London Underground
A Cultural Geography
Distributed for Liverpool University Press
188 pages
|
6 x 9
|
© 2013
In London Underground, David Ashford sets out to chart one of the strangest—as well as most familiar—spaces in London: its famed underground rail system. Providing an account of the evolution of this archetypal modern environment, he sees the underground as the first space to complete the slow process of our estrangement from natural landscape. For Ashford, it is, as Marc Augé has called it, a nonplace, a way to traverse an invisible landscape through the medium of signs and maps. Surveying an impressive diversity of materials, from the Victorian triple-decker novel to modernist art, pop music, and graffiti, Ashford combines cultural history with spatial theory to tell a story of how people have attempted to make a home in the sometimes bizarre spaces of the modern world.
Michael Saler, University of California, Davis
“A brilliant work of cultural history, full of original insights conveyed with clarity and gusto.”
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Convention
List of Illustrations
Notes on Convention
List of Illustrations
The Book of the Machine: A User’s Guide
1. Psychopathology of Modern Space: The Underground Railways of the Inner Circle in the Victorian Imagination
2. The Lord of the Dynamos: The American Invasion of the Tube-Network in Theodore Dreiser’s The Stoic (1947)
3. Blueprints for Babylon: Modernist Mapping of the London Underground
4. Making a Home in Modernity: The Conceptual History of Metroland
5. Christmas in Hell: Tube-Shelter Children in Images by Bill Brandt and Henry Moore
6. Insurrection in Alphabet-City: Counterculture in the London Underground
7. The Ghost in the Machine: Psychogeography in the London Underground
Index
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