Author(s)

Huiyuan Su ¹, You Chen ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ College of Foreign Studies, Guangdong University of Science and Technology, Dongguan, Guangdong, 523083, China

Corresponding Author

You Chen

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on the intrinsic relationship between urban imagery and cultural alienation, examining specific works on British and American literature in the 19th and 20th centuries. Grounded in both spatial criticism and Marxist ideas about space, the study considers how representations of the city in literature. By means of a comparative analysis of Charles Dickens's London in the Steam Age, the wasteland city in Eliot's poems, and Fitzgerald's Jazz Age New York, this study reveals how urban imagery reflects cultural alienation and human alienation in the process of modernity. This research innovatively expands the spatio-temporal dimension of comparative imagery, proposes a theoretical framework of "Literal Linguistic Collapse", and constructs a critical paradigm that includes diagnostic indicators such as symbolization of metaphor system, instruction of grammatical structure, and mechanization of image generation. This study through comparative analysis of cross-century texts in British and American literature, unveils that the spatial alienation caused by industrialization and urbanization exhibits both diachronic continuity and synchronic differences. It also demonstrates that urban literature serves not only as a mirror of modern alienation but also offers a new methodological paradigm by critically engaging with and resisting these phenomena. This approach provides fresh insights into the spatial poetics of linguistic alienation within the modernist context and the cultural symbolic violence embedded in it.

KEYWORDS

Urban Imagery; Cultural Alienation; British Literature; American Literature; Modernity

CITE THIS PAPER

Huiyuan Su, You Chen, Research on Urban Imagery and Cultural Alienation in British and American Literature. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2025) Vol. 8: 27-35. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2025.080305.

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