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This book tells a story about the transformation of mid-Victorian urban writing in response both to London's growing size and diversity, and Britain's shifting global fortunes. Tanya Agathocleous departs from customary understandings of realism, modernism, and the transition between them, to show how a range of writers throughout the nineteenth century - including William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, William Morris, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad - explored the ethical, social and political implications of globalization. Showcasing a variety of different genres, Agathocleous uses the lens of cosmopolitan realism - the literary techniques used to transform the city into an image of the world - to explain how texts that seem glaringly dissimilar actually emerged from the same historical concept, and in doing so presents startlingly new ways of thinking about the meaning and effect of cosmopolitanism.
Table des matières
Introduction: cosmopolitan realism; Part I. The Emergence of Cosmopolitan Realism: 1. The palace and the periodical: the Great Exhibition, Cosmopolis, and the discourse of cosmopolitanism; 2. The sketch and the panorama: Wordsworth, Dickens, and the emergence of cosmopolitan realism; Part II. Cosmopolitan Realism at the Fin de Siècle and Beyond: 3. Realist details and romance plots: James, Doyle, and the aesthetics of fin-de-siècle cosmopolitanism; 4. Ethnography and allegory: socialist internationalism and realist Utopia in News from Nowhere and In Darkest England; 5. The moment and the end of time: Conrad, Woolf and the temporal sublime; Conclusion: 'a city visible but unseen': cosmopolitan realism and the invisible metropolis.
A propos de l'auteur
Tanya Agathocleous is Assistant Professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York.
Résumé
Examining works by writers including Wordsworth, Dickens and Conan Doyle, as well as spectacles such as the Great Exhibition, Tanya Agathocleous shows how London was conceived as a cosmopolis - an image of the world that allowed writers and readers to come to grips with the advent of globalization.
