Time the City and Literary Imagination

Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination explores the relationship between the constructions and representations of the relationship between time and the city in literature published between the late eighteenth century and the present. Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination explores the literary representation of time in writing about the city from the late eighteenth century up to the present day. Covering familiar cities (New York, Tokyo, London) as well as those less frequently the subject of analysis (Istanbul, Taiwan, York), the essays consider the connections between time and memory, motion, material space, and melancholy. By engaging with contemporary critical perspectives, as well as concepts such as the ‘spatial turn’, postdigitality, and translocalism, the book offers a new way of reading the literary city by tracing the ways in which the relationship between time and urban space shape literary narratives. Kaley Kramer is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the co-editor, with Professor Julie Chappell, of Women During the English Reformations (2014). Her research focuses on belonging, property, and identity in lateeighteenth-century writing. Anne-Marie Evans is Associate Head of School for English Literature at York St John University, UK. Her research focuses on American Literature and material culture in early twentieth-century and contemporary writing. Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination explores the relationship between the constructions and representations of the relationship between time and the city in literature published between the late eighteenth century and the present. This collection offers a new way of reading the literary city by tracing the ways in which the relationship between time and urban space can shape literary narratives and forms. The essays consider the representation of a range of literary cities from across the world and consider how an understanding of time, and time passing, can impact on our understanding of the primary texts. Literature necessarily deals with time, both as a function of storytelling and as an experience of reading. In this volume, the contributions demonstrate how literature about cities brings to the forefront the relationship between individual and communal experience and time.