Representation Of London Research Articles

The Roaring Streets: Dickensian London in the Pages of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was a keen preserver of some Victorian values, and among these the art of Charles Dickens, with his representation of London, its voices, sounds, music and noises. Dickens’s Little Dorrit and its closing sentence opens up my critical track by suggesting that Woolf’s reconstruction of the past must give to Victorian sounds a role that is neither ancillary nor merely impressionistic. This article focuses on Woolf’s portrayal of Victorian urban life in her fiction, especially in The Years (1937), where London sounds are everywhere present and deployed to create the polyphony—an exciting cacophony in modernist terms—of the great city. In Woolf’s fiction sounds are meant to convey symbolic meanings, to bring myth to the foreground, while also adding to the realism of the text. Sounds function like the many voices of an organ—the baroque instrument par excellence—suggesting at once order and chaos, norm and transgression: they frame representation and yet also break the frame by directly affecting the reader. This effect of discordia concors as acoustic experience is implemented within the verbal context, emphasizing the dialogic relationship between the source of sound, its reception, and the performative function sounds obtain within the texture of The Years.

Narrative, Temporality and the Modernist City

<p>The article explores the idea of temporality in relation to high-modernist literary representations of London. I claim that the modernist metropolis appears as a palimpsest whose memorialising function is upheld by techniques such as fragmentation, citation, myth, allegory, intertextual references or allusions, which question the stereotypical relationship between then and now, subject and site. It does so by deconstructing traditional temporal sequences and by foregrounding a subtle connection between past and present. Thus, the modernist city will be considered as a space of transformation in which the substantialness of space and subjective time translates the elusive meaning of contemporary history. </p><p> </p>

‘No Longer Young and Not Yet Old’ London: Spatio-Temporal Ambivalence in Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You

This article examines the peculiar spatio-temporal ambivalence of Hanif Kureishi’s 2008 novel, Something to Tell You. Building on Doreen Massey’s (2005) understanding of space and place, I put forth a new framework of spatial production and experience, comprising the cartographical and the phenomenological. Through these terms, I argue that we can engage with both the particularity and the plurality of the novel’s representation of London. Geographic Information System (GIS) software is employed both to make explicit the novel’s relationship to cartography, and to cartographic London, but, equally, to conceptualise Something to Tell You’s reconstellation of the city. By way of conclusion, I suggest that Something to Tell You bears a political and poetic ambivalence that is symptomatic of a wider hesitancy toward representing the capital (as representation relates to stultification). And whilst this unsettledness and non-surety as to the ‘where’ and the ‘when’ of London experience is, for protagonist, Jamal, a cause of great anxiety, is it nonetheless true to the ‘reality’, in Wolfreys’ (1999) sense of the term, of living, of doing, and of being in London.

The Image of Contemporary Society in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere

Neil Gaiman’s urban fantasy novel Neverwhere revolves around some problematic aspects prevalent in the contemporary world, such as an iniquitous discrepancy between social classes or a problematic attitude to history. The artistic universes created by Gaiman are instrumental in conveying a complex condition of postmodern society. Although one of the represented worlds, London Above, is realistic and the other, London Below, is fantastic, both are suggestive of the contemporary social situation, citizens’ shared values and aspirations. Only when considered together can they reveal a comprehensive image of what the community accepts and what it rejects as no longer consistent with commonly held beliefs. The disparities in the representations of London Above and London Below refer to the division into the present and the past. The realistically portrayed metropolis is the embodiment of contemporary times. The fantastic London Below epitomises all that is ignored or rejected by London Above. The present study is going to discuss the main ideas encoded in the semiotic spaces created by Neil Gaiman, on the basis of postmodern theories. I am going to focus on how the characteristic features of postmodern fiction, such as the use of fantasy and the application of the ontological dominant, by highlighting the boundaries between London Above and London Below affect the general purport of the work.

Spatialising Early and Late Modernity: Representations of London in Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Dr. Dee and Hawksmoor

Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985) and The House of Dr. Dee (1993) are examples of a distinctive British form of contemporary experimental historical fiction, and through representations of London they explore the popular dimension of early modernity, showing how the capital’s spaces both embodied and produced multiple modernity, as well as the unsung pre-modern allegiances that critiqued modern forms. While the novels’ respective Renaissance and post-Restoration settings allow them to explore different stages in the development of both London modernity and resistant forms, their juxtaposition of early and late modern narratives establishes a compelling parallel between early modern and late twentieth-century London. Both sets of narratives also stage a shift away from modern forms towards inherited pre-modern allegiances, connecting this to a new relationship with the capital’s inheritance of pre-Reformation and Gothic built space, as well as an equivalent tradition of London writing, one in which Ackroyd’s novels themselves participate.

