We begin with the origin of the city/countryside dialectic and review the historical literature on the nature of the city. We then introduce the contradictions between urban and rural, acknowledging the important concept of the metabolic rift, followed by Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the “right to the city.” Finally, the analytical framing of popular rural social movements is discussed in the rural/urban contradictory framing.

Despite popular perceptions of Vaughan Williams as being focussed primarily on nature and the pastoral, a vivid appreciation of urban environments played an equally crucial role in shaping his artistic vision. A Londoner for most of his adult life, he also spent significant time in Berlin and Paris, and had a special regard for New York. Yet while he relished the bustle and rich social diversity of London, the de facto capital of the world during his lifetime, he was also keenly aware of its deprivation and dark undercurrents. A London Symphony is the most ambitious musical work to thematicize the modern city composed anywhere before 1914, and it evokes psychological and experiential tropes central to modernism’s urban imaginary across the arts, including the collision of multiple social identities, temporalities, and spatial perspectives, and the associated alienation and fragmentation of the unitary self. The composer employs an exceptionally wide range of materials, juxtaposing folk song, ragtime, street noise, and much else, in a multilayered environment of sometimes violent dissonance and rhythmic dislocation. Yet the work strives to integrate such diversity within an overarching symphonic framework – a powerful metaphor for a vision of nation and humanity that underpinned the composer’s later work.

This chapter examines 1890s women poets through the lens of ecology. By focusing on three main parameters (countryside, city, and empire), the chapter offers a new landscape of poets and poetries of the 1890s and argues that some of the most advanced ecological thinking of the period appeared in women’s poetry. Starting with Christina Rossetti, the chapter unveils how poets of the 1890s used genres such as the pastoral, realist, and symbolist poetry paradigmatically to produce powerful critiques of agrilogistics, globalization and eco-colonialism at the fin de siècle. Central to the chapter is its focus on polluted environments. Looking at Amy Levy and Alice Meynell, it shows how their poetics of soot and grime argued for green spaces to combat the damaged caused by the coal industry to modern city living. The chapter also analyzes the anticolonial poetics of Katharine Tynan and Sarojini Naidu and their use of autochthonous plants in their fight against the British empire.

This essay examines medieval women dramatists, from Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim in tenth-century Germany, through Hildegard of Bingen and her Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues) in the twelfth century, to Katherine Sutton, Abbess of Barking in the late fourteenth century, who composed liturgical dramas for Holy Week. The essay locates these women dramatists within the wider context of medieval convent performances in England and Europe, and shows that religious women were not only authors but also actors, directors, and costume makers; their convents provided the play space, while laywomen sometimes also contributed. Niebrzydowski also explores the often speculative or conjectural evidence for womenߣs participation in drama outside the convents. Although there is only one definitive English example of women as associated with a Corpus Christi production, a lost Chester pageant of ߢour Lady thassumpcionߣ, other fragmentary evidence suggests lay womenߣs involvement in a range of dramatic forms from saintsߣ lives, interludes, and morality plays to processions and pageants.

The ‘noble lie’ is crucial within the political philosophy of the Republic, as the ideology of the charter myth needed to motivate the citizens of the Republic’s good city in general, and the rulers in particular, to care above all for its well-being. I look first at the way lying figured in the Greeks’ imaginary and their political discourse, particularly that of the Athenian democracy; then at ethical dimensions of Socrates’ notion of ‘useful lie’, and his distinction between deception by speech and deception in the soul. What makes the ‘noble lie’ useful is its ability (if believed) to instil in citizens love for their community (not merely calculation that promotion of its well-being is in their own self-interest), through representation of their human identity as membership of a single family, with their core affections and obligations directed to their mother country. It is that sense of basic identity and commensurate obligation, not dialectically based grasp of eternal truth, which will persuade philosophers to take their part in ruling the city. Finally, I tackle the issue – its difficulty highlighted by Socrates himself – of how belief in the narrative is to be secured.

This chapter begins by synthesising the results of the previous modelling chapters, also considering how far one might go with conclusions in each case, given the limits and quality of the various datasets. Having synthesised these data, the models are tested against two ‘known’ networks, described in ancient literature: the Ionian League and the Kalaureian Amphiktyony. In highlighting the differences between the expected and the actual results, the case is made that literature and historical documents can project a greater degree of unity between communities than might have in reality been expressed or presented for reasons of their own political gain and unity.

This book closes by returning to the problem of the polis, and to considering the extent to which a fresh approach can contribute new thoughts to an old debate. In considering what exactly an ancient city was, its activities are emphasised: the fact that a city formed political and economic connection with its neighbours helped to define it. The potentials and pitfalls of modelling for historical enquiry are considered, and the case is made for a more data-driven and ‘scientific’ classical archaeology of the next generation.

This chapter begins by considering the pattern of archaeology in Greece form the past 100 years that has generated huge datasets – and that these datasets have been largely under deployed in making historical conclusions about Greece of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. After reviewing the history of scholarship on ‘Archaic Greece’ (and the relative quietness of scholarship on this topic in the most recent decades) this chapter considers ways in which the huge amount of data from Archaic Greece could be organised and analysed. Various methods from the Digital Humanities are considered, with discussion focusing also on data cleaning and organisation, before proposing that network analysis will be a useful framework for this study in making clear the ways in which the first communities of Archaic Greece formed economic and political alliances – and rivalries – with one another.

