The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History

Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch, Silja Laine, Richard Dennis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000507478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History explores a variety of geographical and cultural contexts to examine what literary texts, grasped as material objects and reflections on urban materialities, have to offer for urban history.

The contributing writers' approach to literary narratives and materialities in urban history is summarised within the conceptualisation 'materiality in/of literature': the way in which literary narratives at once refer to the material world and actively partake in the material construction of the world. This book takes a geographically multipolar and multidisciplinary approach to discuss cities in the UK, the US, India, South Africa, Finland, and France whilst examining a wide range of textual genres from the novel to cartoons, advertising copy, architecture and urban planning, and archaeological writing. In the process, attention is drawn to narrative complexities embedded within literary fiction and to the dialogue between narratives and historical change.

The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History has three areas of focus: literary fiction as form of urban materiality, literary narratives as social investigations of the material city, and the narrating of silenced material lives as witnessed in various narrative sources.

1 Urban History and the Materialities of/in Literature

Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch, Silja Laine and Richard Dennis

Urban history has a long record of drawing on literary sources for its engagement with cities of the past. A case in point is Lewis Mumford’s The City in History (1961), which draws also on a range of fictional texts for elucidating the rich variety of urban conditions in history. Mumford foregrounds the importance of fictional texts for our understanding of the city, claiming that cities in history have reached the climax of their urban condition in fictional representations (140). The link drawn by Mumford between the very emergence of the city and ‘glyphs, ideograms, and script’ (Mumford 97) suggests that writing was connected both to the origins and to the individual climaxes of urbanism. Foundational works on British urban history by H.J. Dyos, both alone (1961) and in collaboration with others (Dyos and Wolff), similarly emphasised the place of literary authors and graphic images in forming views of the modern city. In Mumford’s case, as in a range of more recent publications (see Kervanto Nevanlinna and Blom), the use of literary narratives does not necessarily question the extent to which the fictionality or the formal features of literary narratives make these differ from other sources such as autobiographies, letters, inscriptions, or historical annals. There is an assumption in such historical works of a more or less immediate accessibility to past urban materiality through fictional source texts. On the other hand, text-based (e.g. New Critical) and postmodernist approaches (e.g. structuralism and post-structuralism) in literary studies have long emphasised the distance – sometimes seemingly insurmountable – between material world and culture-specific word.

While studies such as those by Mumford and Dyos have produced cornerstones of sorts for urban history, their work has also been extensively critiqued during the past half-century. Mumford’s intuitive methods for drawing conclusions about the past are far removed from those of contemporary archive-driven urban historians, who have pointed out absences, lacks, and doubtful interpretations in his work, including his disparagement of nineteenth-century industry. Recent decades have seen the appearance of a host of new urban history publications straddling history and literary studies, and developing interests in both the specificity of literary narratives and the material conditions of the historical city. Such works include Cities in Modernity by Richard Dennis, Christoph Lindner’s Imagining New York, and The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth Century American Literature by Dana Brand, to name but a few. But there remains a need to further question the interaction between literary narratives (as potential research sources) and urban materialities. What is gained when literary narratives are used in urban history, and what is lost? What kinds of methodological approaches are most useful when drawing on literary narratives in the context of urban history? And what happens when we approach literary narratives of past cities not only in terms of distanced reflections of a past materiality, but rather as firmly intertwined with the urban material conditions from which they arise and to which they contribute?

This volume showcases a range of case studies of what literary texts, grasped as material objects and as reflections on urban materialities, have to offer for urban history. With concrete examples from a wide variety of geographical and cultural contexts, it engages in dialogue between literary scholars and urban historians in ways that hopefully may enrich future cooperation. The approach to literary narratives and materialities in urban history proposed here is summed up with the conceptualisation ‘materiality in/of literature’, defined here as the way in which literary narratives are at once referring to the material world and also actively partaking in the material construction of the world. Narratives are variously engaged, enveloped in, and constitutive of the material world they reflect upon. This book relates the materiality of literary texts to urban history along lines that are geographically multipolar and multidisciplinary. Chapters discuss cities in the UK, the US, India, South Africa, Finland, and France, examining a wide range of textual genres from the novel to cartoons, advertising copy, architecture and urban planning, and archaeological writing. In the process, attention is drawn to narrative complexities embedded within literary fiction and to the dialogue between narratives and historical change. The volume explores different categories of literary narrative in various text types and literary genres which together support, shape, and structure but also question stories about the city. It focusses on three specific, although intertwined, areas of focus: literary fiction as form of urban materiality, literary narratives as social investigations of the material city, and the narrating of silenced material lives as witnessed in various narrative sources.

