A Street-Level View of the World-City: John Lanchester’s London in Capital (2012)
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 proper...
Zapisane w:
| Wydane w: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| 1. autor: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Język: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2023
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| Hasła przedmiotowe: | |
| Dostęp online: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Streszczenie: | 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 foregrounds houses as central characters, thus 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), in other words, the suburbanisation of the world-city. |
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