The Lord Mayor's Show in Early Modern London

The Lord Mayor's Show – a lavish entertainment organised yearly to celebrate the oath of the new mayor – became a key event in London civic life between the 1580s and the late 1630s, involving such authors as Thomas Middleton, Thomas Heywood, Anthony Munday, John Webster and Thomas Dekker. This essay provides a survey of the most important literature concerning the early modern Lord Mayor's Shows, their historical development as a dramatic form, their ceremonial role, their textual dimension and their symbolic representation of London's political life.

Cultural Representations of London in British-Asian and Bollywood Films

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway … . The air was dark above Gravesend … brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on...

“Walking and Watching” in Queer London: Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet and The Night Watch

This article argues that Sarah Waters’ representation of London in her historical fictions Tipping the Velvet and The Night Watch is used to delineate the gendered bodies and sexual identities of her characters. A historical summary demonstrates that female masculinity was slowly mapped onto sexual identity between the 1880s and 1940s in Britain. The article argues that Waters’ “inventive” use of this history allows her to question the construction of both historical and contemporary identifications. The way that Waters’ characters are constricted and liberated by London's urban landscape demonstrates the spatial and temporal contingency of both gender and sexuality.

Dickens's London: perception, subjectivity, and phenomenal urban multiplicity

This phenomenological exploration of the streets of dark London opens up new perspectives on the city and the writer. Taking Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as its model, Dickens' City offers an exciting and original project that opens a dialogue between phenomenology, philosophy and the Dickensian representation of the city in all its forms. Julian Wolfreys suggests that in their representations of London - its streets, buildings, public institutions, domestic residences, rooms and phenomena that constitute such space - novels and journalism can be seen as forerunners of urban and material phenomenology. While also addressing those aspects of the urban that are developed from interpretations of other literary forms, styles and genres, Dickens' City presents in twenty-six episodes (from Bells, Bridges and Butlers via Inns and Interiors and Public Houses, the Police and the Post to Todgers and the Thames) a radical reorientation to London in the nineteenth century, the development of Dickens as a writer, and the ways in which readers today receive and perceive both. Key features: major reassessment of writing on the city; dual focus on methodology and the historicity of Dickensian urban consciousness; philosophical reflections on urban tropologies through key passages from texts recreate the experience of Victorian London; and, inventive structure offers the reader an experience of the disordered multiplicity of London.

Ruins; or the Being of Time as History in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day

In 1926–27, in his work Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), Martin Heidegger sought to ‘destroy’ the metaphysics of presence. To destroy, which meant to solicit, to shake, to destabilize, to bring out the ruins and remains inherent in presence, was for Heidegger, if not to surpass metaphysics and its privilege of presence, to attest another mode of thinking time and history. This other way of thinking was to think Being (Sein), the holding-together of life (Zusammenhang des Lebens), and community, according to an ‘always already’ and ‘always not yet’. The ‘destruction of presence’ sought precisely to show that the rationalistic imposition of presence was disastrous. In his as yet unpublished course from 1964, entitled ‘Heidegger: la question de l’Etre et l’histoire’, Jacques Derrida interrogates at length Heidegger’s project, writing for example that ‘Sein und Zeit commence donc a ebranler, a solliciter l’epoque qui dissimule l’histoire de l’etre sous l’histoire de l’etantite determine comme presentite/ Being and Time begins, therefore, to shake, to unsettle, the epoch that dissimulates the history of Being beneath the history of beingness determined as present-ness’. Derrida, in this course and henceforth with ever-greater acuity and force, laid out what this other way of thinking might be, and it acknowledges and welcomes the place of the ruin, the remainder, well-nigh converting it into a sustainable resource, in the name of thinking otherwise what life and community are, despite the hegemony of a metaphysics of presence. I would like to take the de(con)struction of presence—not at all a ruin-causing event in twentieth-century thought, on the contrary—as a point of departure for reading a novel devoted to the remanence of ruins in London, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949). Commanded by a representation of the Blitz, and by a representation of London as a presence whose modality is the past of the future, this novel is a striking example of a ‘deconstruction of present exhaustion and of past master discourses’.

