While the city has featured most prominently in literary works following the emergence of the modern nation-state, alongside the rise of print capitalism and the novel form, its presence in literary and artistic productions goes further back in time. The methods of treatment and significance accorded to it have changed in every era, contingent upon social, political, and cultural developments, and here's looking at some of the trends that have prevailed.
The City and Classical Literature
The oldest association of the 'city' space with the arts is traceable back to ancient Greece. Records of ancient Greek culture mention the 'polis' translating to the democratic city-state - a civic-political administrative unit and predecessor to the modern city. The polis also had a pivotal role in the sphere of Greek literature. The Dionysia festival, in honour of the god of wine, fertility, and theatre, Dionysus, featured performances of tragic and comic plays. An archon would be elected to curate the City Dionysia or the urban festival. Famous playwrights, including Aeschylus and Euripides had their plays performed at the festival. The mention of one's own city, like that of Athens in Aeschylus's Eumenides would be a matter of excitement for the audience. Since the festival was competitive, it also proved to be a matter of civic pride.
However, with the passage of time, social formations changed, and the significance of the city dwindled in literary works during the medieval period. Democratic or oligarchic systems were replaced by feudalism and the aristocracy. This is not to say that the socio-economic or political function of the city diminished. In fact, with the passage of time, the city emerged as an important site of commerce and a respite from communal and religious obligations of the rural sphere. Interestingly, most academic works that have examined the relationship between the city and literature too, largely tend to focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. This is understandable, given that even during the early modern period, only one-tenth of Europe's total population inhabited cities. Despite this, as centers of economic activity and guilds, and having an active political community, European cities such as Berlin and Madrid were some of the first to emerge as administrative centres. In fact, even in India, the Mughal sultanate established its various administrative strongholds in places that were trade and cultural centres.
Transition to Early Modernity
The city began to really gain prominence in the nation-building trajectory, with the rise of mercantile capitalism and dwindling of feudalism. Communitarian social organisation, characterizing medieval society, was replaced by a newfound sense of individualism. Some of the most important early modern playwrights such as Shakespeare set many of his plays either in court or against a pastoral backdrop. His view of the city, as mouthed by Prospero in Act 4, Scene 1 of The Tempest, isn't entirely favorable. He viewed the modern city as a space of chaos and disorder. In fact, it was quite common in Shakespearean plays to use the trope of exile and pastoral settings as a respite even from the vices of courtly life. Ben Johnson, contrastingly, paved the way for the genre of the 'city comedy', honed by the likes of Thomas Middleton and John Webster. Johnson's Every Man In His Humour, Middleton's Anything For A Quiet Life are some of the examples of this genre. With much of Church-owned property shifting to private ownership and expansion in overseas trade, this genre center-staged London in its exploration of human vices, by means of caustic commentary and bawdy humour.
Soon enough, the urban space didn't merely remain restricted to the supposedly 'lower' genre of comedy. George Lillo's 1731 tragedy, The London Merchant, was hailed as the first tragic work to revolve around a middle class protagonist, featuring working class characters. It subverted earlier tragic suppositions of 'heroism' and 'valour'. Most interestingly, the story unfolded in the streets and whore-houses of London, instead of in court or pastoral settings. The rise of the middle class, as well as a newly defined working class resulted in a visible shift in representation in literature. As literary works started becoming more about the 'common man' than kings and noblemen, the setting automatically shifted to cities. Additionally, the 18th century signalled the onset of the European industrial revolution, alongside a strong mercantile impetus. This resulted in large-scale migration from smaller towns and villages to the cities, and thus, a growing working class presence.
The Rise of the Novel and the Nation-State
It is against this context that we see the emergence of the modern nation-state, print capitalism, and the genre of the novel. As a truly cosmopolitan form of narrative representation, the novel managed to encompass various demographic sections and had an urban focus. Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, for instance, narrates a person's experience of the bubonic plague in London, wherein the city becomes a signifier of calamity and its people's suffering. His picaresque story Moll Flanders too, follows an episodic structure across the newly constructed urban spaces in colonial United States to London to Lancashire county and then back to the United States. The city, in fact, becomes emblematic of mobility and adventure in much of the picaresque genre, which includes Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and then, about a century later, Mark Twain's adventure stories Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In the case of Twain's works, set in the United States, we see the city (in free states primarily) in context of its emergence and evolution as a cosmopolitan space, especially in juxtaposition to the rural plantation-based states with greater social rigidity.
