Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century
Visible City, Invisible World

Traces the development of cosmopolitanism and the growing importance of the city in nineteenth-century literature.

Tanya Agathocleous (Author)

9780521762649, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 December 2010

294 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.56 kg

"Agathocleous situates her study among the growing body of work that seeks to "transcend a focus on the nation and nationalism"(2). She does so by focusing on the evolution of a distinctive form of cosmopolitanism that emerged in writing about London from the 1850's onward." -- Victorian Studies

This book tells a story about the transformation of mid-Victorian urban writing in response both to London's growing size and diversity, and Britain's shifting global fortunes. Tanya Agathocleous departs from customary understandings of realism, modernism, and the transition between them, to show how a range of writers throughout the nineteenth century - including William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, William Morris, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad - explored the ethical, social and political implications of globalization. Showcasing a variety of different genres, Agathocleous uses the lens of cosmopolitan realism - the literary techniques used to transform the city into an image of the world - to explain how texts that seem glaringly dissimilar actually emerged from the same historical concept, and in doing so presents startlingly new ways of thinking about the meaning and effect of cosmopolitanism.

Introduction: cosmopolitan realism
Part I. The Emergence of Cosmopolitan Realism: 1. The palace and the periodical: the Great Exhibition, Cosmopolis, and the discourse of cosmopolitanism
2. The sketch and the panorama: Wordsworth, Dickens, and the emergence of cosmopolitan realism
Part II. Cosmopolitan Realism at the Fin de Siècle and Beyond: 3. Realist details and romance plots: James, Doyle, and the aesthetics of fin-de-siècle cosmopolitanism
4. Ethnography and allegory: socialist internationalism and realist Utopia in News from Nowhere and In Darkest England
5. The moment and the end of time: Conrad, Woolf and the temporal sublime
Conclusion: 'a city visible but unseen': cosmopolitan realism and the invisible metropolis.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]