The Cambridge companion to the literature of London

London has provided the setting and inspiration for a host of literary works in English, from canonical masterpieces to the popular and ephemeral. Drawing upon a variety of methods and materials, the essays in this volume explore the London of Langland and the Peasants' Rebellion, of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan stage, of Pepys and the Restoration coffee house, of Dickens and Victorian wealth and poverty, of Conrad and the Empire, of Woolf and the wartime Blitz, of Naipaul and postcolonial immigration, and of contemporary globalism. Contributions from historians, art historians, theorists and media specialists as well as leading literary scholars exemplify current approaches to genre, gender studies, book history, performance studies and urban studies. In showing how the tradition of English literature is shaped by representations of London, this volume also illuminates the relationship between the literary imagination and the society of one of the world's greatest cities.

‘Where I Come From, We Eat Places Like This For Breakfast’: Aki Kaurismäki's I Hired a Contract Killer as Transnational Representation of Local London

This paper considers Aki Kaurismaki’s film I Hired a Contract Killer (1990) as an iconoclastic (not to say eccentric) addition to the small canon of transnational ‘outsider’ representations of London by European directors and involving European stars. Its more particular interest, however, is in exploring Contract Killer’s London in terms of its cinematic geography and the specifics of its resonant choice of determinedly off-centre locations (drawn largely from the postindustrial, post-imperial east London docks and old East End, but extending to a wider palette of districts in London EC, north and west), and in the insights that might emerge from detailed attention to these. As Charlotte Brunsdon explores in the introduction to her book London in Cinema, the task of ‘thinking about London in the cinema’ is fraught with ‘difficulty’ (2007: 11). Part of this ‘difficulty’ has to do with the gap between the methodologies and usual concerns of ‘legitimate’ film studies and the different approaches and preoccupations of both other salient academic disciplines (such as cultural geography or

Introduction: Screen Londons

Our aim, in editing the ‘London Issue’ of this journal, is to contribute to a conversation between scholars of British cinema and television, London historians and scholars of the cinematic city. In 2007, introducing the themed issue on ‘Space and Place in British Cinema and Television’, Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley observed that it would have been possible to fill the whole journal with essays about the representation of London. This issue does just that, responding to the increased interest in cinematic and, to a lesser extent, televisual, Londons, while also demonstrating the continuing fertility of the paradigms of ‘space and place’ for scholars of the moving image1. It includes a wide range of approaches to the topic of London on screen, with varying attention to British institutions of the moving image – such as Channel Four or the British Board of Film Classification – as well as to concepts such as genre, narration and memory. As a whole, the issue, through its juxtapositions of method and approach, shows something of the complexity of encounters between the terms ‘London’, ‘cinema’ and ‘television’ within British film and television studies.

Review: A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of London, by Lawrence Phillips

Review: <i>A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of London</i>, by Lawrence Phillips

Understanding the Role of the National Exemplar in Constructing ‘Strategic Glurbanization’

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the tensions between economic and environmental priorities through attempts to reconfigure urban governance arrangements in a world city. We examine these tensions through the development of the hydrogen energy economy in London and through attempts to cultivate new techniques of governance in realizing this vision. Through case study material, we develop two representations of the negotiation of new forms of governance. First, we outline the representation of ‘London as world leader in progressive urban governance’. Second, we develop a characterization of ‘the politics of the world city in CO2reduction’. The article moves on to address the scalar making up of these representations, in relation to and through analysing multiple interpretations of London as a ‘national exemplar’. The active positioning and representation of London as the exemplar by the national state and the specificities of London governance, we claim, enables the mayor to actively negotiate between the two sets of apparently conflicting logics of hydrogen development. London's energy strategy is therefore to a large extent ‘nationalized’ while at the same time national energy policy is also regionalized around London. Consequently, London is differentially and positively positioned in comparison to other city‐regions of the UK. The need to develop a sustainability fix that can allow London, and the greater South East of England, to continue to grow economically and within the apparent constraints of environmental limits requires a specific governance fix around the national exemplar and new socio‐technical energy networks, which we characterize as ‘strategic glurbanization’.RésuméCet article s'intéresse aux tensions entre priorités économiques et environnementales dans les tentatives de reconfiguration de la gouvernance urbaine d'une ville mondiale. Ces tensions sont étudiées dans le cadre de l'économie de l'hydrogène développée à Londres et de projets de nouvelles techniques de gouvernance visant à concrétiser cette vision. À partir d'éléments d'étude de cas, deux représentations de la négociation de formes innovantes de gouvernance sont élaborées. D'abord, sont exposées la représentation de ‘Londres, chef de file mondial d'une gouvernance urbaine novatrice’, puis une description des ‘politiques de réduction en CO2de la ville mondiale’. L'article aborde ensuite l'échelle de création de ces représentations, en fonction et au travers de l'analyse d'interprétations de Londres comme ‘exemple national’. Le positionnement et la représentation dynamiques de Londres en tant qu'exemple d'après l'État national, ainsi que les particularités de la gouvernance londonienne, permettent au maire, selon nous, de négocier véritablement entre les deux logiques apparemment contradictoires du développement de l'hydrogène. La stratégie énergétique de Londres est donc ‘nationalisée’ dans une large mesure tandis que, parallèlement, la politique énergétique nationale est régionalisée autour de la métropole. C'est ainsi que la ville se place de manière différente et positive par rapport à d'autres régions métropolitaines du Royaume‐Uni. Le besoin d'élaborer une solution durable qui permette à Londres, et à la région sud‐est de l'Angleterre, de poursuivre leur essor économique moyennant les contraintes manifestes des limites environnementales exige une gouvernance spécifique définie autour de l'exemple national et de nouveaux réseaux énergétiques socio‐techniques que nous qualifions de ‘glurbanisation stratégique’.

