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BookPrinted Material
Author Alter, Robert.

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

Publication Info. New Haven : Yale University Press, [2005]
©2005

Item Status

Location Call No. Status OPAC Message Public Note Gift Note
 Moore Stacks  PN3352.C5 A48 2005    Available  ---
Description xiii, 175 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 161-163) and index.
Contents Flaubert: the demise of the spectator -- Flaubert: urban poetics -- Dickens: the realism of metaphor -- Dickens: intimations of apocalypse -- Bely: phantasmatic city -- Woolf: urban pastoral -- Joyce: metropolitan shuffle -- Kafka: suspicion and the city.
Summary A literary investigation of how the modern metropolis--intoxicating, disturbing, powerful--changed perceptions and irrevocably altered the Western imagination. 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 interpretations of novels by Flaubert, Dickens, Bely, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka, Alter reveals the ways the city entered the literary imagination.--From publisher description.
Subject European fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.
European fiction.
Chronological Term 19th century
Subject European fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
Chronological Term 20th century
Subject Cities and towns in literature.
Cities and towns in literature.
ISBN 0300108028 cloth alkaline paper
Standard No. 9780300108026