In the City of Love's Sleep
- Submitting institution
-
Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 30375676
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Faber and Faber
- ISBN
- 9780571337620
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- This is an experimental and interdisciplinary novel constructed on the basis of ergon (the central narrative) and parergon (short essays on artefacts), enacting the work’s themes of object, investment, preservation, framing and context. The objects included here were encountered when Greenlaw was the first artist in residence at the Science Museum. The book was developed with the support of one of the first Wellcome Fellowships to be given to an artist. The novel is primarily an investigation of memory and love but within this it engages Greenlaw’s central concerns: problems of description, the relationship between technology and perceptual experience, culture and investigative approach. Love and the object are metaphors for one another. We analyse materials and construction, name the parts and invest purpose. The cloud mirror is a way of observing indirectly without venturing forth, the bone skates a way of crossing emotional ice, the merman a reflection of our composite selves, the anatomical model of a horse an illustration of how we like to name the parts and how we want above all to be described. The book is as much an investigation of the contemporary self as it is of our relationships with others: the self as fractured, multiple, invested and unknown; how we confuse speech with action and thought with emotion; how we are never whole or wholly present; and how emotional change occurs at a level to which we have little access. It is about how much a cardiac patient simulator, broken telegraph cables or a merman may have to teach us about how we communicate and how we love. It was reviewed extensively, read from and discussed in the national media, and presented at international literary festivals including Edinburgh, Munich, Berlin and Hay, and has also been produced as an audiobook.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -