Underground Writing

This exciting volume explores the way in which the London Underground (“The Tube”) was mapped by a number of writers, including George Orwell, H. G. Wells, George Gissing, and Virginia Woolf, from the late Victorian era to the end of World War II. Represented diversely as a Dantean underworld, a psychological looking-glass, and a place for safety and security, the Underground is evaluated here as portrayed in fiction, poetry, and art, as well as a borderland for cultural construction in transport history, anthropology, and urban studies. Linking adventurous literature with the actual underground modes of transit, author David Welsh reshapes the metaphorical world of “underground writing” and places it in its proper social and political context.