ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the relation between literature and the metropolitan city in the early twentieth century. It argues that space is a pervasive concern in modernism, not in the Renaissance sense of linear perspectives, but as a dimension of intersecting planes and multiple viewpoints. For James Donald, Georg Simmel's essay Metropoles and Mental Life attempts to grasp the uneasy trichotomy of, 'subjective space, the outside world, and social life'. In Metropoles and Mental Life, Simmel says, 'The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy' because its 'multiplicity and concentration of economic exchange' offers the means of exchange an importance denied in rural commerce using mutual exchange. For Simmel, an enquiry into the meaning of modern life must, 'seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the supra-individual contents of life'.
