Reclaiming the City US academic, Professor Kristin Ross spent periods of travel research in Paris in the 1980s (Ross 1988) to develop a new method of inquiry to link literary text and urban space. Her findings will be used here to explain some of the key aspects of social space in French cities. She chooses poetry as her data source quite deliberately, giving a challenging rationale for this decision. Whilst the study of narrative prose in the nineteenth-century novel is conducted in French Studies departments of British and American universities with an unexplained assumption that these texts are a social production of reality, Ross argues that verse is considered to be 'a desiring production that is mere fantasy or wish fulfilment' (Ross, 1988, 11). Her study values poetry as a discursive practice that can yield data on the social developments of an era. Her key argument, or finding, from her textual analyses is that social space was transformed during the period of the
ISSN 2753-7803
