Imagined cities
Subtitle: urban experience and the language of the novel
By: Robert Alter.
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: New Haven
Language: eng
Number of pages: 175
Subjects: European fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism; European fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Cities and towns in literature
Description: A literary investigation of how the modern metropolis--intoxicating, disturbing, powerful--changed perceptions and irrevocably altered the Western imagination. Alter traces the arc of literary development triggered by the runaway growth of urban centers from the early nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. As new technologies and arrangements of public and private space changed the ways people experienced time and space, the urban panorama became less coherent--a metropolis defying traditional representation and definition, a vast jumble of shifting fragments and glimpses--and writers were compelled to create new methods for conveying the experience of the city. In interpretations of novels by Flaubert, Dickens, Bely, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka, Alter reveals the ways the city entered the literary imagination.--From publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Flaubert; title: the demise of the spectator; title: Flaubert; title: urban poetics; title: Dickens; title: the realism of metaphor; title: Dickens; title: intimations of apocalypse; title: Bely; title: phantasmatic city; title: Woolf; title: urban pastoral; title: Joyce; title: metropolitan shuffle; title: Kafka; title: suspicion and the city.