot book examines literary elements of urban topography that have animated Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair’s respective representations of London-ness. Ann Tso argues these authors write London “psychogeographically” to deconstruct popular visions of London with colonial and neoliberal undertones. Moore’s psychogeography consists of bird’s-eye views that reveal the brute force threatening to unravel Londonscape from within; Ackroyd’s aims to detect London sensuously, since every new awareness recalls an otherworldly London; Sinclair’s conjures up a narrative consciousness made erratic by London’s disunified landscape. Drawing together the dystopian, the phenomenological, and the postcolonial, Tso explores how these texts characterize “London-ness” as estranging.