Ebook: The Literary Psychogeography of London: Otherworlds of Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair
Author: Ann Tso
- Tags: Literature, Literary Theory, European Literature, British Culture, Urban History, Urban Geography / Urbanism (inc. megacities cities towns), Cultural Studies
- Series: Literary Urban Studies
- Year: 2020
- Publisher: Springer International Publishing
- Edition: 1st ed.
- Language: English
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This Pivot book examines literary elements of urban topography that have animated Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair’s respective representations of London-ness. Ann Tso argues these authors write London “psychogeographically” to deconstruct popular visions of London with colonial and neoliberal undertones. Moore’s psychogeography consists of bird’s-eye views that reveal the brute force threatening to unravel Londonscape from within; Ackroyd’s aims to detect London sensuously, since every new awareness recalls an otherworldly London; Sinclair’s conjures up a narrative consciousness made erratic by London’s disunified landscape. Drawing together the dystopian, the phenomenological, and the postcolonial, Tso explores how these texts characterize “London-ness” as estranging.