Nick Hubble - London in Contemporary British Fiction: The City Beyond the City

London in Contemporary
British Fiction

Bloomsbury Studies in the City

Series Editors: Lawrence Phillips, Regents University London, UK; Matthew Beaumont, Senior Lecturer in English, University College London, UK.

Editorial Board: Professor Rachel Bowlby (University College London, UK); Professor Brycchan Carey (Kingston University London, UK); Professor Susan Alice Fischer (City University of New York, USA); Professor Pamela Gilbert (University of Florida, USA); Professor Richard Lehan (University of California, USA); Professor John McLeod (University of Leeds, UK); Alex Murray, Lecturer (Queens University Belfast, UK ); Professor Deborah Epstein Nord (Princeton University, USA); Professor Douglas Tallack (University of Leicester, UK); Professor Philip Tew (Brunel University London, UK); Professor David Trotter (University of Cambridge, UK); Professor Judith Walkowitz (Johns Hopkins University, USA); Professor Julian Wolfreys (University of Portsmouth, UK).

The history of literature is tied to the city. From Aeschylus to Addison, Baudelaire to Balzac, Conrad to Coetzee and Dickens to Dostoevsky, writers make sense of the city and shape modern understandings through their reflections and depictions. The urban is a fundamental aspect of a substantial part of the literary canon that is frequently not considered in and of itself because it is so prevalent.

Bloomsbury Studies in the City captures the best contemporary criticism on urban literature and culture. Reading literature, film, drama and poetry in their historical and social context and alongside urban and spatial theory, this series explores the impact of the city on writers and their work.

Titles in the Series:

New Suburban Stories

Edited by Martin Dines and Timotheus Vermeulen

Irish Writing London: Volumes 1 and 2

Edited by Tom Herron

London in Contemporary British Literature

Edited by Nick Hubble and Philip Tew

Salman Rushdies Cities

Vassilena Parashkevova

G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity

Edited by Matthew Beaumont and Matthew Ingleby

Brooklyn Fictions: The Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age

James Peacock

Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London

Niall Martin

London in Contemporary
British Fiction

The City Beyond the City

Edited by
Nick Hubble and Philip Tew

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents

Some of these chapters are developed from papers given at the seventh annual Literary London conference, Liminal London: Country/City, Work/Leisure, Past/Future, and States Between, organised by Brycchan Carey, Nick Hubble, Lawrence Phillips and Philip Tew; hosted by the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW) and the Department of English at Brunel University from 2 to 4 July 2008 with financial support from the British Academy. We are grateful to the Literary London organisation and the British Academy for this support.

We would like to thank all our contributors for their expertise, patience and generosity when responding to our queries and guidance as this book has gradually taken shape. We have enjoyed excellent support throughout from the editorial team at Bloomsbury, especially David Avital and Mark Richardson, who have been instrumental in bringing this book to fruition. We would also like to mention the staff at Brunel University Library, the British Library, the National Library of Wales and other research libraries who have provided support to the contributors to this volume.

An earlier version of parts of Laura Colombinos chapter first appeared in her book, Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing, Architecture and the Body published by Routledge in 2013.

Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University in the UK. His main research interests are in post-1945 British literature and literary and cultural theory. He is author of Martin Amis: Writers and Their Work (Northcote House, 2015); Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (Peter Lang, 2007); editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (Routledge, 2005), and co-editor of The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction in The Decades Series (Continuum, 2015). He has also published journal articles and book chapters on Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Sam Selvon, Alan Sillitoe, the city in postmodern fiction, fictional representations of youth subcultures and working-class writing. He is currently working on two books: Contemporary British Fiction: A Readers Guide to the Essential Criticism ; and Making a Scene: Youth Subcultures in Postwar and Contemporary Fiction .

Doris Bremm received her PhD in Twentieth-Century Studies from the University of Florida. She is area coordinator for literature and culture at the Familienbildungssttte Bonn, Germany. In her research, she specializes in contemporary literature, intersections between literature and the visual arts, and literary theory. Her publications include Stream of Consciousness Narration in James Joyces Ulysses: The Flaneur and the Labyrinth in Lestrygonians in The Image of the City in Literature, Media, and Society (eds Will Wright and Steven Kaplan, Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, 2003), and three chapters in The English Literature Companion (ed. Julian Wolfreys, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Her book manuscript Representation Beyond Representation: Reading Paintings in Contemporary Narratives considers contemporary literature about visual art as a new way to historicize postmodernism and the postmodern novel. She has won several teaching awards at the University of Florida and at the Georgia Institute of Technology .

Laura Colombino is Associate Professor at the University of Genoa. She is the author of Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing (Peter Lang, 2008) and Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing Architecture and the Body (Routledge, 2013), winner of the AIA Senior Book Prize 2015. She has published articles and essays on a number of Victorian, modernist and contemporary writers, such as Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, Ford Madox Ford, J. G. Ballard, Ian McEwan, A. S. Byatt and Iain Sinclair. Her interdisciplinary research interests include: the relationship between writing and the visual arts; the gaze in literature; contemporary architectural spaces and their embodiments; the interplay of trauma, cultural memory and the city. She is a member of the editorial board of the International Ford Madox Ford Studies and, since July 2015, of the Core Group of the Cultural Literacy in Europe project (http://cleurope.eu).

Susan Alice Fischer is Professor of English at Medgar Evers College of The City University of New York. She is Editor of The Literary London Journal () and Co-Editor of Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education (Taylor & Francis), both peer-reviewed. She has written widely on contemporary British authors, including the fiction of Maggie Gee, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. Her edited volume, Hanif Kureishi: Contemporary Critical Perspectives , was published by Bloomsbury in 2015.

Nick Hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University London, UK. Author of Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Palgrave Macmillan 2006/10); co-author of Ageing, Narrative and Identity (Palgrave Macmillan 2013); co-editor of The Science Fiction Handbook (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) and three volumes of Bloomsbury Academics British Fiction: The Decades Series: The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015) and The 2000s (2015); and also co-editor of special issues of the journals EnterText , Literary London and New Formations . Nick has published journal articles or book chapters on writers including Pat Barker, Ford Madox Ford, B. S. Johnson, Naomi Mitchison, George Orwell, Christopher Priest, John Sommerfield and Edward Upward.