Concept of City in Modernist Novels
The city is a key motif in modernist literature. Numerous novels and poems reflect the ways in which cities generate states of shock, exhilaration, alienation, anonymity, confusion or thrill. The idea of the isolated, questioning self belongs to the modern urban centre, not the provincial margins, a subject famously explored by the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire celebrated the flΓ’neur, a leisured wanderer who was able inconspicuously to observe the vivid modern city.
Impossible to fix or transfer with traditional forms, the modern city seemed to demand a revolution in artistic sensibility and aesthetic expression. Along the dimension of space, we might mention the increasingly complex interaction that results from the apposition of different communities, whether class, ethnic, or religious-based, whose paths intersect onto the crowded city streets. And the changing subdivisons and boundaries of the modern city, as new populations are brought within its limits, are transformed so rapidly.
The relationship of city to countryside is not only a spatial relationship but even more one through time: the return to the country by the writer is also a journey back to the past; Culture and Nature seem to belong to different time-scales rather than to co-exist in the same world. And yet they are linked in space by the technological innovations: the railways, the Post Office and the telegraph wires, the cinema and photography that transform the rhythms of daily life and the nature of social interaction. Technological innovations compress space and time. They serve as sources of metaphor and metonymy to represent the subjective experience of modernity.
