Abstract
Unlike in the previous decade, the 1990s British literary scene witnessed an emergence of a number of novels which tend to perceive London, or the modern urban milieu in general, from a more optimistic perspective. This approach can be found, for instance, in works by Hanif Kureishi, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Jim Crace.
A remarkable contribution to this tendency is Penelope Lively's City of the Mind (1991), a rather short yet complex novel which captures and celebrates London in its spatial, temporal and human diversity and heterogeneity. This article attempts to demonstrate the various ways in which Lively's novel (re)presents the city as both a physical environment and a mental concept, as well as to analyse the interconnectedness between her city and its inhabitants' psyche.
It also argues that due to its psychogeographic scope the novel can be taken as a fictional anticipator of Ackroyd's London: The Biography (2000).