Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel

by Robert Alter

In Imagined Cities , Robert Alter traces the arc of literary development triggered by the runaway growth of urban centers from the early nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. As new technologies and arrangements of public and private space changed the ways people experienced time and space, the urban panorama became less coherent—a metropolis defying traditional representation and definition, a vast jumble of shifting fragments and glimpses—and writers were compelled to create new methods for conveying the experience of the city.In a series of subtle and convincing interpretations of novels by Flaubert, Dickens, Bely, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka, Alter reveals the ways the city entered the literary imagination. He shows how writers of diverse imaginative temperaments developed innovative techniques to represent shifts in modern consciousness. Writers sought more than a journalistic representation of city living, he argues, and to convey meaningfully the reality of the metropolis, the city had to be re-created or reimagined. His book probes the literary response to changing realities of the period and contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of the Western imagination.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Criticism, Urban, Nonfiction, Literature

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967, and has published many acclaimed works on the Bible, literary modernism, and contemporary Hebrew literature.

Reviews

[Daniel Polansky]

Alter chronicles the changing perception of the modern city through a selection of novelists. Basically I just was so enjoying Alter's translation of the Old Testament that I didn't like the idea of being finished. I virtually never read this sort of literary criticism so I vaguely enjoyed the challenge of pushing myself through it. Apart from those two caveats there were a lot of thoughtful stuff in here, I appreciated someone explaining to me what I didn't get out of Bely and it actually made me want to give Dickens another shot. Take that as you'd like.

[Eli Crannberry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read. Alter is insightful and draws specific examples from notable authors who were contemporaries of each other. I found this book useful and am looking forward to reading more by him.

[Liz Fazzio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Usei para as aulas do mestrado. Embora muito detalhista, me pareceu bem repetitivo.

[Babak Fakhamzadeh · Rating 2 out of 5]

With its close reading of Flaubert, Dickens, Andrei Bely, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, this is, mostly, not a book that was well spent on me.

[Jenifer Mohammed · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting and thoughtful analysis of the depiction of the city and the urban experience in famous novels. It was a fascinating study to read and one I will come back to again and again.