06 May 2013

Review: Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World by Tanya Agathocleous

Hardcover, 266 pages
Published 2011
Borrowed from  the library
Read April 2013
Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World
by Tanya Agathocleous

Agathocleous's monograph has at its center a great idea: the "world-city" concept, the idea that an individual city can stand in for the shape and state of the entire world. She traces this idea's emergence in the nineteenth century, specifically in the form of novels and other writings about London in the genre she dubs "cosmopolitan realism." It's a great idea, well-articulated, especially in the introduction and the first couple chapters, as well as the last one. There's definitely some potential for our understanding of utopian fiction, which Agathocleous mines for a reading of News from Nowhere, but could apply to many more examples beside.

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