However, the 19th century most significantly witnessed the works of Charles Dickens, who imbued his cities with a life of their own. The finest example of this would have to be A Tale of Two Cities, wherein he center-stages London and Paris, making his characters and their narratives revolve around these spaces, while the French Revolution unfolds. Dickens of course, built most of his narratives in and around the city of London. His social realist style was aimed at laying bare the realities of class-segregated Victorian English society
London, as the epicenter of both Empire and industrial England, was of course where much of his narrative action unfolded. And so, as we go from Great Expectations to Bleak House to David Copperfield, we are offered glimpses of Westminster Abbey and Newgate Prison, and Chelsea and Oxford Street, and St Paul's Cathedral and Buckingham Street and Camden Town. This proved to be a defining literary experience, especially for non-native English speakers like myself, in terms of how we imagined the designated west. Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent too narrativized the disorienting experience of life in turn-of-century London. Interestingly, Rudyard Kipling, who was also writing during this turn of the century, turned much of his focus to the Empire. His famous poem Song of the Cities, in fact, was a tribute to the cities of colonial Britain, including his hometown of Bombay. Even his 1901 novel Kim, takes us through parts of colonial Lucknow and Lahore, which were cosmopolitan urban centres in British India.
The Metropolis in Modernist Imagination
By the mid-20th century, literary and cultural trends underwent a seismic shift, with the advent of Modernism in conjunction with WWI. The evolution of the modern nation-state had come to fruition and the city was at the heart of it. Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire introduced in their works, the figure of the flâneur, a wanderer, understanding, participating in, and relaying the experiences of the modern metropolis, while maintaining a critical distance. George Simmel went on to explain this as a function of "the complexities of modern city life" which began to bridge class divides and forge new social bonds. And then, in Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, we encounter the figure of the flâneuse, in the form of Clarissa Dalloway, as she walks around post-war London, alongside the shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Smith. Both characters inhabit different ranks in social stratification, and we see how hugely different their experiences of the city are, by extension of this, but also similar, in terms of their psychological make-up.
James Joyce's Dubliners, continues to be one of the most remarkable literary works anthologizing modern city life, its peculiarities, and the dwindling of its many social institutions. In fact, the alienated subject of modernist fiction is very much a product of the modern city. It is vast, and despite offering a scope for anonymity, it's often chaotic and isolating. Charles Baudelaire's flaneur also was a product of the Parisian metropolis, in the age of high capitalism. A figure exploring the city's arcades and alleyways, in search of corners to escape the vagaries of urban living in the newly emergent, industrial modern nation-state.
Postcolonial Memory and Spatial Significance
By the mid-20th century, the political geography and organisation of the world was to change considerably. Movements for decolonisation were underway in countries ranging from Kenya in Africa, to Jamaica in the Caribbean, to of course, India. Thereafter, the entire postcolonial literary canon was largely defined by the supplementary literature of remorse and revenge, recalling the colonial experience, its trauma, and resistance to it. The city then emerged as a site of 'remembering', to refer to Homi Bhabha, 'of a dismembered past'. The city, like Lahore in Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice Candy Man, or Calcutta in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, bears witness to this experience. Especially in the Indian context, it also becomes a part of the partition violence and dismemberment, as riots unfolded, and its people are assaulted and brutalized. V.V. Ganeshananthan's Love Marriage, is another interesting example of the city as a spatial signifier of postcolonial violence and longing, in context of civilian and ethnic strife, as was the case in her native Sri Lanka.
Thus, one can infer that with the evolution of time and social formations, and literature's reflections upon the same, literary works have also represented the ways in which these changes have contributed to the structuring of cities, acting on them, their inhabitants, and social institutions.
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