In Metropolis on the Styx, David L. Pike considers how underground spaces and their many myths have organized ways of seeing, thinking about, and living in the modern city. Expanding on the cultural history of underground construction in his acclaimed...

David L. Pike is Professor of Literature at American University. He is the author of Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 and Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (winner of the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities), both from Cornell.

This is an engaging and erudite volume throughout. Pike avoids becoming overly mired in a quagmire of theoretical considerations, and his arguments are firmly grounded in the urban landscapes that are the subject of his analysis. His work is a welcome addition to a long line of literature critically concerned with the rise of the modern industrial metropolis.... It is recommended for any scholar interested in the form of the urban world as a product of technology and the evolution of our attitudes about it. I expect that it will find wide use in upper division courses in American studies, geography, and urban studies.

Tanya Agathocleous:

Pike's book presents us with both a new of of spatializing capitalist modernity and a truly impressive archive of texts about the city and its underground spaces. The carefully chosen epigraphs dotted throughout each chapter speak volumes on their own, and the astonishing range of works and phenomenon analyzed within each chapter (from journalism to panoramas to the trench cities of World War I) are illustrated by many rare and wonderful images (110 in total).... Metropolis on the Styx's ambitious purview makes the density of material it analyzes necessary, for its arguments reach across space (from London to Paris) and time (spanning two full centuries).... All this breadth and depth makes for a work that is profoundly interdisciplinary, bringing together the interests of urban studies, English and comparative literature, history, art history, architecture, and geography as if to propose a new field—subterranean studies—and provide enough material to keep it going for some time.

Bruce Robbins:

Pike has a collector's passion for viaducts, arches, quarries, tunnels, sewers, and arcades, and for the many and varied things that nineteenth-century observers had to say about them. His enthusiasm is especially contagious in an era when long-term government neglect of infrastructure has filled the news with breached levees, collapsing bridges, neighborhoods falling off the power grid, and other end-of-the-world style disasters.... Following the lead of Walter Benjamin, Pike reflects brilliantly on the devil in Baudelaire, while he also uncovers plausible devil surrogates in Eugene Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris, in the Gothic genre (relocated from the country to the city), in detective stories (the detective as another limping devil, taking off the housetops to reveal the hidden world of connections), in film noir and neo-noir.

John Plotz, Brandeis University:

It is hard to know where to begin praising Metropolis on the Styx—and once begun, even harder to know where to stop. Pike's eye for the dazzling quotation makes each section a new wonderland journey into an underground space that he trains us to see virtually everywhere in the modern city. Replete with both recondite historical detail and remarkably assured readings of texts ranging from the canonical to the arcane to the ridiculous, this book treats with respect and grave attention such a wide array of cultural phenomena that the reader is lulled into believing that we have always been underground—that there has never been a time and nowhere is there a place that is not fundamentally shaped by the logic of the underground city right below us.