Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature
Author: Laura Colombino
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2013-06-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136777954

This book analyses the spatial politics of a range of British novelists writing on London since the 1950s, emphasizing spatial representation as an embodied practice at the point where the architectural landscape and the body enter into relation with each other. Colombino visits the city in connection with its boundaries, abstract spaces and natural microcosms, as they stand in for all the conflicting realms of identity; its interstices and ruins are seen as inhabited by bodies that reproduce internally the external conditions of political and social struggle. The study brings into focus the fiction in which London provides not a residual interest but a strong psychic-phenomenological grounding, and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing this space. Authors such as J. G. Ballard, Geoff Dyer, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Tom McCarthy, Michael Bracewell and Zadie Smith are considered in order to map the relationship of body, architecture and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the city. Through readings that are consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and reflections formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists and art critics, this book offers a substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of literary urban studies.

Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel

Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel
Author: Dr Sara Upstone
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2013-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1409475212

In her innovative study of spatial locations in postcolonial texts, Sara Upstone adopts a transnational and comparative approach that challenges the tendency to engage with authors in isolation or in relation to other writers from a single geographical setting. Suggesting that isolating authors in terms of geography reinforces the primacy of the nation, Upstone instead illuminates the power of spatial locales such as the journey, city, home, and body to enable personal or communal statements of resistance against colonial prejudice and its neo-colonial legacies. While focusing on the major texts of Wilson Harris, Toni Morrison, and Salman Rushdie in relation to particular spatial locations, Upstone offers a wide range of examples from other postcolonial authors, including Michael Ondaatje, Keri Hulme, J. M. Coetzee, Arundhati Roy, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Abdulrazak Gurnah. The result is a strong case for what Upstone terms the 'postcolonial spatial imagination', independent of geography though always fully contextualised. Written in accessible and unhurried prose, Upstone's study is marked by its respect for the ways in which the writers themselves resist not only geographical boundaries but academic categorisation.

Contemporary British Literature and Urban Space

Contemporary British Literature and Urban Space
Author: K. Duff
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2014-12-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137429356

Looking at writers such as Will Self, Hani Kureishi, JG Ballard, and Iain Sinclair, Kim Duff's new book examines contemporary British literature and its depiction of the city after the time of Thatcher and mass privatization. This lively study is an important and engaging work for students and scholars alike.

London Dispossessed

London Dispossessed
Author: John Twyning
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 269
Release: 1998-03-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0333994752

In the Early Modern period, massive emigration, along with political contention between the Court and the City, reshaped London's social topography and human landscape. This book examines the spaces and identities which characterized the changing metropolis. From excursions into institutions like Bedlam, Bridewell, and the Theatre, as well as exploring the less formal places and practices of London, such as prostitution, the suburbs, and the fashion parades at St Paul's Walk, a new way of seeing the city becomes open to us.

London in Contemporary British Fiction

London in Contemporary British Fiction
Author: Nick Hubble
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2016-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1623560616

Contemporary writers such as Peter Ackroyd, J.G. Ballard, John King, Ian McEwan, Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Zadie Smith have been registering the changes to the social and cultural London landscape for years. This volume brings together their vivid representations of the capital. Uniting the readings are themes such as relationship between the country and the city; the capacity of satirical forms to encompass the 'real London'; spatio-temporal transformations and emergences; the relationship between multiculturalism and universalism; the underground as the spatial equivalent of London's unconsciousness and the suburbs as the frontier of the future. The volume creates a framework for new approaches to the representation of London required by the unprecedented social uncertainties of recent years: an invaluable contribution to studies of contemporary writing about London.

Spatial Politics

Spatial Politics
Author: David Featherstone
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2013-01-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1444338307

This critical engagement with Doreen Massey’s ground-breaking work in geographic theory and its relationship to politics features specially commissioned essays from former students and colleagues, as well as the artists, political figures and activists whose thinking she has helped to shape. It seeks to mark and take forward her compelling contributions to geographical theorizing and political debate. High profile contributors include Lawrence Grossberg, Chantal Mouffe, Jamie Peck and Jane Wills The global reach and significance of Massey’s work recommends this volume to a diverse readership Provides an agenda for work on spatial politics and critical geography Sets out the contours of a human geography informed by Doreen Massey’s work

Spatial Politics

Spatial Politics
Author: David Featherstone
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2012-11-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1118278836

This critical engagement with Doreen Massey’s ground-breaking work in geographic theory and its relationship to politics features specially commissioned essays from former students and colleagues, as well as the artists, political figures and activists whose thinking she has helped to shape. It seeks to mark and take forward her compelling contributions to geographical theorizing and political debate. High profile contributors include Lawrence Grossberg, Chantal Mouffe, Jamie Peck and Jane Wills The global reach and significance of Massey’s work recommends this volume to a diverse readership Provides an agenda for work on spatial politics and critical geography Sets out the contours of a human geography informed by Doreen Massey’s work

Spatial Literary Studies

Spatial Literary Studies
Author: Robert T. Tally Jr.
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000208044

Following the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination offers a wide range of essays that reframe or transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. These essays reflect upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality. Working within or alongside related approaches, such as geocriticism, literary geography, and the spatial humanities, these essays examine the relationship between literary spatiality and different genres or media, such as film or television. The contributors to Spatial Literary Studies draw upon diverse critical and theoretical traditions in disclosing, analyzing, and exploring the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world, thus making new textual geographies and literary cartographies possible.

The Spaces of the Modern City

The Spaces of the Modern City
Author: Gyan Prakash
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2008-02-24
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780691133430

It historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape. This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg. They explore the nature of spatial politics, examining the disparate worlds of eighteenth-century Baghdad, nineteenth-century Morelia. They also show the meaning of everyday spaces to urban life, illuminating issues such as crime in metropolitan London, youth culture in Dakar, "memory projects" in Tokyo, and Bombay cinema.