The Monster and the Atom: Representation of London in James and Conrad

The Monster and the Atom: Representation of London in James and Conrad

Writing the ‘architexture’ of the global cityGlobalization and the birth of modern London

In this paper Philip Dowdall explores some of the ways in which the discourse of globalization has made itself apparent in the material and cultural fabric of London, and the psyches of the city's inhabitants. The author follows earlier attempts in this journal to describe and analyse the effects of contemporary processes of globalization on the city, and the consequences for those who occupy it (on London, see Michael Edwards and Doreen Massey, in CITY 5(1), for example). Drawing on literary and architectural representations of London from the 17th to the 19th‐centuries, Dowdall points out some surprising but clear parallels between recent discourses on the city's global identity, championed by current Mayor Ken Livingstones attempts to redefine metropolitan identity, and earlier efforts to position London as a gateway to the world. The author sees the city as the focus of continuous self‐conscious re‐invention (340) and writes that ‘Britain had to learn how to build globalization into the very foundations of [its] thinking some 300 years before Livingstone believed it to be a necessary means of survival in a competitive global economy’; arguing that the underlying essence of the discourse of globalization has changed little in the meantime.

Unsettling cosmopolitanisms: Representations of London in Kamila Shamsie's salt and saffron

Crucial to postcolonial debate concerning contemporary processes of globalization is an analysis of the extent to which textual treatments of location and dislocation are materially grounded. Kamila Shamsie's Salt and Saffron, located in Karachi and London, focuses on the polarized class system in the Pakistani city, but fails to extend this focus to its representations of London. Drawing on Marxist spatial analysis (Lefebvre, de Certeau) and with reference to Shamsie's more recent novel Kartography, I trace within Salt and Saffron an ideological repression of the social hierarchies that structure the space of London. I argue that the abstraction of space beyond the Indian subcontinent functions as a decoy, deflecting attention away from the significant presence of the “West” in the novel, and obscuring the relationship of location and transnational movement to class. I suggest that this deterritorializing, “cosmopolitan” tendency in Shamsie's work represses a materialist treatment of space.

Visuality and Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century England

Visuality and Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century England

Aestheticizing the Ancestral City: antiquarianism, topography and the representation of London in the long eighteenth century

To assert its distinction, modernity has always looked backwards as well as forwards. During the eighteenth century London underwent a steady process of transformation as numerous ancient buildings were demolished in the name of urban improvements. As these modernizations went forward a concomitant rise of antiquarian sentiment prompted a plethora of engraved representations which aimed to keep the past in view. This essay considers the evolution, dissemination and reception of such cumulative antiquarian representations from the nostalgia for Hollar’s bird’s‐eye view of pre‐Fire London to the moral judgements implied in John Thomas Smith’s later etchings of dilapidated and impoverished sites of antiquity. By charting the changing aesthetics and interests of this genre, this essay discusses the ambiguous relationship between the publishing of antiquarian representations and the status and preservation of the sites that they depicted. It also asks whether the circulation of such representations helped to ground urban identity at a time when the city was in a constant and disorienting state of change.