Metropolis on the Styx : the underworlds of modern urban culture, 1800-2001 / David L. Pike.

Author
Pike, David L. (David Lawrence), 1963- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2007.
Description
xvii, 377 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Availability

Available Online

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Engineering Library - Stacks TA712 .P55 2007 Browse related items Request
    Marquand Library - Remote Storage: Marquand Use OnlyTA712 .P55 2007 Browse related items Request

      Details

      Subject(s)
      Summary note
      "In Metropolis on the Styx,David L. Pike considers how underground spaces and their many myths have organized ways of seeing, thinking about, and living in the modern city. Expanding on the cultural history of underground construction in his acclaimed previous book, Subterranean Cities, Pike details the emergence of a vertical city in the imagination of nineteenth-century Paris and London, a city overseen by hosts of devils and undermined by subterranean villains, a city whose ground level was replete with passages between above and below. Metropolis on the Styx brings together a rich variety of visual and written sources ranging from pulp mysteries and movie serials to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the novels of Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Elinor Glyn to the broadsheets and ephemera of everyday urban life. From these materials, Pike conjures a working theory of modern underground space that explains why our notions about urban environments remain essentially nineteenth-century in character, even though cities themselves have since changed almost beyond recognition."--Publisher description.
      Bibliographic references
      Includes bibliographical references (p. [317]-356) and index.
      Contents
      • 1. Devil, the Underground, and the Vertical City
      • Underground Metropolis
      • Modernist Space and Underground Theory
      • From the Mine to the Trench
      • Devil above and the Devil below
      • Devil and the Rhythms of Modern Life
      • Seasons in Twentieth-Century Hell
      • Modernism, Memory, and Urban Space
      • 2. Devil Comes to Town
      • Devil in Paris and London
      • Devil in Urban Hell
      • Spectacles of the Metropolitan Devil
      • His Satanic Majesty's Court
      • Devil on Crutches
      • Satanic Verses
      • Devil Take the Hindmost
      • Modern Devil
      • 3. Mysteries of the Underground
      • True Mysteries of the Modern Metropolis Revealed
      • Sensations of Subterranean London
      • "If the rich only knew ..."
      • Afterlife of the Urban Mysteries
      • Urban Underworlds of Postwar America
      • 4. Through the Looking Glass
      • Er Ego in Arcadia
      • Down by the Dark Arches
      • Passage under the Thames
      • Foreign Incursions
      • Arcade Entrenched
      • Thresholds of Stage and Screen
      • Threshold of a New Millennium.
      ISBN
      • 9780801444906 ((cloth ; : alk. paper))
      • 080144490X ((cloth ; : alk. paper))
      • 9780801473043 ((pbk. ; : alk. paper))
      • 0801473047 ((pbk. ; : alk. paper))
      LCCN
      2007018953
      OCLC
      124074963
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