In a series of one hundred maps, Franco Moretti explores the fictionalization of geography in the nineteenth-century novel. Balzac's Paris, Dickens's London and Scott's Scottish Lowlands are mapped, alongside the territories of Spanish picaresque novels, African colonial romances and Russian novels of ideas, in a path-breaking study which suggests that space may well be the secret protagonist of cultural history.

(2003). World Literature and World Politics: In Search of a Research Agenda. Global Society: Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 229-252.

Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900

World Literature and World Politics: In Search of a Research Agenda

There are a number of studies on J.B. Priestley’s life and work including assessments of his novels, social and political writings and contribution to English culture. Some of these studies have commented on Priestley and landscape, especially his attachment to Bradford and rural Yorkshire. There are no detailed studies, however, relating to his geographical imagination. The purpose of this research is a survey and interpretation of Priestley’s work to form a source of information and ideas relating to landscape, dwelling and topophilia as the basis of his geographical imagination. The thesis will consider, firstly, what he wrote relating to the origin and form of his attachment to Bradford and rural Yorkshire as indicated by his articles in the Bradford Pioneer in 1913, a Labour newspaper published in Bradford. The thesis explains the extent to which he continued this attachment in his later work after the First World War before writing about London. In the next stage I approach the novel Angel Pavement in terms of his responses to London in relation to the provinces. Finally, the research is concerned with how Angel Pavement represented the landscape and identity of London in about 1930. The main contribution of the research is its detailed response to Priestley’s thoughts on urban and rural landscapes in his early journalism and popular fiction. The research is organized around two main themes. The first of these is concerned with the origin of Priestley’s attachment to Bradford and rural Yorkshire. The second considers how this attachment has influenced later work, in particular how he approached writing about London.

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Landscape and the geographical imagination of j.b. priestley: 1913-1930

"How Wide is the Circle of We?" historian David Hollinger asked a decade ago.' He was pointing out the decline of confidence since 1940 in species-wide generalization in the human sciences. But his phrase seems to speak directly to the question of the humanities and citizenship today, when many, including me, think that the exclusiveness of national citizenship needs to give way to more cosmopolitan affiliations. The question is whether the humanitieswith their reference to the human-have a role in such a development. Can we expect the humanities to help widen the circle of we? Historically, the sponsor and constituency of the academic humanities has been the nation-state, not the whole of humanity. Though the humanities disciplines have spoken for the value of the human, they have never until our own time proposed to embrace all humans. The creation of the academic humanities as professional scholarly fields was intertwined with the making of the modem nation-state. Indeed, those peoples who were not organized into nation-states were beyond the ken for professional historians and were relegated to the discipline of anthropology. History as a discipline was in fact a key collaborator in the work of distinguishing those who considered themselves "civilized" from those they considered not so--for the reason of lacking a written literature and archives-based history. But this has changed in the past quarter century; moreover, the same move from parochialism to expansion and cosmopolitan inclusion is occurring in literary studies, art history, and musicology. The world is now fully organized into nation-states, and humanities scholars are now more inclusive in their reach. Scholarship shuns the language of civilized and uncivilized, and all of humanity has been brought into the portfolio of history and literary studies. Parallel with this development there have been calls, as historian Prasenjit Duara titled his 1995 book Rescuing History from the Nation, to "rescue history from the nation." Similar calls have been made for literary studies, where border crossing has become a way

