Writing London: Volume 2: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality

Following on from Julian Wolfrey's successful Writing London (1998), this second volume extends Wolfrey's original argument that a new urban sensibility in the nineteenth century had been developed which established new ways of writing about and responding to the city. Writing London - Volume 2 explores through a range of readings of twentieth-century films and texts the complex relationship between the experience of the city, the pleasures of the urban text and the solitary nature of these pleasures. The book has a broad focus, in part dictated not only by the transformation of literary production in the twentieth-century, but also by the need to respond to the changes in both urban representation and London itself. Writers discussed include Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Maureen Duffy, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock. The volume covers texts from the late nineteenth-century to the end of the twentieth, in a critical reading that incorporates the theoretical insights of Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and Jacques Derrida.

Julian Wolfreys is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at Loughborough University, UK. He was previously Professor in Literature at the University of Florida, USA. His teaching and research is concerned with 19th- and 20th-century British literary and cultural studies, literary theory, the poetics and politics of identity, and the idea of the city. He is the series editor of Transitions and has written many course texts for Literature students, notably The English Literature Companion .