Metropolis on the Styx : the underworlds of modern urban culture, 1800-2001 / David L. Pike.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pike, David L. (David Lawrence), 1963-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Underground areas--Social aspects.

Underground areas.

Underground areas in literature.

Civilization, Subterranean.

Sociology, Urban.

Social aspects.

Physical Description:

xvii, 377 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2007.

Summary:

In Metropolis on the Styx, David L. Pike considers how underground spaces and their many myths have organized ways of seeing, thinking about, and living in the modern city. Expanding on the cultural history of underground construction in his acclaimed previous book, Subterranean Cities, Pike brings together a rich variety of visual and written sources ranging from pulp mysteries and movie serials to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the novels of Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Elinor Glyn to the broadsheets and ephemera of everyday urban life. From these materials, Pike conjures a working theory of modern underground space that explains why our notions about urban environments remain essentially nineteenth-century in character, even though cities themselves have since changed almost beyond recognition.

Contents:

1 The Devil, the Underground, and the Vertical City 1

The Underground Metropolis 3

Modernist Space and Underground Theory 11

From the Mine to the Trench 25

The Devil above and the Devil below 36

The Devil and the Rhythms of Modern Life 46

Seasons in Twentieth-Century Hell 54

Modernism, Memory, and Urban Space 59

2 The Devil Comes to Town 65

The Devil in Paris and London 67

The Devil in Urban Hell 73

Spectacles of the Metropolitan Devil 84

His Satanic Majesty's Court 105

The Devil on Crutches 112

Satanic Verses 124

The Devil Take the Hindmost 137

The Modern Devil 146

3 Mysteries of the Underground 158

The True Mysteries of the Modern Metropolis Revealed 159

Sensations of Subterranean London 170

"If the rich only knew..." 183

The Afterlife of the Urban Mysteries 194

The Urban Underworlds of Postwar America 211

4 Through the Looking Glass 220

Et Ego in Arcadia 223

Down by the Dark Arches 243

A Passage under the Thames 260

Foreign Incursions 274

The Arcade Entrenched 282

Thresholds of Stage and Screen 301

The Threshold of a New Millennium 312.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [317]-356) and index.

ISBN:

9780801444906

080144490X

9780801473043

0801473047

OCLC:

124074963