THE LITERARY AND CULTURAL SPACES OF RESTORATION LONDON. This item is unavailable.THE LITERARY AND CULTURAL SPACES OF RESTORATION LONDON

In September 1666 the Great Fire destroyed four-fifths of the ancient City of London within three days. All that had been familiar, settled, known, was suddenly and entirely swept away. Londoners faced an emptiness that was not only physical but also historical, social, financial and conceptual. The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London is the first study to situate the literature of Restoration and early Augustan England within the historical and cultural contexts of the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. Cynthia Wall relates the marked topographical specificity of plays, poems and novels to a wider cultural network of responses to changing perceptions of urban space, and she shows how the literatures of the period - along with the surveying, mapping, rebuilding and official redescribing of the city - attempt to reinvest the city with comprehensible meaning and create new spaces for new genres.

"Wall approaches her subject with a clear purpose and she writes with a bewitchingly lucid prose. Her argument is penetrating, well-articulated, and immensely convincing. Wall cogently illuminates an extensive cultural reorganization of city-space. The Literacy and Cultural Spaces of London marks a significant contribution to both scholarship and methodology, redefining the very cultural space of contemporary criticism." Virginia Quarterly Review

"...a rich and subtle narrative...utterly convincing..." Studies in English Literature

"Cynthia Wall has provided a fuller account of the literary and cultural importance of the fire and its aftermath...ambitious and impressive." Modern Philology