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Near London and Brighton : suburbs in fiction, 1780s-1820s
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Scarth, Katherine Ada (2012) Near London and Brighton : suburbs in fiction, 1780s-1820s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b2680442~S1
Abstract
My thesis explores London’s and Brighton’s Romantic-period affluent residential
suburbs as represented in fiction by Charlotte Smith, Medora Gordon Bryon, Elizabeth
Helme, Jane Austen, and Elizabeth Sandham. While scholarship is still small in size and
scope, literary critics, historians, geographers, and architects have increasingly recognized the
importance of this period for understanding suburban histories and geographies more
generally. At this time, the middling ranks began to move en masse to the suburbs, distinctly
suburban architecture and developments proliferated, and unprecedented acceleration in the
growth of suburban population and infrastructure occurred. My thesis is the first full-length
assertion of the suburbs’ significant re-ordering of society and the built environment in this
period, a transformation that anticipates today’s ubiquitous Anglo-American suburbs.
I ground my study in Romantic-period suburbs by using the work of J.C. Loudon,
whose The Suburban Gardener, and Villa Companion (1838) was the first in-depth treatise
on explicitly suburban homes and gardens. Furthermore, I spatialize the suburb, extending
current criticism on Romantic-period homes, suburbs, and cities, and applying the ideas of
postmodern geographers and spatial theorists. I define the suburban by focusing on how
characters experience domestic space’s geographical location, material features, and social
spaces. These elements of space, along with the connections between time and suburban
space, reveal how the suburb is implicated with the urban and the rural and with issues of
management and power. Characters experience suburban space differently depending on
factors such as socio-economic status, lifestyle, gender, and space of primary identification.
Multiple and diverse versions of suburban homes emerge. Invariably, the novels all prize
some kind of peaceful retreat—a space of reflection, emotional tranquillity, intimacy, or
physical rest. I interrogate how and why fictional narratives condone or condemn particular
strategies of suburban space-making in order to elaborate on wider cultural implications.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) | ||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Suburbs in literature | ||||
Official Date: | September 2012 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Labbe, Jacqueline M., 1965- | ||||
Sponsors: | Warwick Postgraduate Research Scholarship | ||||
Extent: | iv, 325 leaves. | ||||
Language: | eng |
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