Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams

by William Chapman Sharpe

Sharpe (English, Barnard College, Columbia U.) shows how poets from Blake to Williams have constructed "unreal" or archetypal cities from such materials as the biblical accounts of Cain's exile and Babel's confusion, the Whore of Babylon and virginal New Jerusalem. Drawing on Barthes, Benjamin, and Lacan, he offers new readings of the title poets. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

248 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1990

About the author

William Sharpe joined the faculty of Barnard in 1983. In addition to his teaching duties for the English department, he is affiliated with the American studies program at Barnard.

Professor Sharpe specializes in the literature, art, and culture of the modern city, particularly New York. He teaches courses in urban literature, modern poetry, Victorian literature, and literary criticism.

His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has published numerous articles on literature, urban studies, and the visual arts.

Prof. Sharpe's latest book on images of New York City at night, called New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Art, Literature, and Photography (Princeton University Press, 2008) is the winner of the Peter S. Rollins Award of the Northeast American Studies Association and the MSA Book Prize of the Modernist Studies Association.

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