Noting the popular idea associated with the linguistic turn in cultural theory that the city can be read
as a text this paper argues that this motif can be usefully inverted such that the text might be ‘read
as a city’ – whether or not it has a specifically urban focus. This proposition is explored in relation to
the contrasting plotting strategies of Elizabeth Gaskell in North and South (1848) and George Eliot in
Middlemarch (1874). Space syntax theory is brought to Bakhtin’s notion of the literary chronotope, a
concept denoting the time-space contexts encoded in literary narratives, in order to develop the
architectural dimension of what Raymond Williams called the ‘knowable’ community. An articulation
of the ‘architectural chronotope’ in North and South and Middlemarch reveals clear differences in the
images of the knowable community presented by the two texts. These are said to realize contrasting
novelistic conceptions of the bourgeois city, both with resonances in space syntax theor
