London Writing

Abstract:  This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class-ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process that contain clear class effects are looked at: the amount of office space, the flexibility of plans, and the appropriation of the urban environment as exchange or use value. These aspects structure the urban redevelopment but are external to the communicative planning process. The opposition to the redevelopment has in the planning discourse been articulated as “community”-based rather than in class-sensitive terms. We finally present three strategies for reinserting issues of class into planning theory and practice.

Take a walk on the dark side of the street in this unique exploration of the fears and desires at the heart of the British Empire, from the Regency dandy’s playground to the grim and gothic labyrinths of the Victorian city. Enter a world of gin spinners, sneaksmen and Covent Garden nuns, where bare-knuckled boxers slog it out for dozens of rounds, children are worth more dead than alive, and the Thames holds more bodies than the Ganges. This is the Modern Babylon, a place of brutal poverty, violent crime, strong drink, pornography and prostitution; of low neighbourhoods and crooked houses with windows out like broken teeth, wraithlike urchins with haunted eyes, desperate, ruthless and vicious men, and the broken remnants of once fine girls: a grey, bleak, infernal place, where gaslights fail to pierce the pestilential fog, and coppers travel in pairs, if they venture there at all.

Combining the accessibility of a popular history with original research, this book brings the denizens of this vanished world once more to life, along with the voices of those who sought to exploit, imprison or save them, or to simply report back from this alien landscape that both fascinated and appalled: the politicians, the reformers, the journalists and, above all, the storytellers, from literary novelists to purveyors of penny dreadfuls. Welcome to the 19th century underworld…

Krstić, Višnja. ‘Gendered Geographies of Power: London in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Jean Rhys’s Voyage In The Dark’. Annual Review of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, vol. 46, no. 2, 2021, pp. 35–49. https://doi.org/10.19090/gff.2021.2.35-49

This paper poses a parallel analysis of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark, two novels set in London around the First World War that complement one another with regard to representation of women in the city. In focus are Woolf's and Rhys's heroines who belong different social classes. With a view to producing a fuller picture of the London strata of the time, the paper concentrates on a dual front: it examines the position the protagonists enjoy in respect to their gender as well as in respect to their social status. While Rhys's Anna is a young woman from a distant colony, that is an outsider with no permanent residence in London, Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway, however seemingly privileged, is greatly disadvantaged by her restricted experience of the metropolis. The paper argues that in these two novels London is a source of double marginalisationa city unjust to the colonial subjects but unjust to women of all strata. As a theoretical background, the paper uses the concept of gendered geographies of power, which are supposed to help us reveal how different power structures affect the cityscape on both macro and micro level.

A topographical reading of Ignatius Sancho’s letters, especially as it relates to his detailed account of the Gordon riots of 1780, remains a gap in Sancho’s studies. Most of the earlier studies have only mentioned his account of the riots briefly. His account of the riots spans across four letters addressed to banker John Spink, which have all been, along with several other letters he wrote, posthumously published in the collection, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. As part of my discussion, I will show how a mapping of the spaces described in Sancho’s Letters reveals the unlikelihood of his account being solely eyewitness. Here, however, I aim to follow Sancho’s movement through the disrupted spaces where the riots took place and examine his reactions to these spaces. My conclusion here is that Sancho associates with the largely unscathed spaces of Westminster, where he lived, an indication of the social wellness of the area, and himself.

Some three decades have elapsed since the publication of John Healy's seminal autobiography of Irish immigrant experience in London, The Grass Arena. In the intervening years, the text has been the subject of relatively little critical commentary. This article endeavours to contribute to scholarship in the fields of postwar literary studies and Irish literary studies by conducting a close reading of this compelling text. The overall claim posited is that aspects of Healy's experiences are representative of wider facets of Irish experiences in London, and more broadly Great Britain, in the mid-to-late twentieth century. The central thesis underscores the significance of The Grass Arena's valuable contribution to a wider understanding of the overall lived experience of the Irish immigrant in Britain in the mid-to-late twentieth century. The critical framework for this argument draws on the scholarship of Giorgio Agamben. From this critical reference point, a case is made for reading Healy's autobiography through the prism of Agamben's notion of the 'state of exception'. The article identifies three instances of 'states of exception', the army, the prison and the hospital, as both physical and symbolic spaces that represent Agamben's model in Healy's text. The overarching argument of this article is that Healy's memoir is a unique, nuanced and valuable literary depiction of the difficult actual lived experience of a particular subset of the Irish diaspora in Britain that warrants sustained critical attention.

