Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
It is somehow appropriate that this book should close with a discussion of the vampire, for its shadowy, vaporous and shifting presence draws together and metaphorises many of the issues which have been significant throughout it. If my initial premise has been to explore the nature of identity for the individual within nineteenth-century modernity through its representation in a variety of different cultural texts and intertexts, what then can be said about the state of identity in the nineteenth century? As should be clear by now, identity, certainly in terms of its representation in the works scrutinized here, can be seen to be in a state of flux, crisis and transition in all sorts of different configurations. Marx and Engels's claim that modernity for the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie consists of constant and destabilizing revolution and reinvention – encapsulated in the all too familiar phrase ‘[a]ll that is solid melts into air’ so usefully interrogated by Marshall Berman – goes some way to explain why identity should have such unstable qualities during the period. The reasons for this dislocation, subsumed within the broad spectrum of analysis offered in the Communist Manifesto, are manifold.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.