This book offers a critical introduction to the relation between cities and fiction, poetry and literary criticism from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It examines examples of writing from Europe, North America and post-colonial countries. "Moving among canonical and forgotten texts and cultural theory about the modern (Western) city, Malcolm Miles shows literature's importance to the ways we imagine and experience urban space and city life, and why the questions that activity raises matter beyond the classroom. His attention to avant gardes and their milieus is a particularly welcome addition to the discussion and of a piece with his presiding focus on the city as an institution of culture." - Kevin McNamara, Professor of Literature, University of Houston-Clear Lake, USA "Restless, wide-ranging and always intellectually challenging, in this book Malcolm Miles takes us on an journey through Western cities across the last three centuries by examining a sequence of novels and poems written by the likes of Austen, Eliot (George, aka Mary Anne Evans), Eliot (Thomas Stearns), Woolf, Camus and DeLillo. In doing so, he elicits a strong dialectic: cities as the locus for modern literature under Capitalism, and literature as expressive of the negative and positive aspects of Capitalist urban life. Rarely have such insights been so refreshingly expressed as in this book. Self-evidently a labour of love, it also offers a superb summation of Miles's own writings over the years." - Professor Murray Fraser, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK