Imagined cities: urban experience and the language of the novel

Abstract

In Imagined Cities, Robert Alter traces the arc of literary development triggered by the runaway growth of urban centres from the early nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. As new technologies and arrangements of public and private space changed the ways people experienced time and space, the urban panorama became less coherent - a metropolis defying traditional representation and definition, a vast jumble of shifting fragments and glimpses - and writers were compelled to create new methods for conveying the experience of the city. In a series of subtle and convincing interpretations of novels by Flaubert, Dickens, Bely, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka, Alter reveals the ways the city entered the literary imagination. He shows how writers of diverse imaginative temperaments developed innovative techniques to represent shifts in modern consciousness. Writers sought more than a journalistic representation of city living, he argues, and to convey meaningfully the reality of the metropolis, the city had to be recreated or reimagined. His book probes the literary response to changing realities of the period and contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of the Western imagination. Robert Alter is the Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture, published by Yale University Press.

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