Dickens and the Virtual City

Urban Perception and the Production of Social Space

Estelle Murail, Sara Thornton, Estelle Murail, Sara Thornton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319350851
• eBook ISBN: 9783319350868
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores the aesthetic practices used by Dickens to make the space which we have come to know as the Dickensian City. It concentrates on three very precise techniques for the production of social space (counter-mapping, overlaying and troping). The chapters show the scapes and writings which influenced him and the way he transformed them, packaged them and passed them on for future use. The city is shown to be an imagined or virtual world but with a serious aim for a serious game: Dickens sets up a workshop for the simulation of real societies and cities. This urban building with is transferable to other literatures and medial forms. The book offers vital understanding of how writing and image work in particular ways to recreate and re-enchant society and the built environment. It will be of interest to scholars of literature, media, film, urban studies, politics and economics.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Editors and Contributors
• List of Figures
• Part I Introduction
• Chapter 1 Dickensian Counter-Mapping, Overlaying, and Troping: Producing the Virtual City
• Part II Counter-Mapping: The New Information Maps of Dickens
• Chapter 2 The Railway and the River: Conduits of Dickens’ Imaginary City
• Chapter 3 Re-envisioning Dickens’ City: London Through the Eyes of the Flâneur and Asmodeus
• Chapter 4 The Bleeding Heart of Criminal Geography in Dickens’ London
• Chapter 5 One Hundred and Five, North Tower’: The City as a Prison-Home Narrative in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
• Part III Overlaying and Ghosting: London as America, Africa, Arctic, India
• Chapter 6 The ‘Something’ that His Brain Required: America’s Role in the Development of Dickens’ Urban Imagination
• Chapter 7 Dickens and His Urban Museum: The City as Ethnological Spectacle
• Chapter 8 ‘Reddening the Snowy Streets:’ Manchester London, Paris or a Tale of Three Cities
• Chapter 9 ‘Our Mutual City:’ The Posterity of the Dickensian Urbanscape
• Part IV Troping: Sensing the City and the Acts of Reading and Writing
• Chapter 10 The Role of Hypallage in Dickens’ Poetics of the City: The Unheimlich Voices of Martin Chuzzlewit
• Chapter 11 No Thoroughfares in Dickens: Impediment, Persistence, and the City
• Chapter 12 A Production of Two Cities and of Four Illustrators
• Bibliography
• Index