The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York
Mar 2015 · Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Book 97 · Cambridge University Press
Ebook
291
Pages
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About this ebook
In this provocative book, Nicholas Daly tracks the cultural effects of the population explosion of the nineteenth century, the 'demographic transition' to the modern world. As the crowded cities of Paris, London and New York went through similar transformations, a set of shared narratives and images of urban life circulated among them, including fantasies of urban catastrophe, crime dramas, and tales of haunted public transport, refracting the hell that is other people. In the visual arts, sentimental genre pictures appeared that condensed the urban masses into a handful of vulnerable figures: newsboys and flower-girls. At the end of the century, proto-ecological stories emerge about the sprawling city as itself a destroyer. This lively study excavates some of the origins of our own international popular culture, from noir visions of the city as a locus of crime, to utopian images of energy and community.
About the author
Nicholas Daly is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin. He is the author of Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Literature, Technology and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
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