![]() ![]() The age of the blogger, we are all potential Mr Pooters.’ Pooter’s joyless commute to Now as he was in 1888’ and a theatre review from 2011 noted of the book’s chronicling of everyday woes: ‘in In 2007 The Guardian remarked of ‘suburban everyman. Has refereed to how ‘Pooterish sorts – decent fellows living in the inner, and later the outer, suburbs.’ Pooter, the central character of Diary of a Nobody serves as an example of how a fictionalĬreation has given rise to the adjective ‘Pooterish’ to connote an ingrained suburban mentality since the book’sĪppearance in 1892. The impact of a novel can be seen to have been profound when its characters become words in the English vernacular. Hoover’ for the vacuum cleaner, or ‘the walkman’ for personal stereo, or ‘kindle’ for e-reader, Just as when a brand name becomes part of the English language we know that it has entered immortality, for example ‘the The twenty-first-century suburban novel is inevitably shaped by earlier antecedents. ![]() Mr Pooter, a character dating from Victorian times. A range of examples dealing with ‘Asian London’ are dealt with in Chapter 7 but in the beginning there is the social satire of Peck), an expression still synonymous with suburban way of life for a generation who had known war. John Cheever and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit ( 1955) (later a film with Gregory ![]() The US suburban novel enjoyed a boom period in the 1950s with works such as that of On both sides of the Atlantic involving ethnicity, gender, technology, class and sexuality which have all been reflected in Since Delderfield wrote these words multiple changes have occurred in suburban society Were set in, is even more odd given how very few residents are indigenous Londoners or even born in the city let alone able The idea of purity in a suburban race in London, the suburbs of which the books Midsomer Murders and Aidan Burley MP’s remarks that the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony Is now widely taken as a given, not just by sociologists as seen in recent furores over, for example UK television’s This reference to ‘our race’ implying a monocultural entity 29feels distinctly an anachronistic read now at a time when multi-ethnicity The city sophisticates, has been told often enough it is time somebody spoke of the suburbs, for therein, I have sometimesįelt, lies the history of our race’ ( Delderfield 1958:xi). Of these The Dreaming Suburb maintains ‘The story of the country-dwellers, and Writer of non-fiction feels the need to justify their subject of enquiry as urgently needing elucidation the first volume Sweep of events and moralistic undertone of the Delderfield ‘Avenue’ books set from 1919 to 1940. At the other extreme of suburban fiction can be found the historical Garreau) environment where business and technology are emeshed with multinationalĬorporations in a sprawl called BAMA, the Boston–Atlanta Metropolitan Axis in which the entire American East Coast fromīoston to Atlanta, have merged into a single urban mass. At one extreme the futuristic Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) which contains the first ever mention of the word ‘cyberspace’ describesĪ postsuburban ‘edge city’ (cf. Yet the examples of such work are voluminousĪnd vary vastly. Presumablyĭue to its perceived naffness, there is no equivalent volume dealing with the suburb. There is a Penguin Book of the City an anthology of fictional writing capturing stories spun in the metropolis. ![]() The suburbs still manage to be comparatively marginalized in overview considerations of fiction. Perhaps somewhat befitting their positioning vis-a-vis the city, ![]()
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