Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century

"It was a pleasure for me to read this volume, as it composed a multifaceted city in front of my eyes. It reads like an urban kaleidoscope, but its beauty is also that it can be broken into pieces and used in classes. I will use it in my classes on urbanity and representation, for sure, and am sure it will find a ready public amongst scholars of urban studies, and students of the field, graduate and undergraduate."
—Patrice Nganang, Department of Africana Studies, Chair Stony Brook University, USA

This book develops our understanding of the global literary field in the long nineteenth century by discussing nine different places outside the established metropoles. It shows how different economic, geographical and political factors combined to give each place its own distinctive literary culture and symbolic capital. Taking a geocritical approach, the book shows how its different case studies can be seen as ‘literary capitals’ in terms of their role within the wider nation, region or empire. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts and different genres, the book reads the nineteenth-century literary field as a constellation where different connections can be plotted across various points on the map at different times. 

Arunima Bhattacharya is a postdoctoral research assistant on an AHRC-funded project, The Other from Within: Indian Anthropologists and the Birth of a Nation (University of Leeds, UK). Her publications include ‘Everyday Objects and Conversations Experiencing “Self” in the Transnational Space’ in Asian Women, Identity and Migration (2020). 

Richard Hibbitt is Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at the University of Leeds, UK. His publications include the edited volume Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century: An Alternative Mapping of Literary and Cultural Space (Palgrave, 2017). 

Laura Scuriatti is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Bard College, Berlin. She is the author of Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism (2019) and the editor of Groups, Coteries, Circles and Guilds: Modernist Aesthetics and the Utopian Lure of Community (2019).