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Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siécle. Attentive to the historical continuities between 'Romantic' and 'Victorian', the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800-1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.
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the Sage had recently obliterated (155). By reading these structures against the grain, Thompson finds many of these contradictions, reveling in the capacity of such ironies to disrupt the officially sanctioned stories that are told about regeneration projects. At their best, her notes on these skeptical wanderings past fish tanks, chrome-cladded rest rooms, and bloated gift shops resemble the literary psycho-geography of Ian Sinclair (whom she frequently cites).Given how tactile and vivid these descriptions are, then, it seems surprising that Thompson is so relentlessly dependent on the abstract and esoteric writings of two critical theorists from starkly different twentieth-century contexts. Indeed, those who lack a deep knowledge of Benjamin and Baudrillard's writings may not find much of use in this book. For the nonexpert, it is never entirely clear how the fish tanks in the Deep relate to Benjamin's analysis of cinema, or why the premature closure of a community arts hub in West Bromwich should prompt a digression on Baudrillard and the impossibility of a messianic cessation of history. There is something qualitatively new about the explosion of art making in warehouses and curricula schools across the developed West in the last thirty years that this book doesn't fully account for. Whether in giant set-piece galleries, dank hipster lofts, or the breezy lobbies of technology start-ups, "culture" and "creativity" are playing an increasingly central role in the everyday world of the postindustrial West. This new culture industry is bigger, of course, than the handful of galleries built in northern cities in the first decade of the twenty-first century. When writing about these projects Thompson at times conveys a totalizing sense of awe, similar to that used by Benjamin to describe the Parisian arcades. However, it is more than likely that, starved of state funding under the present Conservative government, these fragile buildings will be swept away by the next bout of failed regeneration strategies.
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