World literary studies appears caught between several competing models, each privileging the determining force of a given spatial scale – the global versus the local, national, or regional, - or a specific patterning of space – vertical structure versus horizontal network. This article seeks to test a multiscalar and transregional method of analysis which might place these models in sharper dialogue. It does so by addressing the physiology, a popular quasi-journalistic nineteenth-century genre dedicated to the taxonomic description of mores, customs and social types found in the everyday life of the modern city. Arising in Paris and other metropolises of western Europe, the physiology was soon adapted to the very different circumstances of the Russian capital St. Petersburg, before shifting to the Russian colonial administrative centre of Tiflis (Tbilisi), today the capital of Georgia. This article explores the poetics and cultural politics of the physiology’s adaptation to three distinct urban contexts, in what might be seen as a movement from centre to colonial periphery via the Russian semi-periphery. In doing so it seeks to link genre theory to debates within critical geography on spatial scale, while also entering debates in urban studies and the sociology of culture on metropolitan and peripheral modernization, particularly as it relates to the correlation between the state, the market, and the literary public sphere. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Harry Harootunian on the uneven spatio-temporal rhythms of the urban everyday, the article also addresses the limits of such canonical interventions as Walter Benjamin’s critique of the Parisian flâneur and Jürgen Habermas’s account of the bourgeois public sphere.

This chapter explores urban prose, poetry and painting that moves from sense impressions of city streets to statements about American social and political conditions. A strain of American culture, from Ashcan School painting through James Baldwin’s essays on Harlem to Don DeLillo’s set-piece performative protests, insists that the nation’s politics take shape and moods register on city streets. It argues that certain, primarily literary, forms, through their close attention to, and lucid expression of, the way streets feel offer access to experiences that range from jostling crowds to organized protests to violent confrontations. Where the flâneur pursues urban aesthetics and impressions in the spirit of dilettantism, Henry James restlessly analyses New York’s metropolitan scale; insiders and outsiders probe the tensions that shape ethnic enclaves; and in Tillie Olsen’s strike journalism and E. L. Doctorow’s political fiction of mass protests are at once inspiring and monstrous. Where Doctorow and DeLillo describe postmodern withdrawal from the street as a site of meaning, the chapter ends with its reemergence with Occupy and other recent protest movements.

Emerging in the latter decades of the 18th century, New York periodical literature established and maintained a major relationship with the city and its people over the course of major historical, social, political, and cultural change. During this period, New York was one part of a literary triumvirate with Philadelphia and Boston in which periodical writing flourished. This periodical power soon shifted, however, to New York, with the founding of the New-York Magazine; or, Literary Repository (1790) by brothers Thomas and James Swords. The New–York Magazine preceded one of the most influential periodical publications in the history of New York writing by over a quarter of a century: the Knickerbocker (1833). New York was quickly becoming the centre of the American publishing world and the periodical was at the heart of this literary uprising. But, as this chapter argues, New York periodical literature first demonstrated its influence on New York society decades before in the final years of the 18th century.

Emerging in the latter decades of the 18th century, New York periodical literature established and maintained a major relationship with the city and its people over the course of major historical, social, political, and cultural change. During this period, New York was one part of a literary triumvirate with Philadelphia and Boston in which periodical writing flourished. This periodical power soon shifted, however, to New York, with the founding of the New-York Magazine; or, Literary Repository (1790) by brothers Thomas and James Swords. The New-York Magazine preceded one of the most influential periodical publications in the history of New York writing by over a quarter of a century: the Knickerbocker (1833). New York was quickly becoming the centre of the American publishing world and the periodical was at the heart of this literary uprising. But, as this chapter argues, New York periodical literature first demonstrated its influence on New York society decades before in the final years of the 18th century.

This chapter examines how McCarthy consistently responds to and engages with Romantic ideals. Like W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, McCarthy eludes any neat categorization or restriction to his treatment of preceding styles and genres. Like those “modernists,” McCarthy shares sensibilities that are simultaneously Romantic and anti-Romantic. His sentiments both embrace and challenge the limited sureness of the natural world by erring into sometimes surreal environments; and they revel in the ineffable nature of the uncommon quotidian man. This paradox is possible because McCarthy makes meaning in the interstitial, liminal states of knowledge. The marginalizing of the actual perceived world in favor of the world of representational memory forms the tension that transforms Romantic internalization into modernist memory. His landscapes of isolation act not as faithful descriptions of the “real world,” but a privileging of the perception and memory of that environment. He creates imperfect memories of imperfect worlds. This chapter focuses on Blood Meridian; Or, the Evening Redness in the West, All the Pretty Horses, and The Road as primary examples.

The Romans had a difficult relationship with the kind of luxury and excess that we think of as indicators of moral and social decadence. But in many ways they revelled in such luxury. Readily accepting the financial rewards of empire, they spent huge sums on their own benefits. Whether in the colossal public games in the amphitheatre and the circus, in the opulent imperial bath complexes, or in extravagant private villas, Romans of all social levels delighted in the very best that life was thought to offer. Chapter 1 examines how far the evidence supports this somewhat melodramatic view of Rome by looking at the ways in which luxury spread in the Roman world. It also looks at the ways this growth in luxury compelled the Romans to create new concepts to understand the phenomenon. Luxury was almost never seen as a simple index of increased wealth. Rather, it raised all manner of moral issues among Rome’s ruling classes, many of which long outlived the end of the Roman empire itself.

As a consequence of rapid industrialization and urbanization throughout the nineteenth century, urban cores became dominant in a way they had never been before. By the turn of the century, one in seven people in England and Wales lived in London alone, which housed six million inhabitants; by 1905, Berlin was five times larger than it had been in 1848. The decadent response to this increasingly industrialized, utilitarian, democratized, and urbanized society was one of resistance, a sense of defiance reflected throughout decadent writing. The intense experience of life in the modern city led to the development of new urban sensibilities, notably represented by the flâneur, the flâneuse, and the dandy. In this chapter, the variety of decadent negotiations with the city and urban modernity emerges through an examination of the works of Oscar Wilde, Amy Levy, and Arthur Symons, wherein we observe how each of these three sensibilities supported ambivalent decadent interactions with urban life.