ABSTRACT
Chapter 15 zooms in on literary squares in European literature. The 19th century is covered by Charles Dickens, who in Nicholas Nickleby shows how the squares are keys to the social status of the characters. At the same time, in consonance with the very private character of the English residential square, Dickens presents the squares as spaces of retirement from urban life. This cult of privacy also characterizes Virginia Woolf, who in the essay “Street Haunting” uses the buying of a pencil as an excuse for leaving her home and walking the streets of London. In contrast to the peace and quiet of Woolf’s London square, Alfred Döblin presents Berlin Alexanderplatz as a highly challenging space that can only be managed through literary experiments such as the montage, which make it possible to capture the many dimensions and characters of a modern city. The chapter ends by showing how the literary representation of this particular square is also discussed in texts by Christa Wolf and Annett Gröschner.
