Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870-1914OUP Oxford, 2007 M09 20 - 240 pages Conceiving the City is an innovative study of the ways in which a generation of late-Victorian novelists, poets, painters, and theoreticians attempted to represent London in literature and art. Breaking away from the language and style of Dickens and the static panorama paintings of William Powell Frith, major figures such as Henry James and J. M. Whistler, and, crucially, less-celebrated authors such as Arthur Machen, Edwin Pugh, and George Egerton bent realism intoexciting new shapes. In the naturalism of George Gissing and Arthur Morrison, the fragmentary impressions of Ford Madox Ford, and the brooding mystery of Alvin Langdon Coburn's photogravures, London emerged as a focus for dynamic, explicitly modern art. Although many of these insights would be dismissed or at leastdownplayed by subsequent generations, the ideas evolved during the period from 1870 to 1914 anticipate not only the work of high modernists such as Eliot and Woolf, but also that of later urban theorists such as Foucault and de Certeau, and the novels and travelogues of contemporary London writers Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. Nicholas Freeman recovers a sense of late-Victorian London as a subject for dynamic theoretical and aesthetic experiments, and shows, in stimulating analyses of ConanDoyle, H. G. Wells, Arthur Symons, and others how much of our understanding of urban space we owe to eminent (and not so eminent) Victorian figures. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book restores a much-needed historical perspective to our engagement with the metropolis. |
Contents
Empiricist London | 35 |
Impressionist London | 89 |
Symbolist London | 147 |
Copyright | |
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Conceiving the City:London, Literature, and Art 1870-1914: London ... Nicholas Freeman No preview available - 2007 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic Arthur Machen Arthur Symons artistic Booth Cambridge capital City of Dreadful Coburn Cockney Conrad critical Culture Decadence Dent detail Dickens Dickens's Dreadful Night East End English Hours Essays evocation fin de siècle Ford Madox Ford G. K. Chesterton George Gissing Gissing's Heart of Darkness Henley Henry James Holmes Howards End imagination impressionism impressionist Jago James's journalistic language late-Victorian Literary Impressionism Liza of Lambeth Machen Macmillan means metropolis metropolitan modern city Monet Morrison mystery mystical narrative narrator Nether World nineteenth century Nocturne notes novel novelist observation offered Oxford University Press painters painting Pater Penguin perception picture Poems poet poetry Preface Princess Casamassima prose readers reality revealed Routledge Ruskin Secret Agent seemed slum social Soul of London story Street suggests Symbolism symbolist Symons's T. S. Eliot Thames Thomson Three Impostors urban veil Verse Victorian vision W. B. Yeats Whistler Whistlerian Wilde writers wrote Yeats