Hallucinations: Life in the Post-Modern City

by Elizabeth Wilson

In her latest book, Elizabeth Wilson sets out in a linked series of stories, vignettes and essays to map contemporary city culture. We move from the tawdry glamour of the sixties demi-monde to the urban gypsies of the 1980s, from Kafka's search for love to sexual angst in the B-movie cities of Silicon Valley, from the New York of Brian de Palma's Dressed to Kill to the bleak nostalgia of 'film noir', from the defiant resistance of alternative cabaret to the performance artists of the downtown tourist venues--the Beaubourg, Covent Garden, the Piazza della Signoria--who transform themselves into mechanised puppets: the modern hero as machine.

218 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1989

About the author

Elizabeth Wilson is a pioneer in the development of fashion studies, and has been a university professor, feminist campaigner and activist. Her writing career began in the ‘underground’ magazines of the early 1970s, (Frendz, Red Rag, Spare Rib, Come Together) before she became an academic. She's written for the Guardian and her non-fiction books include Adorned in Dreams (1985, 2003), The Sphinx in the City (1992) (shortlisted for the Manchester Odd Fellows Prize), Bohemians (2000) and Love Game (2014) (long listed for the William Hill sportswriting prize), as well as six crime novels, including War Damage (2009) and The Girl in Berlin (2012) (long listed for the Golden Dagger Award).

There is more than one author with this name in the database. This is the disambiguation profile for authors named Elizabeth Wilson.