This book analyses the spatial politics of a range of British novelists writing on London since the 1950s, emphasizing spatial representation as an embodied practice at the point where the architectural landscape and the body enter into relation with each other. Colombino visits the city in connection with its boundaries, abstract spaces and natural microcosms, as they stand in for all the conflicting realms of identity; its interstices and ruins are seen as inhabited by bodies that reproduce internally the external conditions of political and social struggle. The study brings into focus the fiction in which London provides not a residual interest but a strong psychic-phenomenological grounding, and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing this space. Authors such as J. G. Ballard, Geoff Dyer, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Tom McCarthy, Michael Bracewell and Zadie Smith are considered in order to map the relationship of body, architecture and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the city. Through readings that are consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and reflections formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists and art critics, this book offers a substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of literary urban studies.

This book analyses the spatial politics of a range of British novelists writing on London since the 1950s, emphasizing spatial representation as an embodied practice at the point where the architectural landscape and the body enter into relation with each other. Colombino visits the city in connection with its boundaries, abstract spaces and natural microcosms, as they stand in for all the conflicting realms of identity; its interstices and ruins are seen as inhabited by bodies that reproduce internally the external conditions of political and social struggle. The study brings into focus the fiction in which London provides not a residual interest but a strong psychic-phenomenological grounding, and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing this space. Authors such as J. G. Ballard, Geoff Dyer, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Tom McCarthy, Michael Bracewell and Zadie Smith are considered in order to map the relationship of body, architecture and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the city. Through readings that are consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and reflections formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists and art critics, this book offers a substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of literary urban studies.

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 provides insight into the critical traditions shaping the literary landscape of modern Britain.

Chronicling the last radical architectural group of the twentieth century – NATØ (Narrative Architecture Today) – who emerged from the Architectural Association at the start of the 1980s, this book explores the group’s work which echoed a wider artistic and literary culture that drew on the specific political, social and physical condition of 1980s London. It traces NATؒs identification with a particular stream of post-punk, postmodern expression: a celebration of the abject, an aesthetic of entropy, and a do-it-yourself provisionality. NATØ has most often been documented in reference to Nigel Coates (the instigator of NATØ), which has led to a one-sided, one-dimensional record of NATؒs place in architectural history. This book sets out a more detailed, contextual history of NATØ, told through photographs, drawings, and ephemera, restoring a truer polyvocal narrative of the group’s ethos and development.

A single significant Jacobean country house, Theobalds, provides the focus for this study. James Sutton here delves into the cultural and political aspirations of the two men most closely associated with Theobalds: William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520-1598), who constructed the building, and his second-born son and political scion, Robert, 1st Earl of Salisbury (1563-1612). Attending to the opulent materials and hegemonic spatial codes that enabled Theobalds' fabrication, this book also demonstrates the enormous costs - economic, political, social, but especially familial and personal - of building to envious show in the period. Neither celebrating nor castigating the Cecils' conspicuous consumption at their Hertfordshire estate, the author offers a balanced appraisal of the aesthetic strategies through which they promulgated a family narrative. The forms of display he emphasizes are those in which Theobalds was particularly strong: architecture, gardening, the decorative arts, and above all, the occasional drama. Through its detailed rhetorical analysis of one house and one family, this book provides a fresh view of the complex passage from Elizabethan to Jacobean style. poetics, Materializing Space at an Early Modern Prodigy House deepens our understanding of how early modern English men and women chose to be represented, both to themselves and to others.

Since its first publication in 1985, The Social Production of Urban Space has become a landmark work in urban studies. In this second edition, M. Gottdiener assesses important new theoretical models of urban space--and their shortcomings--including the global perspective, the flexible accumulation school, postmodernism, the new international division of labor, and the "growth machine" perspective.Going beyond the limitations of these and older theories, Gottdiener proposes a model of urban growth that accounts for the deconcentration away from the central city that began in the United States in the 1920s and continues today. Sociologists, political scientists, economists, geographers, and urban planners will find his interdisciplinary approach to urban science invaluable, as it is currently the most comprehensive treatment of European and American work in these related fields.