Three disparate yet related things happened in November 2008 that suggest it is apposite to revisit a film that was controversial when released but which provides a
sophisticated reading of London in the early 21st century. First, Dirty Pretty Things (Frears 2002) was aired on Channel 4. Second, ID cards started to be issued to overseas nationals and airport workers. Third, London Mayor Boris Johnson called for an amnesty for all British migrants working illegally. Soon after the film was released the frenzied moral panic about asylum seekers was peaking, until knocked off the tabloid agenda by the Iraq war. The film was controversial when released and still provokes strong positive and negative reactions. It weaves together with great aplomb complex elements of the material, imagined, live, surveiled and (immigration) policed city. The inner London location filming adds credibility which counters the somewhat implausible, though tense and engaging plot. Cinema has long influenced our perception of the modern city even to the extent of producing the city (Clarke 1997 and Shiels & Fitzmaurice 2001). Many reviews of Dirty Pretty Things have been written but I want to concentrate, first on some misconceptions and then on its neo noir (Schwartz 2005) credentials, which affect the manner in which it portrays divergent yet proximate
aspects of the city big condition in a globalised neoliberal political economy.

Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal's Tourism (2006), as a contemporary British Asian novel, counts as postcolonial fiction yet adds a post-postcolonial and postmodern twist by presenting itself in the context of tourism. Although generally perceived as pulp fiction for its provocative themes and pornographic scenes, the novel's portrayal of the second-generation immigrant experience, urban space and tourism invites a close reading from the perspectives of spatiality and movement, as well as an analysis that is interdisciplinary in its approach, its theoretical background situated at the intersection of tourism, cultural, postcolonial and diaspora studies. The present paper investigates Dhaliwal's novel in terms of the relationship of identity, space and movement, or more specifically what I call mobile subjectivities: the figures of the tourist and the flâneur, and argues that the basic elements of flânerie and tourism are indispensable attributes of British Asians' diasporic identity and experience, and thus integral to the analysis of movement and subjectivity in British Asian fiction.

By showing that the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales was inspired by Harry Bailey's 1381 poll-tax records for Southwark, this article offers a new interpretive context for Chaucer's best-known work.

During the second half of the 1380s, John Gower, the leading fourteenth-century poet and an acquaintance of Geoffrey Chaucer, was working on his longest English poem, the Confessio Amantis. Chaucer, in turn, is believed to have been writing some of the material that would later form The Canterbury Tales. In addition, Chaucer was probably finishing Troilus and Criseyde, which must have been available before March 1388, at least in part, to Thomas Usk, the poet and undersheriff of London, who names the poem and borrows from Chaucer’s Boece in his Testament of Love. It is in the Confessio and in the Troilus, that is, in works written in the second half of the 1380s, that Chaucer and Gower first refer to one another in a literary context. The only other instance that connects the two names is a 1378 legal record, in which Chaucer hands power of attorney to Gower and the lawyer Richard Forster. Rather than reading this document as proof of Gower and Chaucer’s supposed personal friendship, I adduce new evidence for Gower’s legal training that suggests that the 1378 record was a purely professional arrangement—Chaucer might simply have needed a team of lawyers at the time. There is no reason to read this document through the prism of an instance of poetically embedded praise some ten years later, particularly given Gower’s likely career as a lawyer.

The new evidence for Gower’s legal training changes what we know of the relationship between the two poets and, by virtue of pushing forward their literary acquaintance to the late 1380s, brings into sharp relief their deep ties to Southwark, where Gower may have resided at the time and where Chaucer launched his Canterbury Tales. Furthermore, on closer inspection, this new focus on Gower’s and Chaucer’s work in Southwark has the potential not only to foreground the role of an emerging literary culture in the area but to challenge existing models of reading The Canterbury Tales and modify our understanding of what Chaucer had in mind when he embarked on this collection of tales.

