Reading Constellations: Urban Modernity in Victorian Fiction - Hardcover

McKee has brilliantly appropriated Benjamin's concept of the 'constellation' to show, in detailed readings, how, in four Victorian novels, not only are history and the city made of disintegrated parts, but also how 'persons come apart and pieces of them get relocated in other persons.' A challenging and strikingly original book. (J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine)

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.