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Women Writers and the Elusive Urban Sublime: the View from "Manchester, England"
Lancaster University, UK l.pearce@lancaster.ac.uk
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Coming to this city, and its literature, as an outsider, it is sometimes hard not to feel sorry for "Manchester, England" (Haslam).1 Despite the fact that, since the 1980s, Manchester has enjoyed the reputation of being one of the great music capitals of the world, successive waves of grass-roots creativity—what Dave Haslam has identified as its unique "DIY" culture (xxvii)—has not translated into many positive literary representations of the city and its environs as a place of residence. This would seem to be especially true of the women writers associated with the city although—as will be seen—wealth, educational attainment and mobility remain crucial variables in determining our relationship with where we live (Kaplan 1996: 89). What urban literatures—and the theories associated with them—have revealed, however, is that socio-economics alone is not enough to explain how, and why, in Avtar Brah's words "a place of residence becomes home" (1996: 1); inasmuch
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Moving Manchester |
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Spheres of Location |
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The Street
The Districts
The City
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Conclusion |
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