Nicholas Daly is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin. He is the author of Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Literature, Technology and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

'The scope of Daly's project is commendable, embracing the long nineteenth century through the cultural lenses of England, France, and the United States … In opening the possibility for comparison based on the popularity and afterlife of a cultural text as it invokes various figures of the 'demographic imagination', Daly's project is a delightful engagement with various material and aesthetic cultures of the nineteenth century.' Kathleen Morris, BSLS Reviews (www.bsls.ac.uk)

• Introduction; 1. Under the volcano: mass destruction; 2. The streets of wherever: French melodrama and Anglophone localization; 3. The ghost comes to town: the haunted city; 4. The frenzy of the legible in the age of crowds; 5. Fur and feathers: animals and the city in an Anthropocene era; Conclusion.