A Street-Level View of the World-City: John Lanchester’s London in Capital (2012) - Archive ouverte HAL
Article Dans Une Revue Études britanniques contemporaines - Revue de la Société dʼétudes anglaises contemporaines Année : 2023

A Street-Level View of the World-City: John Lanchester’s London in Capital (2012)

Écrire la ville-monde au prisme d'une rue : le Londres de John Lanchester dans Capital (2012)

Résumé

In his choral novel Capital (2012), John Lanchester charts the intersecting trajectories of the residents of Pepys Road, an ordinary-looking street of South London, even as the 2008 financial crisis hits. More than the spectacular crumbling of global finance, this realist novel focuses on the property boom which heralded it. This paper contends that this street-level view of one of the centres of the world-system, which contrasts with dystopian, gothic and apocalyptic literary imaginations of London, enables the author to encode the most insidious effects of global capitalism on urban life, and the ways in which real estate speculation fundamentally disrupts the social fabric of the city. This downscaled narrative of contemporary London, which turns houses into central characters, does not emphasise the collective ‘production of locality’ (Appadurai) but the divorce of space from affect and the disappearance of the neighbourhood as a common space, thus suggesting the splintering of London into ‘fortified fragments’ (Harvey).

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hal-04708160 , version 1 (25-09-2024)

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Marianne Hillion. A Street-Level View of the World-City: John Lanchester’s London in Capital (2012). Études britanniques contemporaines - Revue de la Société dʼétudes anglaises contemporaines, 2023, 64, ⟨10.4000/ebc.13566⟩. ⟨hal-04708160⟩
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