Metropolis On The Styx

In Metropolis on the Styx,David L. Pike considers how underground spaces and their many myths have organized ways of seeing, thinking about, and living in the modern city. Expanding on the cultural history of underground construction in his acclaimed previous book, Subterranean Cities, Pike details the emergence of a vertical city in the imagination of nineteenth-century Paris and London, a city overseen by hosts of devils and undermined by subterranean villains, a city whose ground level was replete with passages between above and below. Metropolis on the Styx brings together a rich variety of visual and written sources ranging from pulp mysteries and movie serials to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the novels of Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Elinor Glyn to the broadsheets and ephemera of everyday urban life. From these materials, Pike conjures a working theory of modern underground space that explains why our notions about urban environments remain essentially nineteenth-century in character, even though cities themselves have since changed almost beyond recognition.Highly original in subject matter, methodology, and conclusions, Metropolis on the Styx synthesizes a number of critical approaches, periods of study, and disciplines in the analysis of a single category of space—the underground. Pike studies the built environments and the textual and visual ephemera (including little-known or unknown archival material) of Paris, London, and other cities in conjunction with canonical modern literature and art. This book integrates a rich visual component—photographs, movie stills, prints, engravings, paintings, cartoons, maps, and drawings of actual and imagined subterranean spaces—into the fabric of the argument.

A history of New York subway passengers as they navigated the system's constraints while striving for individuality, or at least a smooth ride. When the subway first opened with much fanfare on October 27, 1904, New York became a city of underground passengers almost overnight. In this book, Stefan Höhne examines how the experiences of subway passengers in New York City were intertwined with cultural changes in urban mass society throughout the twentieth century. Höhne argues that underground transportation--which early passengers found both exhilarating and distressing--changed perceptions, interactions, and the organization of everyday life.

"The descent to the underworld is one of our oldest stories. It recurs in the most influential texts of early European literature - the Odyssey , the Aeneid , the Inferno - and no less so in the classics of children's literature. Vaclavik shows that retellings for young readers certainly shift emphases, working the legend through transformations of all kinds, but also that much of the traditional katabasis story remains firmly in place. The critical study of children's literature remains a relatively new field, in which such fundamental presences have gone largely unnoticed. As Vaclavik demonstrates, many novels which remain lively and resonant for adult readers richly repay critical attention. And if the incomparable explorer's tales of Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, Hector Malot and even Lewis Carroll have proved durable beyond all expectations, one reason may be that there is no lure like that of the underworld, and none harder to escape. Kiera Vaclavik is Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London."

Monster studies, dystopian literature and film studies have become central to research on the now-proliferating works that give voice to culture-specific anxieties. This new development in scholarship reinforces the notion that the genres of fantasy and science fiction call for interpretations that see their spaces of imagination as reflections of reality, not as spaces invented merely to escape the real world. In this vein, Displacing the Anxieties of Our World discusses fictive spaces of literature, film, and video gaming. The eleven essays that follow the Introduction are grouped into four parts: I. “Imagined Journeys through History, Gaming and Travel”; II. “Political Anxieties and Fear of Dominance”; III. “The Space of Fantastic Science and Scholarship”; and IV. “Spaces Natural and Spaces Artificial”. The studies produce a dialogue among disciplinary fields that bridges the imagined space between sixteenth-century utopia and twenty-first century dystopia with analyses penetrating fictitious spaces beyond utopian and dystopian spheres. This volume argues, consequently, that the space of imagination that conjures up versions of the world's frustrations also offers a virtual battleground – and the possibility of triumph coming from a valuable gain of cognizance, once we perceive the correspondence between spaces of the fantastic and those of the mundane.

In recent decades, there has been a growing recognition of the significance of the supernatural in a Victorian context. Studies of nineteenth-century spiritualism, occultism, magic, and folklore have highlighted that Victorian England was ridden with spectres and learned magicians. Despite this growing body of scholarship, little historiographical work has addressed the Devil. This book demonstrates the significance of the Devil in a Victorian context, emphasising his pervasiveness and diversity. Drawing on a rich array of primary material, including theological and folkloric works, fiction, newspapers and periodicals, and broadsides and other ephemera, it uses the diabolic to explore the Victorians' complex and ambivalent relationship with the supernatural. Both the Devil and hell were theologically contested during the nineteenth century, with an increasing number of both clergymen and laypeople being discomfited by the thought of eternal hellfire. Nevertheless, the Devil continued to play a role in the majority of English denominations, as well as in folklore, spiritualism, occultism, popular culture, literature, and theatre. The Devil and the Victorians will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth-century English cultural and religious history, as well as the darker side of the supernatural.

In January 2012, shooting was set to begin in Sydney, Australia, on the Hollywood-backed production of Milton’s Paradise Lost, with Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper cast as Satan. Yet just two weeks before the start of production, Legendary Pictures delayed the project, reportedly due to budgetary concerns, and soon the company had suspended the film indefinitely. Milton scholar Eric C. Brown, who was then serving as a script consultant for the studio, sees his experience with that project as part of a long and perplexing story of Milton on film. Indeed, as Brown details in this comprehensive study, Milton’s place in the popular imagination—and his extensive influence upon the cinema, in particular—has been both pervasive and persistent.

Corruption Plots illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from cities around the world, Malini Ranganathan, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi pay close attention to the racial, caste, class, and gender locations of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption. Corruption Plots demonstrates how corruption talk is leveraged to make sense of unequal spatial change and used opportunistically by those who are themselves implicated in wrongdoing. Offering a wide-ranging analysis of urban worlds, the authors reveal the ethical, spatial, and political stakes of storytelling and how vital it is to examine the corruption plot in all its contradictions.

This book studies the role of subterranean spaces in literary works about Mexico City. It analyzes how underground spaces such as the subway, the sewage system, tunnels, crypts, and the subsoil itself relate to the whole of the city in a body of works published after 1985, the year of the deadliest earthquake in the capital’s history. The texts belong to the most important genres in urban literature (the novel, the short story, and the crónica) and demonstrate the crucial role played by the underground in contemporary imaginings of the megalopolis, as it condenses and confronts the tensions that run through them. This central idea is developed through four analytical chapters focusing on the political, ecological, historical, and aesthetic dimension of subterranean imaginaries.