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Postcards from the Apocalypse: Patrick Keiller’sLondonand the Legacies of Victorian Realism

2016/09/01 by Tanya Agathocleous · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Cinema and Media Studies #Decadence, Literature, and Society #Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

paper · doi:10.1080/14714787.2016.1255565

openalex publication_date 2016/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

This article examines the way Patrick Keiller’s ‘Robinson’ film trilogy – and in particular the film London – draws on forms, images, and ideas from Victorian literary and visual culture. Like many Victorian texts that focus on the British capital, Keiller’s London uses antithetical scales. The fragmentary perspective of the visual–verbal sketch tradition, exemplified by Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, and the panoramic overview to which Victorian writers and artists aspired, are used in tandem to understand the details of everyday urban life in the context of global capitalism and to imagine a world outside it.

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