Following on from Julian Wolfrey's successful Writing London (1998), this second volume extends Wolfrey's original argument that a new urban sensibility in the nineteenth century had been developed which established new ways of writing about and responding to the city. Writing London - Volume 2 explores through a range of readings of twentieth-century films and texts the complex relationship between the experience of the city, the pleasures of the urban text and the solitary nature of these pleasures. The book has a broad focus, in part dictated not only by the transformation of literary production in the twentieth-century, but also by the need to respond to the changes in both urban representation and London itself. Writers discussed include Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Maureen Duffy, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock. The volume covers texts from the late nineteenth-century to the end of the twentieth, in a critical reading that incorporates the theoretical insights of Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and Jacques Derrida.

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: London Disfigured PART I: STAGES Staging the City: London at the Fin de Siècle & Crises of Representation PART II: CRISES 'That particular psychic London': The Uncanny Example of Elizabeth Bowen The Insatiable Crisis of Memory: Maureen Duffy's Capital PART III: PUNCTUATIONS PART IV: INTERVENTIONS Peter Ackroyd and the 'endless variety' of the 'eternal city': Receiving 'London's haunted past' Sites of Resistance, Sites of Memory: Iain Sinclair's 'delirious fictions' of London PART V: PUNCTUATIONS PART VI: CONSTELLATIONS A Coincidence of Disparate Incidents: London Undone or, Seven Artists in Search of the City Index