Romantic Metropolis


Book Description

This 2005 collection of essays challenges the traditional conception that British Romanticism was rooted in nature and rural life, by showing that much of what was new about Romanticism was born in the city. The essays examine the works and events of the Romantic period from the point of view of the urban world, where rapid developments in population, industry, communication, trade, and technology set the stage and the tone for many of the great achievements in literature and culture. The great metropolis appears as both fact and figure: London is its paradigm, but the metropolitan perspective is also borrowed and projected elsewhere. In this volume, some of the most exciting critics of Romanticism explore diverse cultural productions from poems and paintings, to exhibition sites, panoramas, and political organizations to do long-overdue justice to the place of the city - both as topic and as location - in British Romanticism.




Nonstop Metropolis


Book Description

Nonstop Metropolis,Êthe culminating volume in a trilogy of atlases, conveys innumerable unbound experiences of New York City through twenty-six imaginative maps and informative essays. Bringing together the insights of dozens of expertsÑfrom linguists to music historians, ethnographers, urbanists, and environmental journalistsÑamplified by cartographers, artists, and photographers, it explores all five boroughs of New York City and parts of nearby New Jersey. We are invited to travel through ManhattanÕs playgrounds, from polyglot Queens to many-faceted Brooklyn, and from the resilient Bronx to the mystical kung fu hip-hop mecca of Staten Island. The contributors to this exquisitely designed and gorgeously illustrated volume celebrate New York CityÕs unique vitality, its incubation of the avant-garde, and its literary history, but they also critique its racial and economic inequality, environmental impact, and erasure of its past.ÊNonstop MetropolisÊallows us to excavate New YorkÕs buried layers, to scrutinize its political heft, and to discover the unexpected in one of the most iconic cities in the world. It is both a challenge and homage to how New Yorkers think of their city, and how the world sees this capital of capitalism, culture, immigration, and more. Contributors:ÊSheerly Avni,ÊGaiutra Bahadur,ÊMarshall Berman,ÊJoe Boyd,ÊWill Butler,ÊGarnette Cadogan,ÊThomas J. Campanella,ÊDaniel Aldana Cohen,ÊTeju Cole,ÊJoel Dinerstein,ÊPaul La Farge,ÊFrancisco Goldman,ÊMargo Jefferson,ÊLucy R. Lippard,ÊBarry Lopez,ÊValeria Luiselli,ÊSuketu Mehta,ÊEmily Raboteau, Molly Roy, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts,ÊLuc Sante,ÊHeather Smith,ÊJonathan Tarleton,ÊAstra Taylor,ÊAlexandra T. Vazquez,ÊChristina Zanfagna Interviews with:ÊValerie Capers, Peter Coyote, Grandmaster Caz,ÊGrand Wizzard Theodore,ÊMelle Mel, RZA




Globalization, Modernity and the City


Book Description

We live in a world of big cities. Urbanization, globalization and modernization have received considerable attention but rarely are the connections and relations between them the subjects of similar attention. Cities are an integral part of the network of globalization and important sites of modernization. Globalization, Modernity and The City weaves together broad social themes with detailed urban analysis to explore the connections between the rise of big cities, the creation of a global network and the making of the modern world. It explains the growth of big cities, the urban bias of global flows and the creation of metropolitan modernities. The text develops broad theories of the subtle and complex interactions between urbanization, globalization and modernization in a sweep of the urban experience across the globe. Thematic chapters explore the making of the modern city in profiles of the growth of urban spectaculars, the role of flanerie, the traffic issues of the modernist city, recurring issues of urban utopias and the rise of the primate city. Detailed case studies are drawn from cities in Australia, China and the USA. Urban snapshots of cities such as Atlanta, Barcelona, Istanbul, Mumbai and Seoul provide a truly global coverage. The book links together broad social themes with deep urban analysis. This well-written, accessible and illustrated text will appeal to the broad audience of all those interested in the urban present and the metropolitan future.




Byron in London


Book Description

BYRON IN LONDON is a collection of essays by leading authorities on Byron, charting both his life in London and his writings about the capital. Byron emerges from the different perspectives given as one of English poetry’s leading urban and metropolitan writers. Chapters are on Byron and the London boxing fraternity, Byron and the London stage, and Byron’s attitude to the newly-emerging London coterie of women writers. There is one chapter on his relationship with John Murray, his London publisher, and another on Ugo Foscolo’s life in London. Other chapters place Byron in the English verse tradition of urban writing; and nearly all make reference to the way he describes London in Don Juan.




