Prologue: Joris-Karl Huysmans, or 'after Dickens' -- Introduction: The spatial turn -- John Ruskin: towards a theoretics of space -- Charles Dickens: after realism -- Walter Pater: towards an aesthetics of space -- Oscar Wilde: cosmopolitan space -- Henry James: Modern space -- Conclusion: Unreal cities -- towards modernism.
Summary:
Charting an 'aesthetic', post-realist tradition of writing, this book considers the significant role played by John Ruskin's art criticism in later writing which dealt with the new kinds of spaces encountered in the nineteenth-century. With chapters devoted to the ways in which aesthetic and decadent writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde built upon and challenged Ruskin's ideas, the book links the late Dickens to the early modernism of Henry James. The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature gives a vibrant vision of what an aesthetically sensitive treatment of these spaces looked like during the period.
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