Margins of desire turns the critical spotlight on the London suburbs by showing how the expanding city created new literary locations, genres and themes between 1880 and 1925.
Drawing on a wide range of writings, the book considers not only the fiction that identified the suburbs as significant but also the fiction that suburban dwellers, particularly women, wrote and read for themselves. Pervasive suburban themes included the loss of the rural, the rejection of the urban, the feminisation of culture and changing class identities. By engaging with modernity as represented by the suburbs,...

'Margins of desire' turns the critical spotlight on the London suburbs by showing how the expanding city created new literary locations, genres and themes between 1880 and 1925. Drawing on a wide range of writings, the book considers not only the fiction that identified the suburbs as significant but also the fiction that suburban dwellers, particularly women, wrote and read for themselves. Pervasive suburban themes included the loss of the rural, the rejection of the urban, the feminisation of culture and changing class identities. By engaging with modernity as represented by the suburbs,...