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Povertyopolis: Beyond the East-West Binary in the Late-Nineteenth-Century London Literary Imagination
The London Journal ( IF 0.429 ) Pub Date : 2020-12-20 , DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2020.1854499
Sarah Wise 1
Affiliation  

By siting social problems in the eastern half of the capital city, many writers (both fiction writers and those who purported to be reporting fact) in the final years of the nineteenth century collectively and separately assisted in the emergence of an imaginary London cityscape whose east-west axis (placing poverty physically apart from wealth) served to diminish the true nature of these problems. This crude binary of east versus west failed to represent the systemic, pervasive, pan-London (and in fact, pan-global) ill-effects of advanced capitalism. The east-west polarity acted to confuse and blur the full effects and meanings of how the unregulated labour and housing markets impacted on working-class Londoners wherever they lived in the city. It falsified actual, lived experience and needed to be jettisoned so that a more complex and meaningful picture of metropolitan life could emerge. The true process of ‘immiseration’ should no longer, these writers believed, be occluded by this mythopoeic East — which had become a lazy shorthand for a complex set of problems. In this article, I seek to return to the record the opposition to the east-west binary that, as PJ Keating observed,11 P.J. Keating, ‘Fact and Fiction in the East End’, in M. Wolff and H. J. Dyos (eds.), The Victorian City: Images and Realities, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1973), 585. had emerged in the early 1880s. This opposition was presented by fiction writers including George Gissing, Margaret Harkness and Richard Whiteing; philanthropist and campaigner for working-class girls Maude Stanley; and social investigators Robert Valpy and Arthur Sherwell. Each argued against the polarised vision of London’s socio-economic topography offered by most popular novelists and journalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by which the poor East was presented in contrast to the wealthy West.



中文翻译:

贫困城:超越 19 世纪后期伦敦文学想象中的东西二元

通过将社会问题定位在首都东半部,许多作家(包括小说作家和声称报道事实的人)在 19 世纪的最后几年集体和分别地协助了想象中的伦敦城市景观的出现,其东-西轴(将贫困与财富分开)有助于减少这些问题的真正性质。这种东西方的粗略二元论未能代表先进资本主义的系统性、普遍性、泛伦敦(实际上是泛全球)的不良影响。东西方的极性混淆和模糊了不受监管的劳动力和住房市场如何影响伦敦工人阶级的全部影响和意义。它伪造了实际,生活经验,需要被抛弃,以便出现更复杂和更有意义的大都市生活图景。这些作家认为,真正的“贫困化”过程不应再被这种神话般的东方所遮蔽——东方已经成为一系列复杂问题的懒惰速记。在这篇文章中,我试图重新记录对东西二进制的反对,正如 PJ Keating 所观察到的那样,11 PJ Keating,“东区的事实与虚构”,M. Wolff 和 HJ Dyos(编辑),维多利亚城:图像与现实,第一卷。1 (London: Routledge, 1973), 585. 出现在 1880 年代初期。这种反对是由乔治·吉辛、玛格丽特·哈克尼斯和理查德·怀廷等小说作家提出的。慈善家和工人阶级女孩的活动家 Maude Stanley;以及社会调查员罗伯特·瓦尔比和亚瑟·舍维尔。每个人都反对 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初最受欢迎的小说家和记者提供的伦敦社会经济地形的两极分化愿景,其中贫穷的东方与富裕的西方形成鲜明对比。

更新日期:2020-12-20
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