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  • Reading Maps, Writing Cities
  • Peter Kalliney
Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel. Robert Alter . New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii + 175. $27.50 (cloth).
Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker , eds. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. x + 181. $34.95 (paper).
Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City. Ben Highmore . Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xiv + 178. $29.95 (paper).
Place and Space in Modern Fiction. Wesley A. Kort . Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Pp. xi + 269. $59.95 (cloth).

In the 1990s, postmodernist theory put "space" and geography at the center of debates about new trends in the arts. Turning to cities, urban planning, and architecture for inspiration, Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Edward Soja, and others argued that the distinctive features of postmodern culture could be described and assessed most effectively by understanding the geographic conditions of late capitalism. In recent years, scholars of modernism have responded, using urban space to help redefine the parameters of modernist studies. Though motivated by different political and methodological objectives than their postmodernist forerunners, the books under review here all use geography as a starting point for reconsidering the value of work on modernism.

It is not surprising that scholars have returned to the crossroads of geography and modernism for inspiration, nor is it altogether unexpected that urban space should provide the material and theoretical context within which innovative studies of early twentieth-century culture [End Page 747] might be conducted. After all, several scholarly generations have passed since many of the most important discussions on the subject were written: Raymond Williams's The Country and the City, Marshall Berman's All that Is Solid Melts into Air, Stephen Kern's The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, and Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life were all published between 1973 and 1984. A reconsideration of modernism's geographies is long overdue. What surprises, I think, is the extent to which the books under review here are preoccupied with defining modernism itself, collectively attempting to explain what is distinctive about the moment and movement. Why, these texts ask, were modernists obsessed with urban life, and how did the space of the city contribute to a specifically modernist imagination?

In the past, scholars interested in modernism and the city have struggled to combine the impulse to historicize representations of urban space with a sufficiently engaging account of the movement's penchant for formal experimentation. Arguing that radically new urban conditions inspired, supported, or determined innovation in the literary, graphic, and plastic arts can be a tricky proposition. Reading modernism's obsession with novelty as a cultural reaction to the shift from rural-agricultural to urban-industrial models of economic production has its pitfalls. Industrialization, large cities, and sprawling imperial metropolises were not inventions of the late-nineteenth century. The proliferation of technological instruments that facilitated the circulation of goods, people, and information with ever-increasing velocity—locomotives, steam ships, automobiles, and telecommunications networks—strikes me as a more plausible explanation of changes in perceptions of urban space. Andrew Thacker, in his excellent recent book Moving through Modernity—which unfortunately falls beyond the scope of this review—provides a persuasive account of the way in which speed transformed our relationship with the environment. Yet trains, steamships, and telegraphy, which made many observers feel the world was shrinking rapidly, were also in place well before 1900. It seems modernism's insatiable thirst for newness is both a provocation and an irritant for scholars with a geographic predisposition.

Robert Alter addresses this problem by both expanding the temporal boundaries of modernism and resisting the trend of reading literary works as the cultural precipitates of specific historical conditions, such as the rise of large cities. In Imagined Cities, he traces the origin of modernist fiction's more exaggerated technical innovations back to the works of Gustave Flaubert and Charles Dickens. Flaubert's great Parisian novel, L'education sentimentale, is significant because it departs from the "magisterial certitude" that marks the narrative endeavors of fellow nineteenth-century novelists. Modernism's subjective crises take shape in...

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