Description
Book SynopsisWho said that the suburbs are boring? The suburban trick is to look ordinary and be extraordinary, as Lynne Hapgood's absorbing discussion of the suburbs in fiction from 1880-1925 reveals. -- .
Trade Review'This is of considerable contextual value to the Bennett scholar. Her analysis of Bullock's Robert Thorne (1907), the story of a clerk and his search for a proper identity, makes a fascinating coda to Bennet's A Man From the North. (1898) One of the joys of Hapgood's study is her ability to disturb his perceived tranquil sociological view of suburbia with a reasoned argument for seeing A Man From the North as a more savage text that George Gissing's New Grub Street.' John Shapcott
Table of ContentsList of illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction - The defining suburb Part I Suburban visions 1. The utopian suburb: Jerome K. Jerome, William Morris and 'the logical dream' 2. The suburban idyll: Arthur Conan Doyle, Keble Howard, John Galsworthy 3. Beyond the suburbs: Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas, E.M. Forster Part II Suburban dreams 4. The suburban garden: Elizabeth von Arnim and the garden romances 5. The feminine suburb I: Women readers and romance fiction 6. The feminine suburb II: Louise Gerard, Sophie Cole, Alice Askew, Mary Hamilton Part III Suburban realities 7. The working-class suburb: William Pett Ridge, Shan Bullock, Edwin Pugh 8. The suburban cul-de-sac: George Gissing and H.G. Wells 9. The suburban extraordinary: Arnold Bennett and G.K. Chesterton Suburban fiction: A publication timeline Select bibliography
