English Literature Seminar Series. Week 2
24 January, 16.30–18.00, Screening Room (G.04, 50 George Square)
Matthew Sangster (Glasgow), ‘(Un)Romantic Metropolitanism: Scales, Selves and the Creation of Literary Distinction’.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, London’s scale comprised an unprecedented representational problem. This paper will examine how forms and disciplines that were manifesting increasingly divergent priorities took practically and ideologically different approaches to the formidable task of representing the metropolis. New historical, statistical and topographical accounts increasingly sought to define the city quantitatively, celebrating its immensity and condemning its excesses through calculating its consumption, enumerating its landmarks and bemoaning its large populations of criminals and sex workers. The period’s great map, Richard Horwood’s Plan (1792-9), represents an apotheosis of this trend, although it also displays through its paratexts and omissions some of the concrete limitations that made the city hard to grasp. Conversely, poetry, fiction and personal essays made a powerful negative fetish of the city’s complexity. While early eighteenth-century authors were confident coping with London through using poetic lists and by reducing it to key fashionable locales, by the 1790s, the metropolis had outgrown such forms. Literary writers therefore turned increasingly to subjective and fantastical modes that modelled metropolitan profusion as a disconcerting imposition amidst which right-thinking minds were necessarily cast adrift. In doing so, they modelled new forms of artistry that would play key roles in determining the priorities of the nascent discipline of literature.