The Country, the City, and the Suburb (Panel)
Sterile, tedious, vulgar: suburban stereotypes abound. H. G. Wells thought “the Modern City looks like something that has burst an intolerable envelope and splashed.” John Ruskin found “no existing terms of language … to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin,” of suburban development. Yet these supposedly repulsive spaces were extraordinarily attractive. What do the suburbs offer our understanding of the novel’s social horizons? The nineteenth-century novel's realism has been primarily understood as a metropolitan phenomenon. How does literature from the Victorian era to the present, within and beyond realism and the British tradition, confirm or challenge assumptions about suburban spaces?