London Psychogeographies: Three Moments

This thesis applies the Situationist International's practice of psychogeography to readings of four books set in London from 1722 to 2011. In Chapter One, I explore three geographical fields in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders: place, road and street. I consider how Moll Flanders' path within the city and across the nation constructs and maps subversive psychogeographies for the eponymous protagonist's mobility and self-advancement. In Chapter Two, I examine Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, considering how the criminal world embedded in early Victorian London's labyrinthine slums, read through Situationist theory, challenges the novel's bourgeois morality. In the final chapter, I turn to Iain Sinclair's London Orbital: Walking the M25 and author-artist Laura Oldfield Ford's collection of self-published zines Savage Messiah in order to locate psychogeographical resistance to the advancing spectacle of late-capitalist London. The chapters represent three moments in London's time and space where class struggles are set against the city's geographical order and disciplinary mechanisms.