Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World: 75 (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 75)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 12/19/2013
EAN 9781107663695, ISBN10: 1107663695
Paperback, 294 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
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.
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.