Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf
ISBN: 9781846315978
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Liverpool University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Language & Literature;

The purpose of this book is to explore the ways in which the London Underground/ Tube was 'mapped' by a number of writers from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf. From late Victorian London to the end of the World War II, 'underground writing' created an imaginative world beneath the streets of London. The real subterranean railway was therefore re-enacted in number of ways in writing, including as Dantean Underworld or hell, as gateway to a utopian future, as psychological looking- glass or as place of safety and security. The book is a chronological study from the opening of the first underground in the 1860s to its role in WW2. Each chapter explores perspectives on the underground in a number of writers, starting with George Gissing in the 1880s, moving through the work of H. G. Wells and into the writing of the 1920s & 1930s including Virginia Woolf and George Orwell. It concludes with its portrayal in the fiction, poetry and art (including Henry Moore) of WW2. The approach takes a broadly cultura