Speaking today together with Jason Finch at the #Orientations2018 conference on narrative and place in Nottingham.

We’ll present some of the ideas that developed within the Association for Literary Urban Studies and in relation to work within the Palgrave series in literary urban studies. Our aim is to emphasize (in the context of literary fiction and literary urban studies) the concept of “citiness”: the elements that are specific to the city and the urban condition, and an awareness of what this “citiness” brings to the source material and what it implies in terms of methodological avenues of inquiry. One approach is to move from quantitative to more qualitative features of the (literary) city experience and, eventually, toward cutting across functional, inter-relational, and scalar complexities.