Time, the City, and the 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. 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.

Kaley Kramer and Anne-Marie Evans, Introduction.- 

Section 1: Time and Memory.- Adam James Smith, Nightmares and Cityscapes: Contradictory visions of the city in James Montgomery’s York Prison Poetry (1795-1797).- Alice Levick, Memory and Grief in Urban Spaces: Marshall Berman, D.J. Waldie, and the Modern American City.- Anne-Marie Evans, No Safe Sanctuary: Race, Space and Time in Colson Whitehead’s Speculative Cities.

Section 2: Time and Movement.- Helena Ifill, ‘The Sensation of a Moment’: Telepathy on the Omnibus in Wilkie Collins’s Basil (1852).- Quyen Nguyen, ‘Like holding water in your hand’: the Textual City and Time in Ulysses.- Sarah Lawson Welsh, ‘This is London, this is Life’: Migrant experiences of time and space in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners.- Lena Mattheis, Peeling Layers: Transnational Urban Time.

Section 3: Time and Material Space.- Steven Nardi, The ‘Skyscraper Primitives’: Urban Space and Primordial Time in the 1920s American Avant-garde.- Megan Cannella, Indirect Memorialization of Trauma in Murakami's after the quake and Delilo's Point Omega.- Spencer Jordan, 'Totaled City': The Post-Digital Textualities of Ben Lerner's 10:04.

Section 4: Time and Melancholy.- Sarah Trott, The City as No Man's Land: Generational War Trauma in Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles.- Jean Amato, Reconfiguring Public and Private Urban Queer Space in Pai Hsien-yung’s Nieh Tzu (1983).- Michael P. Moreno, 'No Centre Other than Ourselves': Istanbul, Hüzün, and the Heterotopic Portal between Civilization and Time.- Deirdre Flynn, ‘Our narrative is reminscence’: Clinging to Lost Time in Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane.

Anne-Marie Evans is Associate Head of School for English Literature, York St John University, UK.

Kaley Kramer is Deputy Head of English, Sheffield Hallam University, UK.