English 355: British Fiction Since 1900

Mapping London Novels: Literary Allusions locates passages from a diverse array of London fictional works on the city map.  Whether a reader hopes to trace Clarissa Dalloway’s walk to buy flowers for her party, to find where the anarchists set off a bomb that explodes time itself in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, or simply wants to see how many different writers have remarked on Regent’s Park, the project reveals a literary London that shimmers on the surface of actual London.  As students read more contemporary works, the neighborhoods marked by pins and passages expanded out of Westminster all the way to Zadie Smith’s Willesden, in NW.  In creating the map, students learned the resonances of London locales, marked the shifting characters of its neighborhoods, and visualized fictional worlds as they overlayed the real one.  This course was taught by Dean Suzanne Keen during Fall 2013.