Reading Constellations: Urban Modernity in Victorian Fiction
Patricia McKee
Abstract
The modern city in the works of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James disrupts the ideal of progressive improvement which often framed modernity in the Victorian imagination. This study uses Walter Benjamin’s idea of the constellation to clarify these authors’ undermining of presumptions of progressive history and to elaborate the disputed and distracted urban modernities of their fictions. What are for Benjamin modes of thinking philosophically appear in fiction with revisionary social and emotional effects, in constellations that interrupt the individual self and social relations, a ... More
Keywords: Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Walter Benjamin, modernity, city
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 | Print ISBN-13: 9780199333905 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2014 | DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199333905.001.0001 |