Peter Ackroyd's 'Hawksmoor' (1985) tells two stories in alternating chapters: one set in London between 1711 and 1715, the other in present-day London. In the first story, a murderous architect beholden to occult beliefs relates his exploits and situates them within his project of subverting the Enlightenment agenda of his superiors; in the second story, told by an apparently objective third-person narrator, the detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is baffled by a series of bizarre murders. The text’s two loci in time mark, respectively, the early days of modernity, in which science and rationality appeared to herald a brighter future, and late modernity, in which this optimism has come under question. The detective, who embodies the rationalist ethos and the tenet of scientific progress, emerges as a figure whose failure casts doubt upon the validity of the core beliefs of Western culture. Peter Ackroyd’s text is an original example of the sub-genre known as the ‘anti-detective narrative.’

We read Blake’s poem ‘London’ aimed at sensitising readers to the early 19th century plight of London’s most vulnerable citizens. Our reading surfaces several issues relevant to organisational theorising: the role of ‘diabolical reading’ strategies in creating mental flux through textual flux; the use of visual and poetic symbolism to contest the language systems implicated in the psychic effects of institutional domination; and Blake’s narrative voice as wandering Bard, which places the poetic body at the centre of responding to spatial practices of the city. We argue Blake’s art still inspires because it haunts the reader as it continually renews itself in re-reading and so both inscribes and incorporates, making the word, flesh. Blake’s philosophy also highlights the creative poetic subject ‘placed’ in their city-landscape and so provides a pathway through inscription and incorporation. Implications for organizational theory are explained.

This is a study of the female diasporic imagination. It sets out to investigate how Anglophone black women writers and performers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of contemporary globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space.

Making Love, Making Worlds breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and globalization. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, my analyses of literary works and medial performances by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation, displacement or rupture and towards a new emphasis on connection and intimacy. The book argues that, by attending to the deeply personal and relational while also depicting structural and geographical displacement in a time of global flows and refugee movements, these authors and performers strive to create possible inhabitable worlds. However, Making Love, Making Worlds makes a point of tracing the complexities of the voices and visions studied, of foregrounding their ability to engage with the harmful as well as the reparative results that come to be produced at the intersections of love, migration, and globalization.

Informed by a wide theoretical interest, the study combines careful literary analyses with in-depth discussions of cultural and socio-historical contexts. It does not only consider the world-making powers of the old novel form in the third millennium but also ponders the formative effect of new digital media. In holding on to the potential radicality of love, Making Love, Making Worlds makes a case for re-articulating an often-dismissed approach that originated in critical black feminist love studies. While theorisations of space necessarily abound in discussions of postcolonial literatures, my focus on affect introduces a very different entry point for analysis.

My choice of texts – ranging from Adichie’s spectacularly successful Americanah and Smith’s well-known London novels via Oyeyemi’s queer vampire fiction to the poems and performances of Patel and Shire – is due to the pronounced but varying significance they give to the interrelationships of space and love, of migration and affect. The works selected for close analysis provide an opportunity of studying various African diasporic imaginaries in concert with one another: Nigerian-American, Caribbean, Nigerian-British, Somali-British, and Kenyan-American. Read alongside each other, the selected novels, poems and performances suggest a newly and differently connected global imaginary – an alternative to dominant constructions of the present world and a site of resistance to oppressive hegemonic dynamics at work on national as well as global levels.

The British spy novel took a realist turn in the 1960s epitomising the new wave. The first five novels each written Le Carré and Deighton were published in the period 1960-1970. Although both authors and these specific works have remained popular in genre spy fiction, there has been little consideration of the works in relation to each other and in their role together in situating the potential threats of the post-war period in a UK domestic setting rather than on mainland Europe. The transition of Fleming’s novels into film starting with ‘Dr No’ in 1962 suggested that UK spies engaging in espionage undertook this in exotic locations which were far removed from everyday life. An examination of the fiction of Deighton and Le Carré suggests a different world where the locus of external danger was in the suburban midst of Surrey or Wood Green.

