ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to ask how contemporary writing set in large cities reflects these divergent scenarios. It discusses Don deLillo's Cosmopolis, tracing a day in the life of a currency speculator in New York in 2000; and Zadie Smith's NW, set in an everyday milieu in north-west London. The chapter argues that despite the prevalence of a dystopian urban imagery, a multi-ethnic city can be a site of tacit social order. Whether this represents a viable cosmopolitanism remains to be seen. The chapter traces the concept back to the idea of a cosmic urban order in the seventeenth century, and to a nineteenth-century shift from decadence to worldliness in the meaning of cosmopolitan, more or less the meaning of an urban lifestyle. In the nineteenth century the term cosmopolitan had become detached from ideas of a cosmic order, denoting a modern, urban lifestyle.
