In most accounts, literature of the nineteenth century compulsively tells the story of the individual and interiority. But amidst the newly dense social landscapes of modernity, with London as the first city of one million inhabitants, this literature also sought to represent those unknown and unmet: strangers. Focusing on the ways that both Victorian literature and modern social thought responded to an emergent "society of strangers," The Comfort of Strangers argues for a new relation between literary form and the socially dense environments of modernity, insisting upon strangers in...
In most accounts, literature of the nineteenth century compulsively tells the story of the individual and interiority. But amidst the newly dense soci...
