The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space

Nicholas Birns

This book examines literary representations of hyperlocal spaces that subvert the idea of grounded and organic spatial identities. Figures such as the pond, the scientific particle, and Wedgwood creamware often go unnoticed, but they exemplify important shifts in culture and aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space argues that these objects, as well as locations such as alcoves in remote shires, city inns, and mountain retreats, were portrayed by writers in the late eighteenth and early-to-mid nineteenth centuries as gambits that challenged cultural hegemonies. It shows that the hyperlocal space or object, though particular, reaches beyond itself, affording an elasticity that can allow those things that seem beneath notice to reveal broader cultural significance.

Lexington Books

Pages: 250 • Trim: 6½ x 9½

978-1-4985-9952-8 • Hardback • August 2019 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-9953-5 • eBook • August 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Modern / 18th Century, Drama / General, Literary Criticism / Modern / 19th Century, Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / Nature, Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / Religion

The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space

Hardback

eBook

Summary

This book examines literary representations of hyperlocal spaces that subvert the idea of grounded and organic spatial identities. Figures such as the pond, the scientific particle, and Wedgwood creamware often go unnoticed, but they exemplify important shifts in culture and aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space argues that these objects, as well as locations such as alcoves in remote shires, city inns, and mountain retreats, were portrayed by writers in the late eighteenth and early-to-mid nineteenth centuries as gambits that challenged cultural hegemonies. It shows that the hyperlocal space or object, though particular, reaches beyond itself, affording an elasticity that can allow those things that seem beneath notice to reveal broader cultural significance.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 250 • Trim: 6½ x 9½

978-1-4985-9952-8 • Hardback • August 2019 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-9953-5 • eBook • August 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Modern / 18th Century, Drama / General, Literary Criticism / Modern / 19th Century, Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / Nature, Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / Religion

Author

Nicholas Birns teaches literature at the School of Professional Studies, New York University.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Chapter One. Introducing the Hyperlocal

Chapter Two. Societies Royal and Representative: The Scientific Hyperlocal

Chapter Three. The Pond: Emblem of the Hyperlocal

Chapter Four. Negative Adjacency: The Aesthetic Hyperlocal

Chapter Five. To Earth Come Down: The Methodist Hyperlocal

Chapter Six. The Pit and Boxes: The Theatrical Hyperlocal

Chapter Seven. A Glass Reversed: The Epidemiological Hyperlocal

Chapter Eight. Lakes, Shores, and Mountain Crags: The Romantic Hyperlocal

Chapter Nine. Ravens in Shy Neighborhoods: The Convivial Hyperlocal

Chapter Ten. From Monadnock to Jungheera: The Transcendental Hyperlocal

Conclusion: The Hyperlocal and Modernity

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Reviews

Nicholas Birns' latest volume is a marvelously inventive reflection on the 'hyperlocal,' the extensive concept of a place that is at once highly particular and yet massively saturated by everything that exceeds what we often too quickly take to be the parochialism of the local. With a variety of sweeping readings, Birns' book is a welcome contribution to the aesthetics and politics of placement and displacement, knowing and unknowing.
— Jacques Khalip, Brown University

In this extraordinary new study, Birns begins from a level of experience and representation that frequently goes unnoticed, and makes it into an occasion for the most unexpected and wide-ranging illuminations. This book’s ambitious temporal, spatial, and generic scope—from Milton to Thoreau, from the Home Counties to Kolkata, from the U.S. Constitution to Wedgwood pottery—is fitting, however, because the hyperlocal itself proves to be simultaneously elastic and incisive, capacious and concentrated. As Birns convincingly demonstrates through a series of inventive, erudite thematic interventions, the hyperlocal is an essential addition to the cache of theoretical concepts we need to make critical sense of our past, present, and increasingly imperiled future.
— Evan Gottlieb, Associate Professor of English, Oregon State University; author of Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750-1830

The Hyperlocal offers a suggestive conceit for rethinking the ideological mystification of imperial spaces and a bevy of perspicuous and compelling observations on the phenomenology of space.

— Eighteenth-Century Fiction

The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space

Nicholas Birns

The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space

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