This chapter follows microcosmic worlds figured in the skyscraper across three “Chicago Schools”: in architecture, in urban sociology, and in political economy. Three novels map three historical phases: Frank Norris’s The Pit (1902), the financialization of wheat in Chicago’s early skyscrapers; Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), the “color line” and the public sphere on Chicago’s South Side; and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), the landscapes of oil and steel in Dubai. In each the skyscraper appears fleetingly on the horizon, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye as it shifts scales from stage to prop. The three corresponding “Chicago Schools” are: the architects of early skyscrapers assembled around the slogan “form follows function”; the group of urban sociologists that included St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, authors of Black Metropolis (1945); and the economists who supplied the neoliberal precepts by which oil wealth was converted into speculative real estate in Dubai and elsewhere. The article concludes with a coda that records, with reference to the work of urban sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod and the writer Deepak Unnikrishnan, the stark divisions of labor that haunt these three “Chicagos” and their skyscrapers, from Lake Michigan to the Persian Gulf.

This chapter is an abstract of a paper that argued that historians of Greek civic culture in the Roman Empire should draw on the novels for details of Greek city life, of the behaviour of its elites, and of the relation between city and country – something Fergus Millar did, quite independently, and very effectively, in his UCL inaugural lecture ‘The world of the Golden Ass’ in March 1981.

This chapter argues that, unlike Dio in his Euboean Oration, in which the countryside is always presented positively and the city almost wholly negatively, Longus does not make his rustics entirely virtuous or his city-dwellers wholly bad. I differentiated between virtues of ἦθος, ‘character’, and virtues of πρᾶξις, ‘action’, illustrating the differences between those of the country and of the city by an analytical table. I noted especially Longus’ presentation of piety and impiety, of deception and of artifice, and of fear and boldness, concluding that the country’s vices prompt readers to reflection as much as do its virtues.

Where the inner suburbs of south Dublin were Victorian, most of the development on the north side of the city has taken place in the twentieth century, so that historical layers – Georgian, Victorian, twentieth-century, and contemporary – sit adjacent to one another. Anne Enright’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Gathering, makes use of this stratified cityscape, but it figures elsewhere, as well, including in recent crime fiction. As we move towards the old docklands in the north city, we find ourselves in a completely new cityscape, which is beginning to be explored by writers such as Paul Murray, while the older neighbourhoods nearby have been the territory of Conor McPherson’s plays; it was here, too, that Bram Stoker was born. However, the real challenge for contemporary Irish writing has been to invest the new largely working-class suburbs of north Dublin with the same kind of dense cultural associations as the historic city centre.The central figures here have been Paula Meehan, Dermot Bolger, and Roddy Doyle, whose fictional Barrytown is based on Kilbarrack where he grew up. Finally, at the limits of the city, we come to Howth, where Joyce’s Ulysses reaches its conclusion.

In many cities, it is often assumed that the residential suburbs are not the sort of place in which literary culture thrives.And, indeed, the work of one of the most prominent writers associated with the suburbs of south Dublin – Eavan Boland – has taken this idea as a major theme in her work.However, a closer analysis shows that south Dublin has long had rich literary associations, and it is this intersection of private and public that is the focus of this chapter. It was here that both James Joyce and G. B. Shaw were born, and where W. B. Yeats lived. The area was also a hive of activity during the Irish Literary Revival, whether in the school run by Patrick Pearse, or in the literary salons of George Russell (Æ). More recently, it has been associated with poets such as Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, as well as with Booker-winning novelist Anne Enright, whose novel Actress provides the chapter with a starting point. Far from being the quiet annex to the boisterous city-centre literary pubs, the south Dublin suburbs have been the site of intense literary activity of many kinds for the more than a century, a place where the intersections of public and private can be explored.

Dublin: A Writer’s City begins with a personal introduction, in which the author reflects on his arrival in the city in the mid-1980s, and his realization during his very first hours there that he was living a few doors down from where Oscar Wilde had been born, on a street that features in Ulysses, in the stories of Samuel Beckett, and in the poetry of Thomas Kinsella – and around the corner from the site of the first production of what would become the Abbey Theatre. This initial stroll down an apparently innocuous street – Westland Row – provides the basis for a reflection on the ways in which being aware of the literature of a city influence our experience of urban living. These reflections are framed in the context of the empty city during the pandemic that began in the spring of 2020.

A defining characteristic of Dublin has been its repurposed Georgian buildings. Most of the north inner city was originally laid out as homes for the wealthy in the eighteenth century. However, by the nineteenth century the great city mansions of the north city were on their way to becoming some of the worst tenement slums in Europe; and much of the development of the twentieth century was focused on finding better accommodation for the tenement-dwellers. And yet the tenements and surrounding areas have produced a rich literary culture. The best-known example may be Seán O’Casey; however, there are others, including James Stephens, James Plunkett, Paula Meehan, and, of course, this part of the city is also closely linked with James Joyce’s writing, with substantial parts of Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners set here. It was also here that Brendan Behan grew up, and his work revolves around this area. In addition there are unexpected associations, such as the birthplace of Iris Murdoch. This chapter explores this literary world of the north inner city, in which sometimes extreme poverty and a vibrant sense of community coexist.

The campus of Trinity College Dublin is a paradox; on the one hand, it is a enclosed campus, cut off from the city around it by walls and gates; on the other, it is situated in the very heart of the city. Among its graduates are many of Ireland’s major writers, from George Farquhar in the seventeenth century, to Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith in the eighteenth century, to Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde in the nineteenth century, and J. M. Synge in the early twentieth century. In the 1960s, many of the poets who would dominate Irish poetry in the decades that followed were students or staff: Eavan Boland, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanéin, Brendan Kennelly, and Paula Meehan. More recently, novelists Anne Enright and Sally Rooney have been graduates. This chapter looks at how over the centuries, the distinctive nature of Trinity’s space within the city – both enclosed and yet permeable – has provided a kind of oasis for conversation and writing, while still actively engaging with the life of the city around it.