‘Street level view’: spatial orientation and metropolitical boundaries in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Nell Dunn’s Up The Junction

A traversing of, and wandering through, The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon and Up The Junction by Nell Dunn. This essay focuses on the urban infrastructure that imposes boundaries on the characters in both stories, and repeatedly works to marginalise them. This essay also concentrates on the texts' affixion to the local, and how the characters are confined to their material realities, or their 'street level views'. Selvon's text, however, differs from Dunn's, in that the male characters enact a wandering motion which provides them with creative agency and allows them to surpass the orders of the structures of the metropolis. While Dunn's characters are fixed to the local, and their material poverty, they discover solidarity and community through this. This essay explores how both texts contain characters who overcome the notion of the city as an agent of marginalisation via methods of survival and resistance, but are simultaneously bordered in by the spaces they occupy.