Provocative account exploring how a population explosion transformed nineteenth-century European and American culture, creating shared narratives of urban life.

This study explores the role of fiction in the social production of the West Central district of London in the nineteenth century. It tells a new history of the novel from a local geographical perspective, tracing developments in the form as it engaged with Bloomsbury in the period it emerged as the city’s dominant literary zone. A neighbourhood that was subject simultaneously to socio-economic decline and cultural ascent, fiction set in Bloomsbury is shown to have reconceived the area’s marginality as potential autonomy. Drawing on sociological theory, this book critically historicizes Bloomsbury’s trajectory to show that its association with the intellectual “fraction” known as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ at the beginning of the twentieth century was symptomatic rather than exceptional. From the 1820s onwards, writers positioned themselves socially within the metropolitan geography they projected through their fiction. As Bloomsbury became increasingly identified with the cultural capital of writers rather than the economic capital of established wealth, writers subtly affiliated themselves with the area, and the figure of the writer and Bloomsbury became symbolically conflated.

"This collection, published in association with the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland, re-examines the relationship between Ireland and Scotland in the nineteenth century. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, it questions received ideas about the extent of cultural harmony between the two countries, arguing instead that conflict and difference were central themes in nineteenth-century Irish-Scottish relations." --Book Jacket.