Lexington Books The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space

This book examines literary representations of hyperlocal spaces that subvert the idea of grounded and organic spatial identities. Figures such as the pond, the scientific particle, and Wedgwood creamware often go unnoticed, but they exemplify important shifts in culture and aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space argues that these objects, as well as locations such as alcoves in remote shires, city inns, and mountain retreats, were portrayed by writers in the late eighteenth and early-to-mid nineteenth centuries as gambits that challenged cultural hegemonies. It shows that the hyperlocal space or object, though particular, reaches beyond itself, affording an elasticity that can allow those things that seem beneath notice to reveal broader cultural significance. Review In this extraordinary new study, Birns begins from a level of experience and representation that frequently goes unnoticed, and makes it into an occasion for the most unexpected and wide-ranging illuminations. This book's ambitious temporal, spatial, and generic scope--from Milton to Thoreau, from the Home Counties to Kolkata, from the U.S. Constitution to Wedgwood pottery--is fitting, however, because the hyperlocal itself proves to be simultaneously elastic and incisive, capacious and concentrated. As Birns convincingly demonstrates through a series of inventive, erudite thematic interventions, the hyperlocal is an essential addition to the cache of theoretical concepts we need to make critical sense of our past, present, and increasingly imperiled future.--Evan Gottlieb, Associate Professor of English, Oregon State University; author of Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750-1830 Nicholas Birns' latest volume is a marvelously inventive reflection on the 'hyperlocal, ' the extensive concept of a place that is at once highly particular and yet massively saturated by everything that exceeds what we often too quickly take to be the parochialism of the local. With a variety of sweeping readings, Birns' book is a welcome contribution to the aesthetics and politics of placement and displacement, knowing and unknowing.--Jacques Khalip, Brown University About the Author Nicholas Birns teaches literature at the School of Professional Studies, New York University.