David L. Pike

Afterimages of the Victorian City

As emblematic spaces of social and cultural contamination, the Victorian street and underworld have had remarkable afterlives in twentieth-century reinterpretations of Victorian cityscapes. This article explores what persists in our vision of the nineteenth-century city well over a century after it was, so to speak, first seen, and how what persists impacts on our attempts to reconstruct that act of seeing. In the lived spaces around us there is in fact continuity, in that the city is a palimpsest and patchwork of Victorian and post-Victorian materials. However, to see those spaces as Victorian is in fact to elide a historical process of physical accumulation and syncretism. This article explores spectral ‘afterimages’ of the Victorian street and underground, in a variety of contemporary sources, ranging from Gary Shermans Death Line (1972) and John Mackenzies The Long Good Friday (1980) to Salman Rushdies The Satanic Verses (New York: Picador, 1988), the material culture of steampunk and the Telectros...

The Walt Disney World Underground

This article has grown out of a larger project on representations of subterranean space in the modern city. It explores the meanings of the “utilidors,” the underground infrastructure of the Magic Kingdom, within the broader experience of the space of Walt Disney World. It relates this experience to a particular mode of representing the modern city as divided between its respectable, aboveground spaces and its hidden, underground spaces. The author concludes by suggesting some of the insights the power of Disney’s spatial divisions can provide in thinking about current images of the city as simultaneously a site of “Disneyfication” (e.g., the new Times Square) and as a place of ruin, crime, and decay.

London on Film and Underground

Abstract This paper argues that the symbolic meaning of the London Underground, more than those of other metropolitan subway systems, perfectly matches the primary meaning that subways possess as a cultural, and, especially, a cinematic space. In general, different subterranean spaces carry associations with different aspects of the complex attributes of the underground. The subway embodies its quotidian qualities; it is associated with work, daily routine, and the average citizen. This paper studies ways in which the Underground as cinematic setting negotiates the material and cultural attributes of the space, beginning with the intersection of modernity, technology and everyday life in films of the 1920s and 1930s. It then addresses conflicts within this model that emerge in science fiction, horror and fantasy of the 1960s and 1970s. The paper concludes by considering the relationship of the underground railway with the other urban subterranean space primarily featured in film, the sewer, and hypothesizes that the recent appearance, basically for the first time, of the London sewers on screen marks a shift in the cultural identity of underground space within the city.

'Down by the Dark Arches': A Cultural History of the Adelphi

Abstract The Adelphi, which was built in 1768 and only demolished in the 1930s, was a highly symbolic site in Londons urban landscape. Situated between the City and Westminster, and built on arches over the Thames, it was associated both with Londons underworld and its respectable population and occupied an equivocal place in contemporary imagination. This paper explores the history of construction as well as the topographical metaphors associated with the Adelphi. Its role as a cultural icon of a vertically stratified city is explored through the works of writers such as Dickens and artists such as Gericault Popular culture also celebrated the Adelphis subterranean status. In popular theatre and literature as in illustration, the Adelphi epitomised the genre of low life and urban mystery. Finally, the way in which the Adelphi symbolised a set of underground spaces is explored against the background of its demolition.

Cold War Reduction: The Principle of the Swiss Bunker Fantasy

The bunkerization of Europe is a Cold War story that has continued to resonate into the 21st century through foreign policy, the built environment, and cultural traces both material and imaginary. This essay explores the physical, ideological, and cultural bunkerization of Switzerland, one of the most heavily fortified countries in the world, through its military and civil defense history, the spatial manifestations of that history, and the cultural responses to these manifestations during and after the Cold War. The essay compares the unusually democratic process of the Swiss civil defense infrastructure and its ramifications for thinking about the spatial legacy of the Cold War with the bunker fantasy in the United States and the rest of Europe.

Commuting to Another World: Spaces of Transport and Transport Maps in Urban Fantasy

In fantasy and science fiction more than any other genres of fiction, mapping is an essential supplement, and often a precursor, to the standard creative process of character development and plotting. This chapter examines a particular kind of mapping, the particular kinds of spaces it maps, and the peculiar imaginary surrounding it: the urban transport system and its relationship to the contemporary sub-genre of urban fantasy with which it has emerged. The chapter considers a range of texts by writers including China Mieville, Neil Gaiman, Laurence Leonard, Michael de Larrabeiti, Neal Shusterman, Suzanne Collins, and Lauren Beukes. It concludes with a brief analysis of Michael Moorcock’s Mother London (1988) and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006).

Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism

ment and the continuing competition for resources to protect children and animals, from the local to the federal levels. In her discussion of animals and children, Pearson writes more generally about the children protected by such organizations than the animals. While differentiating among different types of animals on which protection agencies focused (namely, pets, work animals, and livestock), the children discussed are a largely homogenous group. Pearson does mention instruction in animal welfare for African Americans and Native Americans, but such children never explicitly appear as protected children in this narrative. This is, undoubtedly, because the child welfare organizations of the Gilded Age prioritized white children in their own attention to what populations concerned them. Pearson discusses the figure of the slave quite extensively, significant for the slave’s supposed childlike dependency and because, as Pearson notes, “[i]n political and reformist discourse, animals served figuratively, like slaves, as among the paradigmatic dependent beings” (109). Unlike animals, however, enslaved or formerly enslaved people never make it past this figurative position, remaining only in the theoretical position of the sufferer but never in Pearson’s examples of protected children. This focus on white children and the marginalization of nonwhite children is not unusual for much work in the fields of nineteenth-century studies, childhood studies, or animal studies. While the topic of protecting nonwhite children may be beyond the purview of Pearson’s study, this gap in the text illustrates the further work there is to be done, particularly on the relationship between nonwhite children and animals. Noting the different class, gender, and racial disparities that have historically accompanied ideas about who has the ability to suffer and the racial implications of associations between humanity and humaneness, Pearson’s text does suggest some possibilities for further research. Overall, Pearson’s book is an exciting interdisciplinary endeavor, bringing childhood studies and animal studies into conversation within the context of nineteenthcentury American studies. It is well positioned to become a foundational text for future work on children and animals.

Headlong into futurity

‘So, with a kind of madness upon me, I flung myself into futurity.’ These are the words with which H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller powers his machine into high gear, as a result of which he will soon find himself more than 800,000 years removed into ‘futurity,’ a sufficient distance from which to speculate on the long-term effects of the profound changes occurring back in England in 1895. With this abrupt gesture, Wells also pretty much invented speculative fiction, the literary genre which self-consciously addresses the present by flinging the technology of today into the futurity of an imagined tomorrow. This genre constitutes something of a secret sharer to the conventional history of technology, which operates primarily by tracing genealogies of the technology of today into the lived past of the last few centuries. To consider the relationship between literature (or art or culture) and the history of technology is to consider the relationship between speculating about the future and studying the past, between what the philosopher Ernst Bloch termed the ‘anticipatory consciousness’ of cultural production and what historians can verify or at least hypothesize about what actually happened in the past. This distinction manifests itself in many ways in the literature, art and culture of technology, as is evident in the range of topics and approaches in the three full-length essays and two briefer case studies on the topic that share the current issue of History and Technology with this introduction. This distinction between the study of the literature of technology and the historiography of technology should be regarded less as a stark divide than a question of perspective, which is why elements of the approaches taken by the essays here overlap with and complement those of the history of technology more strictly speaking. Nevertheless, observing where they separate from and run counter to the conventional methodologies of history and how those methodologies are changed when incorporated into the discipline of literary studies will also, hopefully, be instructive regarding what both fields can tell us about their shared object of study, what we can term in the broadest sense the ‘technological imaginary’: the range of ways in which technology is and has been conceptualized and represented. In this introduction, I discuss some key sites of overlap and divergence and suggest some of their implications both for the study of the literature, art and culture of technology and for the history of technology.

Bernard Silvestris’ descent into the classics: TheCommentum super sex libros Aeneidos

What did it mean to be a Christian teacher of pagan literature in 12th-century Europe? Bernard Silvestris addresses this question in the margins of his allegoricalCommentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid. In the manifest reading of what he calls theintegumentum of theAeneid, Bernard tells the journey of the sould from its imprisonment in the body to its return to God, with its education in thetrivium andquadrivium beginning with thedescensus ad inferos of book 6. At the same time, however, Bernard also introduces a narrative allegory of teaching. The commentarys teacher is shown to labor under both the inability to accede to the authority of the inspired Christian exegete and the unwillingness to forego the concomitant access to prophetic truth.