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Explores the crucial role played by the city in the construction of modernism
This innovative book examines the development of modernist writing in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna. 'Focusing on how literary outsiders represented various spaces in these cities, it draws upon contemporary theories of affect and literary geography to offer an original account of the geographical emotions of modernism. Particular attention is given to the transnational qualities of modernist writing by examining writers whose view of the cities considered is that of migrants, exiles or strangers, including Mulk Raj Anand, Bryher, Blaise Cendrars, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Hope Mirrlees, Noami Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon and Stephen Spender.
Andrew Thacker is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at Nottingham Trent University.
List of contents
Acknowledgements; List of Illustrations; Introduction: Geographical Emotions and the Modernist City; A Typical Modernist City; Structure and Method; Four Cities; 1. Paris; Introduction: A New Babel; T. S. Eliot and the Sordid City; Technology, Boulevards, and the Tour Unique: Apollinaire and Cendrars; Hope Mirrlees on the Metro; Jean Rhys: Being Faithful to Paris; Paris Noir; Swooning in Paris; 2. Vienna; Introduction; German Modernism and Regional Transnationalism; Vienna and Die Moderne; After the War: Red Vienna; Vienna Diary: Naomi Mitchison; City in Ruins; 3. Berlin; Introduction: Hellhole and Paradise; Restless and Spacious; Expressionist Voices and Cries; Post-war Visitors; Heterotopias: Cafés and Queer Spaces; Geographical Emotions: Goodbye to Berlin and The Heart to Artemis; Berlin in the Cold; 4. London; Introduction: A Larger University; The Modernist Underground; Metro-Land; Spatial Phobias; Overcoming Modernity; Locations of Culture; Queer Foreign Fish: Joseph Conrad; London Unplaced: Sam Selvon; Afterword: Other Cities, Other Modernisms; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Andrew Thacker is Professor of Twentieth Century Literature at Nottingham Trent University. He has published extensively upon modernism, including the three volumes of
The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2009-13),
Geographies of Modernism (2005), and
Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (2003). He was the first Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies and is an editor of the long-running interdisciplinary journal,
Literature & History.
Summary
By focusing on a number of key cities this study considers the influence of the distinctive urban landscaper on the various modernisms that appeared in the period from c.1890 to 1950.
