London Revenant

London Revenant is a dark and magical exploration of London and the tenebrous world that lies beneath it. A madman is pushing people in front of Tube trains. Adam Buckley has a feeling it might be someone he knows. But that is the least of his worries. His narcolepsy is worsening, sucking him into an uncertain, twilight state. He sees people at parties he has no memory of, but who seem to know him. Deep within London’s sprawling Underground, he sees shadowy figures beckoning him into tunnels not shown on any map. His friends are drifting away, intent on chasing down insane, uncharted zones hidden within the capital, and they seem to be succumbing to a strange wasting disease. The suggestion of a half-remembered life and the encroaching shadow of violence threatens to engulf Adam and everyone he knows, unless he can unveil his true identity and that of his stalking nemesis. Conrad Williams’ masterful novel peels back layer upon layer of the city’s skin to reveal the grinning skull that lies beneath.

Contemporary writers such as Peter Ackroyd, J.G. Ballard, John King, Ian McEwan, Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Zadie Smith have been registering the changes to the social and cultural London landscape for years. This volume brings together their vivid representations of the capital. Uniting the readings are themes such as relationship between the country and the city; the capacity of satirical forms to encompass the 'real London'; spatio-temporal transformations and emergences; the relationship between multiculturalism and universalism; the underground as the spatial equivalent of London's unconsciousness and the suburbs as the frontier of the future. The volume creates a framework for new approaches to the representation of London required by the unprecedented social uncertainties of recent years: an invaluable contribution to studies of contemporary writing about London.

The post-war redevelopment of London has been the most extensive in its history, and has been accompanied by a dramatic social and cultural upheaval. This book explores the literary re-imagining of the city in post-war fiction and argues that the image, history, and narrative of the city has been transformed alongside the physical rebuilding and repositioning of the capital. Drawing on the ideas of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Anthony Vigler and others as well as the latest work on urban representation, this book is an important contribution to the study of the intersection between place, lived experience, and the literary imagination. Texts covered include novels by some of the most significant and lesser known authors of the period, including Graham Greene, George Orwell, J. G. Ballard, Stella Gibbons, David Lodge, Doris Lessing, B. S. Johnson, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair.

London has taken a central role in urban Gothic, from key canonic texts like Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula through modern Gothic texts to the 'tourist gothic' of rebranded gastropubs and ghost tours.As a specific category, London Gothic is becoming as important for understanding ourselves today as it has been for thinking about the cultural productions of the late-nineteenth century. This is the first book to focus on Gothic representations of London, offering a range of essays from established and new scholars reading London Gothic as it is manifested in a variety of media and through varied critical approaches.

Surveying an unusually wide variety of material, ranging from the Victorian triple-decker novel, to Modernist art and architecture, to Pop music and graffiti, this book suggests that the tube-network is a transitional form, linking the alienated spaces of Victorian England to the virtual spaces of our contemporary consumer-capitalism.

The Unblemished artfully interweaves the stories of a serial killer who believes he is the rightful son and heir to an ancient dynasty of flesh-eating monsters, and a mother determined to protect her only daughter from the stuff of nightmares. The fate of each of them and the survival of the entire human race depends on one man, Bo Mulvey, who possesses the ancient wisdom the blood thirsty evil needs to achieve its full and horrifying potential.

Finalist for the 2022 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies From the time of Charles Dickens, the imaginative power of the city of London has frequently inspired writers to their most creative flights of fantasy. Charting a new history of London fantasy writing from the Victorian era to the 21st century, Fairy Tales of London explores a powerful tradition of urban fantasy distinct from the rural tales of writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien. Hadas Elber-Aviram traces this urban tradition from Dickens, through the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, the anti-fantasies of George Orwell and Mervyn Peake to contemporary science fiction and fantasy writers such as Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman and China Miéville.

Covers contemporary authors and works that have enjoyed commercial success in the United States but are typically neglected by more "literary" guides. Provides high school and college students with everything they need to know to understand the authors and works of American popular fiction.

Writings on the metropolis generally foreground illimitability, stressing thereby that the urban ultimately remains both illegible and unintelligible. Instead, the purpose of this interdisciplinary study is to demonstrate that mentality as a tool offers orientation in the urban realm. Nora Pleßke develops a model of urban mentality to be employed for cities worldwide. Against the background of the Spatial Turn, she identifies dominant urban-specific structures of London mentality in contemporary London novels, such as Monica Ali's »Brick Lane«, J.G. Ballard's »Millennium People«, Nick Hornby's »A Long Way Down«, and Ian McEwan's »Saturday«.

The purpose of this book is to explore the ways in which the London Underground/ Tube was "mapped" by a number of writers from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf. From late Victorian London to the end of the World War II, "underground writing" created an imaginative world beneath the streets ofLondon. The real subterranean railway was therefore re-enacted in number of ways in writing, including as Dantean Underworld or hell, as gateway to a utopian future, as psychological looking- glass or as place of safety and security. The book is a chronological study from the opening of the first underground in the 1860s to its role in WW2. Each chapter explores perspectives on the underground in a number of writers, starting with George Gissing in the 1880s, moving through the work of H. G. Wells and into the writing of the1920s and 1930s including Virginia Woolf and George Orwell. It concludes with its portrayal in the fiction, poetry and art (including Henry Moore) of WW2. The approach takes a broadly cultural studies perspective, crossing the boundaries of transport history, literature and London/urban studies. It draws mainly on fiction but also uses poetry, art, journals, postcards and posters to illustrate. It links the actual underground trains, tracks andstations to the metaphorical world of "underground writing" and places the writing in a social/political context.