The Boundaries and Constituencies of History

This thesis proposes and explores the concept of ?invisible architecture? as a means of interpreting the city in the nineteenth century. Invisible architecture is understood as the unseen structure which holds together the modern city, allowing it to exist as a concept despite the impossibility of gaining full knowledge of it. It has two sides, the first repressive and stabilising, the second fluctuating and utopian. In this way, the thesis is interested in the material and spatial basis of ideology, as well as the ways ideology can be disrupted or distorted. It is also interested in developing a link between invisible architecture and two forms of the unconscious: the psychoanalytic unconscious, which is read through Freud and Lacan, and Walter Benjamin?s ?optical unconscious?. More broadly, the thesis explores the ongoing significance of Benjamin?s Arcades Project (1927-40) for nineteenth-century city literature. 	Invisible architecture is explored by analysing how it operates as an object of interest and concern for a selection of writers whose work engages with the modern city between approximately 1830 and 1885. Chapter One focuses on Nikolai Gogol, whose essay ?On Present-Day Architecture? (1835) is read in relation to Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948). This text expresses the desire to bring into visibility the submerged history of architecture and to produce a modern urban architecture that is monolithic and controlling. At the same time, it imagines a city built from suspended structures made of iron, a form of architecture that is speculative and destabilising. Gogol?s use of the term ?arabesque? (as in his 1835 volume, Arabesques) is also investigated, with reference to ?The Overcoat? (1842), as a means of thinking about how the city both disrupts and evokes totality. Chapter Two looks at James Kay, Friedrich Engels and Elizabeth Gaskell?s writing on industrial Manchester, especially Mary Barton (1848). It argues that the trope of the underground, which is associated particularly with the working class, operates as a form of invisible architecture, and considers the ways Kay?s 1832 pamphlet on Manchester cotton-workers seeks to bring the city into greater visibility. Chapters Three and Four focus on Dickens?s London in Dombey and Son (1848) and Our Mutual Friend (1865) respectively. Chapter Three looks at the hidden, but unstable, connections between the domestic and financial ?houses? of Dombey, and reads the railway as a force which both breaks apart and connects the city of London. Chapter Four focuses on the river as indicating the presence of that which cannot be integrated into the city because it is fundamentally unknowable, drawing on Lacan?s work on vision and the unconscious. This chapter also suggests that city space in Our Mutual Friend is frequently uncanny, referring to Freud?s essay on the topic. Chapter 5 examines Zola?s Paris in The Kill (1872) and The Ladies? Paradise (1883) in relation to Debord?s Society of the Spectacle (1967), arguing that Haussmann?s boulevards and the new department stores of Second Empire Paris seem to open up the city with new vistas of space and glass, offering absolute visibility, but at the same time suppressing and destroying parts of the city. The conclusion looks at whiteness within city space, basing its discussion on texts covered in the preceding chapters. It proposes the contradictory combination of visibility and invisibility which whiteness signifies as a final example of invisible architecture, and argues for a dialectical connection between nineteenth-century whiteness and the whiteness of modernism.

Invisible Architecture: Ideologies of Space in the Nineteenth-Century City

This study aims to discuss the structural and contextual configuration of three books by Orhan Pamuk: The White Castle, My Name is Red and Istanbul: Memories of a City. The central line of enquiry will be the possibility of representing identity as the attempt to capture the elements that make the ‘self’ what it is. Without limiting my analysis to an individual or national definition of identity, I will argue that Pamuk, writing through the various metaphysical binaries including self/other, East/West, word/image, reality/fiction, and original/imitation, offers an alternative view of identity resulting from the definition of representation as differance. I will argue that within the framework of Pamuk’s work representation, far from offering a comforting resolution, is a space governed by ambivalence that results from the fluctuations of meaning. Representation, for Pamuk, is only possible as a process of constant displacement that enables meaning through difference and deferral. Accordingly the representation of identity is no longer limited to the binaries of the metaphysical tradition, which operate within firm boundaries, but manifests itself in constant fluctuation as ambivalence. Within this framework I will suggest that Pamuk’s works operate in that space of ambivalence, undermining the firm grounds of metaphysics by perpetually displacing any possibility of closure. Initially focusing on the self/other dichotomy I will argue that the representations of the ‘self’ are its reinventions through difference and deferral thus representing it as ‘an-other’. Using the theoretical framework offered by the writings of Jacques Derrida I will study the various textual and stylistic strategies that Pamuk uses in the his books to enable the representation of identity as differance.

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Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900

Citations

World Literature and World Politics: In Search of a Research Agenda

Landscape and the geographical imagination of j.b. priestley: 1913-1930

The Boundaries and Constituencies of History

Invisible Architecture: Ideologies of Space in the Nineteenth-Century City

Fictional Displacements: An Analysis of Three Texts by Orhan Pamuk

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