Whilst the war was over, the British state was still actively defending itself from internal threats and external dangers. The use of specific London locations in these first ten novels – particularly in ‘Call for the Dead’, and ‘The Spy who came in from the Cold’ by Le Carré and ‘The Ipcress File’ and ‘Berlin Game’ by Deighton create a language of location and fear. The roles played by the leading characters in these novels are complementary - Le Carré’s desk based controllers and Deighton’s operational spies – and appeal to different audiences many of whom had experience of war or conscription. This paper will explore the role of these novels in creating a new climate of public awareness in the post-war state through their locational specificity in London.

Since the cultural turn in human geography in the late 1980s, there has been a widespread consensus on the intelligibility of space and its interpretative necessity. 1 It denotes both a broader understanding of text, whose realm and medium stretch beyond the border of conventional language, and the epistemological significance of studies on topography, which will help to disclose complex and intersubjective meanings of spaces. In the following essay, I will adopt a close-reading approach to investigate the represented urban space of the post-Thatcher era in Patrick Keiller's Film London and its specific aesthetic means, which are deeply rooted in literary Modernism.

In this paper, the author read Henry James's The Awkward Age and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway's Party, in order to demonstrate the dialectical moment of London's age and ageless. The age of London is in the character of literary works, as Clarissa Dalloway comes to show the reader her feelings while walking on the London street. At the gate of St James Park, she has the dialectical moment of feeling "very young; at the same time unspeakably aged" . That is a moment which represents a particular sense of personal history, when the past comes into one's own living present.

In this chapter, I consider the lived relationship between atmosphere and place, drawing on three works by British-African novelist Doris Lessing (1919–2013), who regularly in her writing offers lucid accounts of place atmospheres in London, the city she emigrated to from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) shortly after World War II [2]. These three works are:
 Lessing’s 1969 novel, The Four-Gated City, which depicts the emigrant experience of a young Southern Rhodesian woman named Martha Quest, who arrives in battle-scarred London immediately after World War II (Lessing 1969);
 Lessing’s 1960 In Pursuit of the English, a journalistic account of the author’s first year in London (Lessing 1960);
 Lessing’s short story, “Dialogue,” published in the 1978 Stories and one of her most encompassing depictions of the lived complexity of place atmospheres (Lessing 1978).

This is a paper delivered to the Literary London Society conference in 2013, which considers resistance to monstrous dangers in Robert Rankin's 'Brentford Trilogy'. By thwarting catastrophic threats to Brentford, Pooley and Omally represent the triumph of place over time which is at the heart of much London fiction.

London is one of the most diverse cities in human history. While its multicultural character has been widely celebrated in recent decades – by writers of fiction as much as by anyone – more recently multiculturalism has been said to have ‘failed’, or to have never really existed in the first place. How have recent works of fiction engaged with London’s multiculturalism, and could that multiculturalism itself be regarded as a kind of ‘fiction’?

This study analyses a number of key contemporary texts that engage with questions about ethnic and cultural diversity in London. It argues that in recent years the most successful and engaging works of literature about the city have attempted to assert its diversity as undeniable whilst also challenging the notion that London is an inclusive utopia which offers sanctuary and prosperity to its migrants.

It is important for all businesses to enhance visibility of their brands when exhibiting in trade fairs and shows. Use of display stands and boards help in showcasing the leaflets and brochures for potential clients to access and increase brand visibility.