For decades, urban historians have been highlighting literature as a source of evidence about what the city in modernity was experientially like. We provide evidence from texts and cities that could confirm these assumptions but will also question some of them. Literary narratives have the capacity to evoke, convey, and question experiential conditions, enabling readers ‘to simulate the intrinsic or ineffable qualities of an experience’ (Caracciolo 96) – the qualia, or ‘what it feels like’. They thus need incorporating in urban historians’ accounts of city experience, an area of recent interest (Kenny). Literature is seen here first as material in and of itself, and second in the idea that literary genres, language, and narrative conventions provide the material structures for rendering specific kinds of experiences. And literary narratives have their effect on emerging new urban materialities and are constitutive of reactions (political, social, and architectural) to city developments in history. Our approach in this volume aims to draw attention to narrative complexities embedded within literary fiction and the dialogue between narratives and historical change.

Reading City Literature after Bourdieu and Lefebvre

The materiality of literary texts can be understood in several complementary ways. First, there is the view of literature itself as material, in the sense of the materiality of physical books, of the physical newspapers that print fictional narratives (Mackintosh; Mackintosh, Dennis, and Holdsworth), or of the material aspects of book culture institutions such as publishing houses, book shops, or libraries (see e.g. Nash). Studying urban history in terms of the materialities of literature and of literary texts as material elements in the social fabric of the city would demand a move in directions outlined by Pierre Bourdieu (The Field of Cultural Production; The Rules of Art) and his collaborators and followers in studying the network of power relations in ‘the field of literature’. Such work could include studies of how literary institutions, physical features of fictional works, and book culture form material relationships that tend to converge on, and inform, urban experiences. Literature, then, has a place in the complex material history of humans’ uses of and relations to technology. Important theorisations in this area include those of Heidegger (‘The Question Concerning Technology’, ‘The Thing’), in whose terms, developed more recently by Bill Brown (‘Thing Theory’, ‘Objects’) and others, the book and the text can be seen as examples of the category of the ‘thing’. Reading Heidegger’s later essays and the philosophy of place developed from them by Jeff Malpas, ‘any individual thing’ can be understood by a person through ‘walking around it and so seeing its details at the same time as we get a feel for it as a whole’ (Finch 78).

Second, there is also – and this is how literary narratives are more commonly used in urban history – the way in which literary narratives can offer complex insights into the materialities of urban lives, insights that complement and enrich the information we have from other sources. For decades, urban historians as well as cultural geographers have been highlighting literature as a source of evidence about how the city in modernity was experienced (Harvey). Literary narratives reflect upon and mediate, in varied ways, the urban material world. And they may, in turn, have their effect on emerging new urban materialities, becoming constitutive of reactions (political, social, and architectural) to city developments in history. As such, literary narratives as representations of urban materiality are not seen here as passive recipients or imaginary ‘mirrors’ of reality, but rather as partaking in a complex constellation of discourses that draw on, but that also feed into the urban experience and urban decision-making, such as discourses on public housing, urban planning, and green spaces in the city. Examples of such interaction are the influence of utopian writing such as that of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1889) on English urban planning (see Ameel, ‘Cities Utopian’) or the effect of Camille Lemonnier’s novel Un mâle (1881) on forest preservation in Brussels (Notteboom).

A crucial reference point for considering the relationship between literary narratives and other dimensions of the urban experience is the famous triad developed by Henri Lefebvre in the seminal The Production of Space, where a three-fold taxonomy of space is proposed. Lefebvre distinguishes between material spatial practices (the dimension of experience, such as everyday city walks), what he calls representations of space (the dimension of conception; space, such as it is imagined), and representational spaces (the dimension of imagination) (Lefebvre 33, 38–39; see also Harvey 26; Ameel, Moved by the City 51–54). In Lefebvre’s conceptualisation, literary representations are not in a binary relationship with the material reality, and are again not merely immaterial imaginaries that ‘mirror’ material reality, but are part of a complex, three-fold operation. Lefebvre’s view of space, formulated in the 1960s and 1970s, also needs nuancing and questioning. We do not see Lefebvre’s triad as an invitation to examine different emanations of urbanity as separated from each other along neatly arranged categories, but rather as a reminder that all objects of study could (and should) be thought of in all three ways – material, symbolic, and imagined – proposed by Lefebvre, via the kind of wide-ranging sensory history crossing many types of published and unpublished sources which is notably produced by recent research (e.g. Tullett – ‘The Macaroni’s “Ambrosial essences”’, ‘Grease and Sweat’; Koole).

