Writing London

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 has no London to offer us, thanks be! He is the most generous and witty writer going, and when he turns to London it is to release us into realms of thinking about representation, history, and narrative tricks. His own tricks are so sweet-hearted he can wind us into the remarkable illusion that we are thinking way beyond ourselves. Like his 'London', we are a set of images looking for something to represent, a materiality trying to find a story, a history that will neither go away nor appear before us directly. I know of no finer way to think or to be than is generated by this book.' - James R. Kincaid, Aerol Arnold Professor of English, University of Southern California, USA 'In a famous scene of Huysmans's A Rebours, Des Esseintes, bored with Paris in the Winter, decides to take a trip to London. He stops in a British pub next to the station and absorbs himself in the murmur of English voices, eats English fare and drinks English beer. He spends a whole day there and decides that he does not need to board the train and boat-he has felt what London is like-and heads back home. It is a similar experience that Julian Wolfreys' marvellous book forces upon us. Using the various discourses of theory as a contrapuntal backdrop, he weaves in and out of several contemporary novels by Ackroyd, Bowen, Duffy, Sinclair and others, with such mastery that in the end, we know London intimately, with all its disruptive cartographies and postmodern monuments, much better than if we had visited it.' - Jean-Michel Rabaté, Clara M. Clenenden Term Professor, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania 'Writing London - Volume 2: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality is an important book. Wonderfully learned and original, it is a distinguished sequel to Julian Wolfreys's earlier Writing London. This new book demonstrates that twentieth-century writers about London (Elizabeth Bowen, Maureen Duffy, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, and others) anticipate or coincide with the most advanced insights of modern critical theory in Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Deleuze and Guattari, Samuel Weber, Bernard Steigler, Avital Ronell, Tom Cohen, and many others... This wonderful book is a must read, especially for all those who have themselves, as I have, become haunted by London's calls.' - J. Hillis Miller, UCI Distinguished Research Professor, University of California at Irvine, USA 'a tour de force' - Anne Humphreys, The Journal of British Studies

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 .