Allegory and the City

Abstract

nThis chapter attempts a history of allegorical uses of the city, starting from the New Testament, but moving on to the city in modernity—the city of Dickens, and of Baudelaire, whose Les Fleurs du Mal and prose-poems are discussed in detail. Constant reference is made to Walter Benjamin’s commentaries on Baudelaire, which invoke allegory, the state of melancholy, and ‘phantasmagoria’. The city-as-phantasmagoria gives a fantastic sense of social reality as deceptive and dissembling as allegory itself. The ‘vanity’ of the city in Bunyan or Thackeray may be compared with the city as mirage, dissolving, like its fog, and yet producing grotesque images.