The City Mysteries: Crime, Vice, and Sin Revealed Through Space

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/rn301220f

Abstract

This thesis is a spatial examination of the metropolis within three novels of the city mysteries genre. These works depict the rapidly expanding cities of Europe and America in the early 19th century and are noted for revealing the high levels of crime, vice, and sin throughout society. The architectural and inhabited space of these cities was used by the writers to inform their characters and ideas and through these same means an analysis will be made of their fictional urban environments. An exploration will be made, through the moral space of a Victorian home to determine how the authors envisioned the feasibility of a normative self-regulating subject living in these aberrant urban settings.

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