London's Underground Spaces: Representing the Victorian City, 1840-1915
Haewon Hwang
Abstract
The construction of London's underground sewers, underground railway and suburban cemeteries created seismic shifts in the geography and the psychological apprehension of the city. Yet, why are there so few literary and aesthetic interventions in Victorian representations of subterranean spaces? What is London's answer to the Parisian sewers of Victor Hugo or the unflinching realism of Émile Zola's underworld? Where is the great English underground novel? This book explores this elision not as an absence of imaginative output, but a presence and plenitude of anxiety and fears that haunt the pa ... More
The construction of London's underground sewers, underground railway and suburban cemeteries created seismic shifts in the geography and the psychological apprehension of the city. Yet, why are there so few literary and aesthetic interventions in Victorian representations of subterranean spaces? What is London's answer to the Parisian sewers of Victor Hugo or the unflinching realism of Émile Zola's underworld? Where is the great English underground novel? This book explores this elision not as an absence of imaginative output, but a presence and plenitude of anxiety and fears that haunt the pages of Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Bram Stoker and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The way these writers negotiated the dirt and messiness of underground spaces reveals not only the emergence of Gothic, socialist, and modernist sensibilities, but the way all modern cities deal with what is unseen, intangible and inarticulable.
Keywords:
Underground,
Victoria,
Modernity,
Derrida,
City,
London
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780748676071 |
Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: January 2014 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748676071.001.0001 |