Results by title

5 books match the query 'Architecture and literature'

cover of Architecture and Modern Literature

Architecture and Modern Literature

David Spurr

University of Michigan Press, 2012

Architecture and Modern Literature explores the representation and interpretation of architectural space in modern literature from the early nineteenth century to the present, with the aim of showing how literary production and architectural construction are related as cultural forms in the historical context of modernity. In addressing this subject, it also examines the larger questions of the relation between literature and architecture and the extent to which these two arts define one another in the social and philosophical contexts of modernity. Architecture and Modern Literature will serve as a foundational introduction to the emerging interdisciplinary study of architecture and literature. David Spurr addresses a broad range of material, including literary, critical, and philosophical works in English, French, and German, and proposes a new historical and theoretical overview of this area, in which modern forms of "meaning" in architecture and literature are related to the discourses of being, dwelling, and homelessness.

[more]
cover of Building Romanticism: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Building Romanticism

Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Nicole Reynolds

University of Michigan Press, 2010

Building Romanticism sets the literary culture of Romantic Britain within the context of the period’s architectural productions in order to recover a relationship between these arts that, though deeply valued by writers and architects of the day, has been neglected by modern scholars in both fields. Toward this goal, Nicole Reynolds explores the centrality of architecture and architectural tropes to Romanticism’s dramatic reconceptualization of the individual subject and of the world that subject inhabits.Focusing on the correspondence between the period’s built environments and its literary pursuits, Building Romanticism argues that at this turbulent moment in British history a number of politically charged and aesthetically resonant architectural spaces, both real and imagined, negotiated intense anxieties about shifting notions of gender and sexuality, increased class mobility, the individual’s uncertain place in history, challenges to the British national character and to the project of nation building, and the very form and function of art itself. By tracing the reception of Romantic topoi—rhetorical and literal common places—through the nineteenth century, this book explores how Victorians remodeled Romanticism, its ideological preoccupations and cultural artifacts, according to their own era's social agendas.
[more]
cover of How We Learn Where We Live: Thomas Bernhard, Architecture, and Bildung

How We Learn Where We Live

Thomas Bernhard, Architecture, and Bildung

Fatima Naqvi

Northwestern University Press, 2015

How We Learn Where We Live opens new avenues into thinking about one of the most provocative writers of the twentieth century, Thomas Bernhard. In one of the first English studies of his work, Fatima Naqvi focuses on the Austrian author’s critique of education (Bildung) through the edifices in which it takes place. She demonstrates that both literature and architecture are implicated in the concept of Bildung. His writings insist that learning has always been a life-long process that is helped—or hindered—by the particular buildings in which Bildung occurs. Naqvi offers close readings of Bernhard’s major prose works, from Amras (1964) to Old Masters (1985) and brings them into dialogue with major architectural debates of the times. She examines Bernard’s interrogation of the theoretical foundations underpinning the educational system and its actual sites.

[more]
cover of Space as Storyteller: Spatial Jumps in Architecture, Critical Theory, and Literature

Space as Storyteller

Spatial Jumps in Architecture, Critical Theory, and Literature

Laura Chiesa

Northwestern University Press, 2016

Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project suggests that space can become a storyteller: if so, plenty of fleeting stories can be read in the space of modernity, where repetition and the unexpected cross-pollinate. In Space as Storyteller, Laura Chiesa explores several stories across a wide range of time that narrate spatial jumps, from Benjamin's tangential take on the cityscape, the experimentalism of Futurist theatricality, the multiple and potential atlases narrated by Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, and the posturban thought and practice of Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas/OMA. Space as Storyteller diverts attention from isolated disciplines and historical or geographical contexts toward transdisciplinary encounters that mobilize the potential to invent new spaces of comparison, a potential the author describes as "architecturability."
[more]
cover of The Poem, the Garden, and the World: Poetry and Performativity in Elizabethan England

The Poem, the Garden, and the World

Poetry and Performativity in Elizabethan England

Jim Ellis

Northwestern University Press, 2023

How an early modern understanding of place and movement are embedded in a performative theory of literature
 
How is a garden like a poem? Early modern writers frequently compared the two, and as Jim Ellis shows, the metaphor gained strength with the arrival of a spectacular new art form—the Renaissance pleasure garden—which immersed visitors in a political allegory to be read by their bodies’ movements. The Poem, the Garden, and the World traces the Renaissance-era relationship of place and movement from garden to poetry to a confluence of both. Starting with the Earl of Leicester’s pleasure garden for Queen Elizabeth’s 1575 progress visit, Ellis explores the political function of the entertainment landscape that plunged visitors into a fully realized golden world—a mythical new form to represent the nation. Next, he turns to one of that garden’s visitors: Philip Sidney, who would later contend that literature’s golden worlds work to move us as we move through them, reorienting readers toward a belief in English empire. This idea would later be illustrated by Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen; as with the pleasure garden, both characters and readers are refashioned as they traverse the poem’s dreamlike space. Exploring the artistic creations of three of the era’s major figures, Ellis argues for a performative understanding of literature, in which readers are transformed as they navigate poetic worlds.

[more]