Book Review: Writing under the Raj: gender, race and rape in the British colonial imagination, 1830-1947

notes that they were intendedly commercial, but although we are given a full picture of their producers (Rotella stresses the importance of the authorial persona in the texts) we are told little about how they were consumed or by whom. The novels are seen as reflecting (in some cases foretelling) social discourses, but we cannot fully verify their significance in transforming such discourses – except in the case of certain of the writings about Harlem, which appeared at the time of the urban riots of the mid-1960s and which played a role in developing a wider social commentary on their causes and contexts. Secondly, the three different phases of Rotella’s thesis are validated by reference to different cities: there must be a lingering doubt that if the focus had been on writing about only one city the match with the thesis might have been less. These, however, are minor points of criticism of what is otherwise an important book. October cities represents a major achievement in the consideration of the writing of urban America, and it does so in a fluent and attractive style that is virtually entirely free of the obfuscating language that too often passes for erudition. This reviewer, for one, hopes that Carlo Rotella will bring what he calls the ‘city of feeling’ and the ‘city of fact’ together again in another meeting of literary studies and social science: how about urban writing from the postindustrial to the postmodern city?