Imagined Londons

Pamela K. Gilbert

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780791455029, 9780791455012
• eBook ISBN: 9780791487976
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

Explores the various representations and imaginations of London in literature and popular culture, from Victorian times to the present day.

Imagined Londons explores the diverse ways that Britain's "global city" has been imagined and represented in literature, history, the arts, and popular culture, from the mid–nineteenth century to the present day. American and British contributors examine a variety of topics, ranging from poetry to architecture, from dance music to gay pornography, from "tube" maps to the role of Bangladeshi communities in shaping contemporary London politics. Broadly interdisciplinary and deeply attentive to London's historical diversity, the book is unified by its attention to a single question: How have the many imaginations and representations of London shaped-and been shaped by-history and culture? The answers provided within this volume offer the chance to view London in surprising new ways.

Table of contents

• IMAGINED LONDONS
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Imagining Londons by PAMELA K. GILBERT
• 1. The Victorian Social Body and Urban Cartography by PAMELA K. GILBERT
• 2. Other Londoners: Race and Class in Plays of Nineteenth-Century London Life by HEIDI J. HOLDER
• 3. “Men in Petticoats”: Border Crossings in the Queer Case of Mr. Boulton and Mr. Park by MORRIS B. KAPLAN
• 4. Romancing the City: Arthur Symons and the Spatial Politics of Aesthetics in 1890s London by MICHELLE SIPE
• 5. The Metropole as Antipodes: Australian Women in London and Constructing National Identity by ANGELA WOOLLACOTT
• 6. Modernist Space and the Transformation of Underground London by DAVID L. PIKE
• 7. London and the Tourist Imagination by DAVID GILBERT AND FIONA HENDERSON
• 8. Bread and (Rock) Circuses: Sites of Sonic Conflict in London by ALEXEI MONROE
• 9. The Political Construction of Diasporic Communities in the Global City by JOHN EADE, ISABELLE FREMEAUX, AND DAVID GARBIN
• 10. Lonely Londoner: V. S. Naipaul and “The God of the City” by GAUTAM PREMNATH
• 11. Undoing London or, Urban Haunts: The Fracturing of Representation in the 1990s by JULIAN WOLFREYS
• 12. London 2000: The Millennial Imagination in a City of Monuments by MICHAEL LEVENSON
• Contributors
• Index