London Eyes

Book excerpt: "London Eyes provides paths through the city, chancing upon those stories that ultimately have the potential to change London, to see it with new eyes, casting new shadows and seeing new stories open up at many turns. This collection has at its heart a joyous fascination with the city and the texts, images and films that have contributed to our ideas about London. It was a wonderful opportunity to stumble upon some new panoramas." Film Philosophy London incessantly generates and incites cultural responses, pre-eminently in the interconnected domains of literature and film. This book demonstrates that those responses have been sustained as vital experiments and engagements in configuring the city and its inhabitants. Including essays by prominent cultural, literary and film historians this volume forms an original and incisive contribution to ongoing debates about the city's intricate cultural history and its construction through both language and image, as a crucial site of identity, desire, exile and displacement. Gail Cunningham is Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University. Her recent publications include Houses in Between (CUP, 2004) Anna Lombard (Birmingham University Press, 2002) and He-Notes: Reconstructing Masculinity (Palgrave, 2000). Stephen Barber is a Professor of Media Arts at Kingston University. His most recent publications include The Vanishing Map (Berg, 2006), Hijikata (Creation, 2006) and The Art of Destruction (Creation 2004). He has been awarded international prizes and awards for his work by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Getty Program, the Ford Foundation, the DAAD Berlin Artists and Writers Programme, the Annenberg Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the Japan Foundation, the British Academy, the Daiwa Foundation, the Saison Foundation, and the London Arts Board.