Reading the text as a city: The architectural chronotope in two nineteenth-century novels

Noting the popular idea associated with the linguistic turn in cultural theory that the city can be read as a text this paper argues that this motif can be usefully inverted such that the text might be ‘read as a city’ – whether or not it has a specifically urban focus. This proposition is explored in relation to the contrasting plotting strategies of Elizabeth Gaskell in North and South (1848) and George Eliot in Middlemarch (1874). Space syntax theory is brought to Bakhtin’s notion of the literary chronotope, a concept denoting the time-space contexts encoded in literary narratives, in order to develop the architectural dimension of what Raymond Williams called the ‘knowable’ community. An articulation of the ‘architectural chronotope’ in North and South and Middlemarch reveals clear differences in the images of the knowable community presented by the two texts. These are said to realize contrasting novelistic conceptions of the bourgeois city, both with resonances in space syntax theor