Nicholas Royle suggested in a 2004 review that literary outsider ‘Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912–64) has for too long been one of those writers more talked about than read’. Little seems to have changed in the intervening decade, the passing of the author’s centenary having been marked by several small events that contributed to what Royle termed the ‘expanding mythology’ around Maclaren-Ross, but seemingly inspiring little critical interest in his writings. This article seeks to redress the balance, utilizing the wealth of biographical material produced on Maclaren-Ross since his death in 1964, in a detailed reading of his wartime prose. Taking as its starting point the dichotomy between Maclaren-Ross’s dandified appearance and his aggressive heterosexuality, it resituates Maclaren-Ross—and, more importantly, his Second-World-War writings—within an emerging Queer Studies predicated upon the understanding that, whilst many homosexuals are, in their everyday behaviour, not queer people at all, ‘many heterosexuals are extremely queer’. In his peculiar attentiveness to clothing on as off the page, this article contends, Maclaren-Ross demonstrates an understanding, advanced for its time, of the performative power of dress, its ability to queer a society’s response to a given wearer, or group of wearers, and in so doing to betray the prejudices of that society, prejudices exacerbated by the exigencies of war.

[Now available through open access from Speculum: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1017/S0038713415002316]

Among those witnesses of John Gower's works that are known to have been produced during his lifetime, the Trentham manuscript (London, British Library, Additional MS 59495) stands out for its remarkable design as a seemingly planned trilingual collection. The manuscript, usually dated to the first year of Henry IV's reign, exclusively contains Gower's poetry—showcasing his virtuosity in English, French, and Latin. A number of its poems are either addressed to or invoke Henry, yet nothing is known about the history of this manuscript before the seventeenth century. As a result, scholarship on the Trentham manuscript (henceforth Trentham) tends to foreground the question whether this compilation was ever presented to Henry. I will adduce fresh evidence to establish the early provenance of Trentham and show that the manuscript remained in Southwark until the middle of the sixteenth century. Second, I will offer a new context for the composition of Trentham by reading the collection against the background of Anglo-French relations during the first months of Henry's rule. Finally, I will argue for Gower's personal involvement in and continued ownership of this manuscript.

Sebastian Sobecki (2015). Ecce patet tensus: The Trentham Manuscript, In Praise of Peace, and John Gower's Autograph Hand. Speculum, 90, pp 925-959. doi: 10.1017/S0038713415002316.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0038713415002316

Interview with Michael Moorcock on the relationship of his work to William Burroughs.  The interview came about after Michael Butterworth of Savoy suggested my name to Keith Seward.
Full text online at RealityStudio; please follow the link.

The literature of ‘Windrush Generation’ authors invariably (and perhaps necessarily) found themselves engaged in debates regarding race, class and their articulation in the postwar Caribbean migrant experience. In this respect, an analysis of their narrative strategies serves as useful indicator for authorial attitudes towards contemporary black working-class politico-cultural tendencies. Applying concepts originating with Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Vološinov to authors ER Braithwaite, Sam Selvon and George Lamming, I highlight the ways in which language exists as a site of struggle; yet by bringing their analyses into Caribbean London, I show how such struggle must be conceived as inherently intersectional, allowing us to understand how their narrative strategies function as methods of navigating the structures of class and race in Britain and their manifestations in language.

A blog entry looking at George Orwell's 1931 experience in police cells in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch, and how it provided material for Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This features on my literary tour of Bethnal Green 'Bethnal Green in So Many Words', whic explores the area with site-specific readings from various authors. Details are here:
http://charnowalks.co.uk/bgn-so-many-words/

This collection makes a vivid case for the manifold ways that G. K. Chesterton's fictional and non-fictional output repurposed the 'everyday matter' (lamp-posts, bricks, water-towers) and everyday matters (train journeys, grocery shopping, automobile rides, playing with children) of urban modernity (11). A colourful and diverting group of essays emphasises how a Chestertonian literary project was bound up with the creative imperative to play with the 'apparent banality' of urban life at the turn of the twentieth century (4).

Nightlife historically has been viewed as a social problem to be contained by licensing, policing and the management of supply. In the context of recent trends towards deregulation of hours and supply, fears have again resurfaced as to the detrimental impact of the ‘night-time economy’ on street disorder and violence, concerns that have focused attention on the Licensing Act 2003. Utilizing a case study of the regulation of nightlife in the London locality of Southview, this article will explore how there has been ongoing and renewed attention on the problems associated with the night-time economy centred on differentiating between risky and safe cultural and economic forms. The article will argue that the Licensing Act represents a consolidation of over a decade of regulatory change that has ‘reordered’ regulatory approaches to nightlife; one that has, in combination with other aspects of economic, social and cultural change, been productive of ‘subcultural closure’.

