Writing London: v. 3

Writing London Volume 3: Inventions of the City stages a series of interventions and inventions of urban space between the years 1880 and 1930. Addressing key literary texts and neglected authors of the period, Writing London explores the alterity within many of London's most familiar locations. Making sharp distinctions between modernity and modernism, the volume offers extensive readings of Richard Marsh, Amy Levy, Arnold Bennett and T. S. Eliot. Through detailed and attentive close readings which draw on both historiography and other interdisciplinary theoretical resources, Wolfreys reassesses the city as a series of singular sites irreducible to stable identities, whilst also offering a cogent re-evaluation of motifs of the nocturnal and the suburban in the literary imagination of London, concluding with an extended reading of The Waste Land and its manuscript drafts.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: of invention and the singularities of the city of London The Hieroglyphic Other: The Beetle, London, and the Anxieties of Late Imperial England The 'tortuous geography of the night world': the 'productive disorder' of the Noctuary Text Between Seeing and Knowing: Amy Levy, Arnold Bennett and Urban Counter-Romance 'All the living and the dead': Urban Anamnesis in John Berger and Iain Sinclair 'Concatenated words from which the sense seemed gone': The Waste Land Afterword Works Cited Index

About the Author :
JULIAN WOLFREYS is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at Loughborough University, UK. He has published numerous books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature and literary theory. His most recent publications include The Old Story, with a Difference: Pickwick's Vision, Thinking Difference: Critics in Conversation, and Writing London: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality.

Review :
'Julian Wolfreys' series of Writing London books goes from strength to strength. This volume contains admirable readings of the way a series of writers 'invent' London by way of telling stories about particular locations within it - including wonderful chapters on London at night, on Richard Marsh's The Beetle, on Amy Levy and Arnold Bennett (he revived an interest in Bennett for me!), on John Berger and Iain Sinclair, and, last, on Eliot's The Waste Land. The Eliot chapter is by far the best essay on The Waste Land I have ever read. It is a genuine tour de force, as is the whole book.' - Professor J. Hillis Miller, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine, USA