Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the NovelYale University Press, 1 oct. 2008 - 208 pages In Imagined Cities, Robert 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 a series of subtle and convincing interpretations of novels by Flaubert, Dickens, Bely, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka, Alter reveals the ways the city entered the literary imagination. He shows how writers of diverse imaginative temperaments developed innovative techniques to represent shifts in modern consciousness. Writers sought more than a journalistic representation of city living, he argues, and to convey meaningfully the reality of the metropolis, the city had to be re-created or reimagined. His book probes the literary response to changing realities of the period and contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of the Western imagination. |
Table des matières
1 | |
Urban Poetics | 23 |
The Realism of Metaphor | 43 |
Intimations of Apocalypse | 63 |
Illustrations follow page 82 | 82 |
Phantasmatic City | 83 |
Urban Pastoral | 103 |
Metropolitan Shuttle | 121 |
Suspicion and the City | 141 |
Notes | 161 |
165 | |
Autres éditions - Tout afficher
Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel Robert Alter Aucun aperçu disponible - 2010 |
Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel Robert Alter Aucun aperçu disponible - 2005 |
Expressions et termes fréquents
actually Ann Banfield apocalyptic Balzac beginning Bely Bely’s Bleak House Bloom century character cityscape Clarissa convey course Dalloway dark death deployed Dickens Dickens's Dickensian disjunct disorienting Dombey and Son door Dublin episode erotic European eyes fantasy feel fiction figure flaˆneur flâneur Flaubert fragments Frédéric human imagination instance Joyce Joyce’s Kafka language light literary looking Madame Bovary manifestation ment metaphor metropolis mind Mme Arnoux modern city modern urban modernist Museum of London Mutual Friend narrated monologue narrative nature Nikolai nineteenth nineteenth-century novel novelistic objects observed panorama Paris Parisian passage perception perhaps perspective Peter Petersburg phantasmagoria play plot precisely protagonist reader realist reflect registers representation Rosanette seems sense sensory Sentimental Education sexual social stimuli stream of consciousness streets Thames thematic tram Ulysses urban crowd urban experience urban reality urban scene urban setting urban space Virginia Woolf vision visual window woman writers Zola