Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature PDF Author: Laura Colombino
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136777881
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book analyses the spatial politics of a range of British novelists writing on London since the 1950s, emphasizing spatial representation as an embodied practice at the point where the architectural landscape and the body enter into relation with each other. Colombino visits the city in connection with its boundaries, abstract spaces and natural microcosms, as they stand in for all the conflicting realms of identity; its interstices and ruins are seen as inhabited by bodies that reproduce internally the external conditions of political and social struggle. The study brings into focus the fiction in which London provides not a residual interest but a strong psychic-phenomenological grounding, and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing this space. Authors such as J. G. Ballard, Geoff Dyer, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Tom McCarthy, Michael Bracewell and Zadie Smith are considered in order to map the relationship of body, architecture and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the city. Through readings that are consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and reflections formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists and art critics, this book offers a substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of literary urban studies.

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature PDF Author: Laura Colombino
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136777881
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book analyses the spatial politics of a range of British novelists writing on London since the 1950s, emphasizing spatial representation as an embodied practice at the point where the architectural landscape and the body enter into relation with each other. Colombino visits the city in connection with its boundaries, abstract spaces and natural microcosms, as they stand in for all the conflicting realms of identity; its interstices and ruins are seen as inhabited by bodies that reproduce internally the external conditions of political and social struggle. The study brings into focus the fiction in which London provides not a residual interest but a strong psychic-phenomenological grounding, and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing this space. Authors such as J. G. Ballard, Geoff Dyer, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Tom McCarthy, Michael Bracewell and Zadie Smith are considered in order to map the relationship of body, architecture and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the city. Through readings that are consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and reflections formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists and art critics, this book offers a substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of literary urban studies.

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature PDF Author: Laura Colombino
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136777954
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book analyses the spatial politics of a range of British novelists writing on London since the 1950s, emphasizing spatial representation as an embodied practice at the point where the architectural landscape and the body enter into relation with each other. Colombino visits the city in connection with its boundaries, abstract spaces and natural microcosms, as they stand in for all the conflicting realms of identity; its interstices and ruins are seen as inhabited by bodies that reproduce internally the external conditions of political and social struggle. The study brings into focus the fiction in which London provides not a residual interest but a strong psychic-phenomenological grounding, and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing this space. Authors such as J. G. Ballard, Geoff Dyer, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Tom McCarthy, Michael Bracewell and Zadie Smith are considered in order to map the relationship of body, architecture and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the city. Through readings that are consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and reflections formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists and art critics, this book offers a substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of literary urban studies.

Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel

Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel PDF Author: Sara Upstone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317051491
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In her innovative study of spatial locations in postcolonial texts, Sara Upstone adopts a transnational and comparative approach that challenges the tendency to engage with authors in isolation or in relation to other writers from a single geographical setting. Suggesting that isolating authors in terms of geography reinforces the primacy of the nation, Upstone instead illuminates the power of spatial locales such as the journey, city, home, and body to enable personal or communal statements of resistance against colonial prejudice and its neo-colonial legacies. While focusing on the major texts of Wilson Harris, Toni Morrison, and Salman Rushdie in relation to particular spatial locations, Upstone offers a wide range of examples from other postcolonial authors, including Michael Ondaatje, Keri Hulme, J. M. Coetzee, Arundhati Roy, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Abdulrazak Gurnah. The result is a strong case for what Upstone terms the 'postcolonial spatial imagination', independent of geography though always fully contextualised. Written in accessible and unhurried prose, Upstone's study is marked by its respect for the ways in which the writers themselves resist not only geographical boundaries but academic categorisation.

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction, 1945-2010

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction, 1945-2010 PDF Author: David James
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110704023X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 provides insight into the critical traditions shaping the literary landscape of modern Britain.

Critical Perspectives on Resistance in 21st-Century British Literature

Critical Perspectives on Resistance in 21st-Century British Literature PDF Author: Nilay Erdem Ayyıldız
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1036402983
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This book sets out on an intellectual journey, with each chapter acting as a unique compass to lead the reader through the critical perspectives on resistance waiting to be discovered in 21st-century British literature. As such, the book appeals to general readers, including undergraduates, researchers, professionals, and anyone who is interested in cultural studies, literary studies, the humanities, and sociology, particularly resistance and discourse studies.

Contemporary British Literature and Urban Space

Contemporary British Literature and Urban Space PDF Author: K. Duff
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137429356
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Looking at writers such as Will Self, Hani Kureishi, JG Ballard, and Iain Sinclair, Kim Duff's new book examines contemporary British literature and its depiction of the city after the time of Thatcher and mass privatization. This lively study is an important and engaging work for students and scholars alike.

London post-2010 in British Literature and Culture

London post-2010 in British Literature and Culture PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004344012
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
London post-2010 in British Literature and Culture explores cultural and literary representations of London since around 2010 and focuses on a period in which a string of celebratory national and global media events, but also riots and anti-capitalist protests have cemented London’s status as a paradigmatic world city. This collection of articles brings together a wide variety of topics, such as the 2011 London riots, the London Olympics of 2012, royal festivities, the Tube anniversary, memorials, and London in recent novels and blockbuster films. The contributions look at the way in which cultural and literary texts articulate competing versions of the contemporary city, oscillating between either supporting or subverting the hegemonic narrative of London as a place of cosmopolitan harmony and inclusion.

NATØ: Narrative Architecture in Postmodern London

NATØ: Narrative Architecture in Postmodern London PDF Author: Claire Jamieson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317200047
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Chronicling the last radical architectural group of the twentieth century – NATØ (Narrative Architecture Today) – who emerged from the Architectural Association at the start of the 1980s, this book explores the group’s work which echoed a wider artistic and literary culture that drew on the specific political, social and physical condition of 1980s London. It traces NATؒs identification with a particular stream of post-punk, postmodern expression: a celebration of the abject, an aesthetic of entropy, and a do-it-yourself provisionality. NATØ has most often been documented in reference to Nigel Coates (the instigator of NATØ), which has led to a one-sided, one-dimensional record of NATؒs place in architectural history. This book sets out a more detailed, contextual history of NATØ, told through photographs, drawings, and ephemera, restoring a truer polyvocal narrative of the group’s ethos and development.

Spatial Politics

Spatial Politics PDF Author: David Featherstone
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444338307
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This critical engagement with Doreen Massey’s ground-breaking work in geographic theory and its relationship to politics features specially commissioned essays from former students and colleagues, as well as the artists, political figures and activists whose thinking she has helped to shape. It seeks to mark and take forward her compelling contributions to geographical theorizing and political debate. High profile contributors include Lawrence Grossberg, Chantal Mouffe, Jamie Peck and Jane Wills The global reach and significance of Massey’s work recommends this volume to a diverse readership Provides an agenda for work on spatial politics and critical geography Sets out the contours of a human geography informed by Doreen Massey’s work

The Literary Psychogeography of London

The Literary Psychogeography of London PDF Author: Ann Tso
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030529800
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
This Pivot book examines literary elements of urban topography that have animated Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair’s respective representations of London-ness. Ann Tso argues these authors write London “psychogeographically” to deconstruct popular visions of London with colonial and neoliberal undertones. Moore’s psychogeography consists of bird’s-eye views that reveal the brute force threatening to unravel Londonscape from within; Ackroyd’s aims to detect London sensuously, since every new awareness recalls an otherworldly London; Sinclair’s conjures up a narrative consciousness made erratic by London’s disunified landscape. Drawing together the dystopian, the phenomenological, and the postcolonial, Tso explores how these texts characterize “London-ness” as estranging.