Read e-book online Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870-1914 PDF

Conceiving the City is an cutting edge learn of the ways that a iteration of late-Victorian novelists, poets, painters, and theoreticians tried to symbolize London in literature and paintings. Breaking clear of the language and magnificence of Dickens and the static landscape work of William Powell Frith, significant figures resembling Henry James and J. M. Whistler, and, crucially, less-celebrated authors akin to Arthur Machen, Edwin Pugh, and George Egerton bent realism into fascinating new shapes. within the naturalism of George Gissing and Arthur Morrison, the fragmentary impressions of Ford Madox Ford, and the brooding secret of Alvin Langdon Coburn's photogravures, London emerged as a spotlight for dynamic, explicitly glossy artwork. even supposing lots of those insights will be disregarded or at the least downplayed via next generations, the tips developed throughout the interval from 1870 to 1914 count on not just the paintings of excessive modernists comparable to Eliot and Woolf, but in addition that of later city theorists comparable to Foucault and de Certeau, and the novels and travelogues of up to date London writers Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. Nicholas Freeman recovers a feeling of late-Victorian London as a topic for dynamic theoretical and aesthetic experiments, and indicates, in stimulating analyses of Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Arthur Symons, and others how a lot of our realizing of city area we owe to eminent (and now not so eminent) Victorian figures. Written in a transparent and obtainable kind, the ebook restores a much-needed old point of view to our engagement with the metropolis.