Imagined cities : urban experience and the language of the novel / Robert Alter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Alter, Robert.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

European fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

European fiction.

European fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Cities and towns in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (208 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, c2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Flaubert

the demise of the spectator

Flaubert

urban poetics

Dickens

the realism of metaphor

intimations of apocalypse

Bely

phantasmatic city

Woolf

urban pastoral

Joyce

metropolitan shuffle

Kafka

suspicion and the city.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-281-74066-7

9786611740665

0-300-12707-3

OCLC:

952732590