The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843-1907
- Discusses a hitherto under-researched tradition of city-writing, linking Ruskin to modernism
- Reads comparatively five important mid to late nineteenth-century writers
- Marries close textual analysis with historically and geographically informed context
- Fills a gap in the critical literature on city-writing between realism and early modernism
Charting an ‘aesthetic’, post-realist tradition of writing, this book considers the significant role played by John Ruskin’s art criticism in later writing which dealt with the new kinds of spaces encountered in the nineteenth-century. With chapters devoted to the ways in which aesthetic and decadent writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde built upon and challenged Ruskin’s ideas, the book links the late Dickens to the early modernism of Henry James. The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature gives a vibrant vision of what an aesthetically sensitive treatment of these spaces looked like during the period.
Prologue: Joris-Karl Huysmans, or ‘After Dickens’Introduction: The Spatial Turn
1. John Ruskin: Towards a Theoretics of Space
2. Charles Dickens: After Realism
3. Walter Pater: Towards an Aesthetics of Space
4. Oscar Wilde: Cosmopolitan Space
5. Henry James: Modern Space
Conclusion: Unreal Cities: Towards ModernismIndex
The Aesthetics of Space is a valuable voice in the ongoing conversation around literary and cultural modernity in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
The Aesthetics of Space is a remarkable study of the urban entanglements of modern aesthetics, realism, and decadence. In this destabilising intervention into the study of nineteenth-century urban space, Whiteley demonstrates that life often imitates the most disturbing of arts and that reality is defined by the contours of our psychological landscapes.
