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Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Rethinking Urban Modernity

Online ISBN:
9781399508506
Print ISBN:
9781399508483
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
Book

Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Rethinking Urban Modernity

Ben Moore
Ben Moore

Assistant Professor in English Literature

University of Amsterdam
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
12 January 2024
Online ISBN:
9781399508506
Print ISBN:
9781399508483
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press

Abstract

This book presents a new approach to reading urban modernity in nineteenth-century literature, by bringing together hidden, mobile and transparent features of city space as part of a single system it calls ‘invisible architecture’. Resisting narratives of the nineteenth century as progressing from concealment to transparency, it instead argues for a dynamic interaction between these tendencies, drawing on thinkers including Walter Benjamin and Jacques Rancière. Across two parts, the book addresses a range of apparently disparate buildings and spaces. Part I offers new readings of three writers and their cities: Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester, Charles Dickens and London, and Émile Zola and Paris, focusing on the cellar-dwelling, the railway and river, and the department store respectively. Part II takes a broader view by analysing three spatial forms that have not usually been considered features of nineteenth-century modernity: the Gothic cathedral, the arabesque and white walls. Through these readings, the book extends our understanding of the uneven modernity of this period. The Conclusion extends these insights to literary accounts of New York in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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