While suburbs provide a rich field of research for sociologists, architects, urbanists and anthropologists, they have not been given much attention in literary and cultural studies. The Suburbs: New Literary Perspectives sets out to enrich the limited existing body of critical analysis on the subject with a landmark collection of essays offering a far larger perspective than the books or collections published so far on the topic. This interdisciplinary and wide-ranging approach includes li...

The London suburbs have, for more than 250 years, fired the creative literary imagination: whether this is Samuel Johnson hiding away in bucolic pre-industrial Streatham, Italo Svevo cheering on Charlton Athletic FC down at The Valley, or Angela Carter hymning the joyful ‘wrongness’ of living south-of-the-river in Brixton. From Richmond to Rainham, Cockfosters to Croydon, this sweeping literary tour of the 32 London Boroughs describes how writers, from the seventeenth century on, have resp...