Following Lefebvre, literary narratives can exist in a range of relationships to the other modes of spatial production. Especially in the case of radical transformations in the urban environment, as the result of dramatic industrialisation and modernisation, de-industrialisation or globalisation (in the nineteenth century; or, more recently, in the case of radical twenty-first-century ‘expulsions’, see Sassen), literary narratives may provide ways to reflect on the moral and social effects of change. They may suggest ways of moving forward from disruptive experiences. Such reflections are not without a dimension of moral meaning-giving, which may explain the didactic aspect of many literary reflections on the city in transformation. Textual genres that became prominent in specific historical periods as reactions to urban transformations, including the ‘urban sketch’ in the early to mid-nineteenth century (see Brand) or the rise of the detective novel in the late nineteenth century (see Lehan 85–87), may give important insights into the specific narrative frames and imaginative resources available for people at a specific time to imagine the changing material realities in the city.

In addition to literary studies and urban history, this volume draws also on developments in cultural history. Cultural historical approaches have been from early on connected to questions of language, narrative, materiality, and experience, which are at the core of urban literature. Simultaneously, the materiality of (urban) experience has been one of the important questions in cultural historical urban studies. Texts, reading, and literary narratives fold in many ways with urban experiences. Peter Fritzsche, for example, has pointed out how, from the nineteenth century on, there have been ‘word cities’: centres of mass print culture. Reading signs, instructions, timetables, and newspapers was necessary for anyone living in the city (Fritzsche 1–11).

One way to look at urban literature is to see it from the point of view of a certain city as a part of local print and publishing practices alongside a much larger body of texts. Cities have their own specific traditions of producing texts and literature. But cities are also transnational. Many of the conventions and aspirations of urban narratives are not understandable from a local point of view. A good example of this is Heidi Hakkarainen’s recent work on nineteenth-century Vienna and its flourishing humorous publications that commented on the transformation and renewal of the city. Hakkarainen shows that humour in this context was used as a way of investigating the limits of knowledge in a new kind of urban environment that caused uncertainty and insecurity (Hakkarainen 147). A study such as Hakkarainen’s provides an example of a detailed, geographically fixed case that also has relevance for broader patterns of modern urban transformations.

An alternative to a view which sees literature as having a privileged or specially insightful position compared to other types of source would be one in which literature is understood as both having its own history and also being involved in (often, indeed, following from if not actually determined by) other histories. If British novelists of the Victorian period built many of their plots around wills, inheritances, and (often ethically ambivalent) acts of benefaction, this was in part because legacies were such an important instrument of change or the protection of continuity in the lives of middle-class Victorians (Green and Owens). Simultaneously, the inheritance plot became a narrative device well-known to both Victorian novelists and their readers, with 1880s and 1890s novels often playing knowingly with expectations about them established earlier in the century. Aesthetic traditions could be very insistent: ostensibly naturalist writing of 1880s and 1890s London, for example, seems compelled to narrate using literary models already established, whether relatively recently (e.g. the Gothic) or hundreds of years earlier (chivalric romance). An understanding of simultaneous multiple histories often acting abrasively yet productively on one another stands behind many of the individual studies of texts and cities, as does a determination to recognise how acts of ‘jumping scale’ operate, as argued variously in recent work on space and time by literary scholars (Hsu 133; Tung).

New Materialisms and Urban Narratives

As the examples above demonstrate, the way in which literary narratives engage with the materialities of the urban condition is always partly dependent on genre and period conventions, and the specific poetics of any give...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Urban History and the Materialities of/in Literature
• Part I Literary Fiction as Urban Materiality
• Part II Literary Narratives as Social Investigations of the Material City
• Part III Narrating Silenced Material Lives
• Index