This study explores the role of fiction in the social production of the West Central district of London in the nineteenth century. It tells a new history of the novel from a local geographical perspective, tracing developments in the form as it engaged with Bloomsbury in the period it emerged as the city's dominant literary zone. A neighbourhood that was subject simultaneously to socio-economic decline and cultural ascent, fiction set in Bloomsbury is shown to have reconceived the area's marginality as potential autonomy. Drawing on sociological theory, this book critically historicizes Bloomsbury's trajectory to show that its association with the intellectual fraction known as the 'Bloomsbury Group' at the beginning of the twentieth century was symptomatic rather than exceptional. From the 1820s onwards, writers positioned themselves socially within the metropolitan geography they projected through their fiction. As Bloomsbury became increasingly identified with the cultural capitalof writers rather than the economic capital of established wealth, writers subtly affiliated themselves with the area, and the figure of the writer and Bloomsbury became symbolically conflated.

Argues that the novel had a powerful role in mediating this physical location to a geographically dispersed readership, and that this particular site had a material impact on the development of the novel Explores how paying close attention to literary geography can reorient understanding not only of a place in time, but also of the history of fiction Reveals connections between texts usually thought of as separate by assembling together canonical and non-canonical fiction set in the Bloomsbury area

Autorentext
Matthew Ingleby is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Queen Mary University of London, UK. He works on the politics of space in the long nineteenth century. Publications include the short popular history, Bloomsbury: Beyond the Establishment (2017), Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century co-edited with Matthew Kerr (2018), and G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity, co-edited with Matthew Beaumont (2013).

Inhalt

1. IntroductionWriting Bloomsbury's Trajectory.- 2. Bloomsbury Entertains: Dinner Parties and the Literary Geographies of Class.- 3. Bloomsbury versus the Marriage Plot: Boarding-House and Barrister Bachelors.- 4. Bloomsbury's Vocations: Philanthropic Medicine and Iatrophobic Fiction.- 5. Women in the Walk place: Tracking Bloomsbury's Female Pedestrians.- 6. In the Valley of the Shadow of Books: Placing Fictions of Literary Production at the Fin de Siècle .- 7.ConclusionBloomsbury in Play.