Reading Constellations : Urban Modernity in Victorian Fiction

Reading Constellations uses Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history to examine four canonical Victorian novels by Dickens, Hardy, and James. Throughout its chapters, the monograph deploys the dialectical notion of the "constellation" to read moments in novels in which past and present interpenetrate and the ways these writers open out the representation of the city to new modes of articulation and-through narrative perception- the reader's perception of the phenomena of the city, its place as the exemplar of modernity, and the ways in which it determines subjectivity.