Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing Architecture and the Body

This book analyses the spatial politics of a range of British novelists writing on London since the1950s, emphasizing spatial representation as an embodied practice at the point where architectural space and the body enter into relation with each other. Colombino visits space in relation to its contours, boundaries, and geographies as they stand in for all the contested realms of identity; its hollows and voids are seen as occupied by bodies that replicate internally the external conditions of political and social struggle. The study brings into focus and investigates the fiction in which London provides not a residual interest but a strong psychic-phenomenological grounding, and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing this space. Authors such as J.G. Ballard, Michael Bracewell, Geoff Dyer, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Zadie Smith and Tom McCarthy are considered in order to map the relationship of body, architecture, and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the city. Through readings that are consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and reflections formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists, and art critics, this book offers a substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of literary urban studies.