Urban underworlds : a geography of twentieth-century American literature and culture / Thomas Heise.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Heise, Thomas, 1971-

Series:

American literatures initiative

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Social classes in literature.

Literature and society--United States--History--20th century.

Literature and society.

Group identity in literature.

Difference (Psychology) in literature.

Place (Philosophy) in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (306 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, c2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Urban Underworlds is an exploration of city spaces, pathologized identities, lurid fears, and American literature. Surveying the 1890's to the 1990's, Thomas Heise chronicles how and why marginalized populations immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities have been selectively targeted as "urban underworlds" and their neighborhoods characterized as miasmas of disease and moral ruin. The quarantining of minority cultures helped to promote white, middle-class privilege. Following a diverse array of literary figures who differ with the assessment of the underworld as the space of the monstrous Other, Heise contends that it is a place where besieged and neglected communities are actively trying to take possession of their own neighborhoods.

Contents:

Acknowledgments

Introduction. An overview and an underview: Uneven development and the social production of American underworlds

Going down: Narratives of slumming in the ethnic underworlds of lower New York, 1890s-1910s

Degenerate "Sex and the City": The underworlds of New York and Paris in the work of Djuna Barnes and Claude McKay, 1910s-1930s

The black underground: Urban riots, the black underclass, and the work of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, 1940s-1950s

Wasted dreams: John Rechy, Thomas Pynchon, and the underworlds of Los Angeles, 1960s

White spaces and urban ruins: Postmodern geographies in Don DeLillo's underworld, 1950s-1990s.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-283-86423-1

0-8135-4981-7

OCLC:

775302262