A review of B Gürenci Saglam's monograph which addresses the question of how 'knowable' is the mystical London which Ackroyd portrays in his novels. The work, which is based on Gürenci Saglam's doctoral thesis, focuses on Ackroyd's parodying of the literary genres of biography and detective fiction.

This seminar paper - peer-reviewed by Prof. Dr. Straumann (University of Zurich) - is a literary essay on J.G. Ballard's novel high-rise. It aims to explain the hyperbole of chaos within the book by heavily drawing on theories from Richard Sennett and his seminal work The Fall of Public Man. This interpretation is embedded in a brief history of architecture and the beginnings of high-rise construction without which it is near impossible to understand the situation presented in the eponymous novel. The paper concludes that high-rises are inherently problematic for social relations due to a lack of social spaces. The ensuing chaos is a possible outcome of the very tyranny of intimacy Sennett described in 1977.

The paper examines the popular craze for Flash songs among the Victorian working and middle classes, the critical backlash against Egan and, later, Ainsworth, and Dickens’ efforts to distance himself from any association with Newgate novels and novelists, stated in his preface to the 1841 edition of Oliver Twist. In this preface, Dickens attacks the romanticism of the criminal underclass, and objects to and rejects the use of Flash dialogue in fiction, arguing instead for a new form of literary social realism. The paper includes two appendices offering examples and translations of Flash slang from Life in London and Ainsworth’s song ‘Nix My Dolly Pals’ from Rookwood. The title of this paper is taken from Ainsworth’s song and means ‘magistrates, pickpockets and thieves in prison.’

A 6500 word essay - This project grew out of a paper entitled ‘Working-class heroes: Jack Sheppard, Henry Holford & The Literature of Costermongers’ presented at the G.W.M. Reynolds: Popular Culture, Literature & Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century Conference, at the University of Birmingham in July 2000. The complete essay places Reynolds’ epic serial The Mysteries of London (1844 – 1856) within the inter-related contexts of social investigation, Chartism, Newgate fiction, and the Victorian literary novel, comparing and contrasting Reynolds’ masterpiece with Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1843), and depictions of the London criminal underworld by Egan, Ainsworth, Dickens and Mayhew. Reynolds’ unorthodox treatment of fallen women is considered (he doesn’t kill them off like Sue’s La Goualeuse or as Dickens does ‘The Hospital Patient’ and Nancy), as well as his views on capital punishment, and his device of allowing underworld characters to annex the text in order to tell their own stories is read as a political gesture. The paper also explores the development of the ‘mysteries novel’ as an expression of the urbanisation of industrial Britain, and the contemporary critical debate surrounding Reynolds’ politics, seeking an answer to the question of whether or not he was truly radical or merely opportunist. I argue that the chaos of the new urban environment is reflected in the structure of Reynolds’ text, in which competing narrative codes mirror the incoherent experience of the city, anticipating the postmodern novel and allowing Reynolds’ genuine political commentary to co-exist within a gothic and sensational frame that he equally exploits, satirises and subverts.

The tramp, living on the city streets, is the ultimate expression of the motif of the urban walker, and embodies for Peter Ackroyd the relationship between London and its vulnerable citizens. However, the vagrant goes beyond the sufferings of the perpetual victim to embrace a mythic London where tramps are kings, and where refuge and closure are to be found.

8500 word essay - This paper explores what Hugh Trevor-Roper called ‘the invention of tradition’ through Scott’s Waverley novels, Ainsworth’s creation of the legend of Dick Turpin’s ‘Ride to York,’ and his rehabilitation of the then dilapidated Tower of London through his historical novel of the same name. The paper considers myths of national identity, and uses the legend of King Arthur as a frame. The tile is taken from a quotation from Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841).

The article explores the novel Capital by John Lanchester from the space perspective. It shows how the characters in the novel reshape London and how London in turn reshapes their identities. It suggests a framework for the study of the novel from this perspective.