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 Contemporary London Literature

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature
Author: Laura Colombino
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2013-06-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136777881

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: Sara Upstone
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780754665526

In her innovative study of spatial locations in postcolonial texts, Sara Upstone adopts a transnational approach, focusing on the major texts of Wilson Harris, Toni Morrison, and Salmon Rushdie with reference to other postcolonial authors. Challenging the privileging of the nation, Upstone shows that spatial locales such as the journey, city, home, and body enable personal or communal statements of resistance against colonial prejudice and its neo-colonial legacies.

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction, 1945-2010

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction, 1945-2010
Author: David James
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 110704023X

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 provides insight into the critical traditions shaping the literary landscape of modern Britain.

Critical Perspectives on Resistance in 21st-Century British Literature

Critical Perspectives on Resistance in 21st-Century British Literature
Author: Nilay Erdem Ayyıldız
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2024-04-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1036402983

This book sets out on an intellectual journey, with each chapter acting as a unique compass to lead the reader through the critical perspectives on resistance waiting to be discovered in 21st-century British literature. As such, the book appeals to general readers, including undergraduates, researchers, professionals, and anyone who is interested in cultural studies, literary studies, the humanities, and sociology, particularly resistance and discourse studies.

London post-2010 in British Literature and Culture

London post-2010 in British Literature and Culture
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2017-07-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004344012

London post-2010 in British Literature and Culture explores cultural and literary representations of London since around 2010 and focuses on a period in which a string of celebratory national and global media events, but also riots and anti-capitalist protests have cemented London’s status as a paradigmatic world city. This collection of articles brings together a wide variety of topics, such as the 2011 London riots, the London Olympics of 2012, royal festivities, the Tube anniversary, memorials, and London in recent novels and blockbuster films. The contributions look at the way in which cultural and literary texts articulate competing versions of the contemporary city, oscillating between either supporting or subverting the hegemonic narrative of London as a place of cosmopolitan harmony and inclusion.

NATØ: Narrative Architecture in Postmodern London

NATØ: Narrative Architecture in Postmodern London
Author: Claire Jamieson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2017-01-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317200047

Chronicling the last radical architectural group of the twentieth century – NATØ (Narrative Architecture Today) – who emerged from the Architectural Association at the start of the 1980s, this book explores the group’s work which echoed a wider artistic and literary culture that drew on the specific political, social and physical condition of 1980s London. It traces NATؒs identification with a particular stream of post-punk, postmodern expression: a celebration of the abject, an aesthetic of entropy, and a do-it-yourself provisionality. NATØ has most often been documented in reference to Nigel Coates (the instigator of NATØ), which has led to a one-sided, one-dimensional record of NATؒs place in architectural history. This book sets out a more detailed, contextual history of NATØ, told through photographs, drawings, and ephemera, restoring a truer polyvocal narrative of the group’s ethos and development.

The Literary Psychogeography of London

The Literary Psychogeography of London
Author: Ann Tso
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2020-09-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030529800

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.

Reflecting on the City Through Literature

Reflecting on the City Through Literature
Author: Daan Wesselman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2023-10-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1000906477

This book develops and demonstrates an interdisciplinary method that reads literary works as a way of thinking about the city. Literary works do not only provide reflections of the city – depictions of the city as an aesthetically compelling setting – but the literary reflection of the city also offers a critical reflection on the city. How can spatial difference be conceived in cities that are changing beyond the form of the classical modern metropolis of the early 20th century? How can one think of the relation between individual urban subjects and their urban environment, when neither spaces nor discourses of the city provide them with an answer to the question where they might "belong"? How does the human body interact with its urban surroundings, and how should technological mediations be thought of? This book approaches these questions through analysing literary texts, focusing on concepts like heterotopia, non-place and the posthuman. This book will be of interest to interdisciplinary scholars and students of the city, particularly in the fields of Urban Studies, Literary Studies, Geography, and Architecture.

Literary Second Cities

Literary Second Cities
Author: Jason Finch
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319627198

This book brings together geographers and literary scholars in a series of engagements near the boundaries of their disciplines. In urban studies, disproportionate attention has been given to a small set of privileged ‘first’ cities. This volume problematizes the dominance of such alpha cities, offering a wide perspective on ‘second cities’ and their literature. The volume is divided into three themed sections. ‘In the Shadow of the Alpha City’ problematizes the image of cities defined by their function and size, bringing out the contradictions and contestations inherent in cultural productions of second cities, including Birmingham and Bristol in the UK, Las Vegas in the USA, and Tartu in Estonia. ‘Frontier Second Cities’ pays attention to the multiple and trans-national pasts of second cities which occupy border zones, with a focus on Narva, in Estonia, and Turkish/Kurdish Diyarbakir. The final section, ‘The Diffuse Second City’, examines networks the diffuse secondary city made up of interlinked small cities, suburban sprawl and urban overspill, with literary case studies from Italy, Sweden, and Finland.