Words Made Flesh


Book Description

Religion is not merely a different way of thinking but is rather an alternative manner of being—it is both a way of attending to the world and a form of embodiment. Literature provides another key to legislating new ways of being in the world. Some of the best Romantic literature can be understood as experimental attempts to access and harness infrasensible energy—affects and dispositions operating beneath the threshold of consciousness—in the hope that by so doing it may become possible to project elusive affects into the practical world of conscious thinking and judgment. Words Made Flesh demonstrates how the Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and the novelist Jane Austen affect, mediate, and ultimately alter our very sense of embodiment in ways that have lasting effects on readers’ affective, political, and spiritual lives. Such works, which unsettle habitual ways of seeing, are perennially valuable because they not only call attention to the dispositions we normally inhabit, but they also suggest ways of forging new patterns and forms of life through the medium of embodiment. Drawing on the work of these writers, Dempsey argues that Romanticism’s contribution to our understanding of the postsecular becomes clearer when considered in relation to three timely scholarly conversations not previously synthesized: secular and postsecular studies, affect theory, and media studies. By weaving together these three strands, Words Made Flesh clarifies how Romanticism provides a useful field guide to the new geography of the self ushered in by secular modernity, while also pointing toward potential postsecular futures. Ultimately, Dempsey argues for a view of literature that recognizes it as an essential component to ethical practice.




The Emergence of a Modern City


Book Description

This book is an exploration of how urban life in Copenhagen, in the period known as the Golden Age (c. 1800 to 1850), was experienced and structured socially, institutionally, and architecturally. It draws on a broad historical source material - spanning urban anecdotes, biography, philosophy, literature, and visual culture - to do so. The book argues that Copenhagen emerged as a modern city at this time, despite the fact that the Golden Age never witnessed the appearance of the main characteristics of the modernisation of cities associated with industrialisation, such as street lighting, sewer systems, and railroads. The book outlines the historical and topographical context of Copenhagen in the Golden Age with a special focus on the works of the most prominent architect of the period, C.F. Hansen. The characterisation of the city is complemented by investigations into writings of three citizens: the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, the novelist Thomasine Gyllembourg, and the criminal Ole Kollerod, who all take an interest in the city's institutional and urban structures as well as their own place in it. From these different sources, a picture is painted of urban life and thought at a time when the city began to take on characteristics of ambiguity and alienation in European thinking, while at the same time the city itself retained some pre-modern motifs of a symbolic order. This transformation is set in a larger process of cultural re-orientation, from traditional Baroque culture to what might be termed Romantic culture. The book reconsiders the significance of this transformation for the emergent order of the modern European city in the nineteenth century and thus of the very foundation on which our own urban culture rests.




Hero Vol.2


Book Description

This volume focuses on the life and times of the ‘star of the millennium’, Amitabh Bachchan, and goes on to describe his contemporaries such as Shashi Kapoor, Dharmendra and Vinod Khanna, and also the next generation of heroes, including the Khans, Govinda, Hrithik Roshan and others who have followed. Ashok Raj is a research coordinator based in New Delhi. An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, he has served as a consultant to several national and international organizations and NGOs in various spheres such as science, culture and the media. His significant work is a sixteen-part series on cinema, which was published in Screen (in 1988).




Hospitality and the Transatlantic Imagination, 1815–1835


Book Description

Hospitality and the Transatlantic Imagination, 1815-1835 argues that a select group of late-Romantic English and American writers disrupted national tropes by reclaiming their countries' shared historical identification with hospitality. In doing so, they reimagined the spaces of encounter: the city, the coast of England, and the Atlantic itself.




Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine


Book Description

The inherent 'metropolitanism' of writing for a Romantic-era periodical is here explored through the Elia articles that Charles Lamb wrote for the London Magazine.




Handbook of British Romanticism


Book Description

The Handbook of British Romanticism is a state of the art investigation of Romantic literature and theory, a field that probably changed more quickly and more fundamentally than any other traditional era in literary studies. Since the early 1980s, Romantic studies has widened its scope significantly: The canon has been expanded, hitherto ignored genres have been investigated and new topics of research explored. After these profound changes, intensified by the general crisis of literary theory since the turn of the millennium, traditional concepts such as subjectivity, imagination and the creative genius have lost their status as paradigms defining Romanticism. The handbook will feature discussions of key concepts such as history, class, gender, science and the use of media as well as a thorough account of the most central literary genres around the turn of the 19th century. The focus of the book, however, will lie on a discussion of key literary texts in the light of the most recent theoretical developments. Thus, the Handbook of British Romanticism will provide students with an introduction to Romantic literature in general and literary scholars with a discussion of innovative and groundbreaking theoretical developments.