In Public: George Gissing, Newspapers and the City

  • Simon J. James
Chapter

Abstract

The city, notoriously in its nineteenth-century representations, is an entity whose meanings are numerous and irreducible. The experience of modernity is of consciousness being surrounded by more sensory stimuli than it can comfortably or even sufficiently process (Benjamin, 1989, pp. 57–66; Freud, 1959). Georg Simmel wrote in The Metropolis and Mental Life in 1902 of:

the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life. (Simmel, 1950, p. 410.)

Keywords

Public Space Railway Carriage Sharp Discontinuity Daily Telegraph Psychic Life 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2006

Authors and Affiliations

  • Simon J. James

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