ABSTRACT
‘Hurry’ is an intrinsic component of modernity. This introductory essay situates ideas about hurry in recent literatures on modernity, mobility, speed, rhythm and time–space compression, but argues for a distinctive focus on the infrastructures, practices and emotions associated with ‘hurry’. To this end, the essay explores literary representations of hurry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including E.M. Forster’s notion of an ‘architecture of hurry’ on the streets of modern London and Matthew Arnold’s ‘sick hurry’ of modern life, and reviews a lexicon of words often associated with hurried mobility. As an experience, if not as a word, ‘hurry’ predates modernity, yet the very contradictory and ambiguous character of hurry reflects the contradictions and ironies at the heart of urban modernity. The introduction concludes by summarizing the themes of subsequent chapters and acknowledging some inevitable omissions in the range of empirical studies, which also imply scope for future research structured around ideas of modern hurry.
