To quote the English critic Raymond Williams: "By the middle of the nineteenth century the urban population of England exceeded the rural population: the first time in human history that this had ever been so, anywhere." The growth of immense cities at the end of the 19th century brought with it singular challenges for literary authors. How was literary representation supposed to respond to a new world that was often experienced as disorienting and irreducibly alien? In this course, we will examine key works of modernity that address this question. We will examine radical new techniques such as interior monologue, narrative fragmentation, and the structural use of myth that attempted to capture and give order to new kinds of urban perception. We will also consider works that grappled with the new social realities and challenges that urbanization brought with it. Authors will include novelists (Woolf, Joyce, and Rhys), poets (T.S. Eliot and Whitman, an important 19th-century precursor), as well as some continental figures (Baudelaire, Schnitzler, Camus). |