The city in American literature and culture / edited by Kevin R. McNamara.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

McNamara, Kevin R., 1958- editor.

Series:

Cambridge themes in American literature and culture.

Cambridge themes in American literature and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

Cities and towns--Political aspects--United States.

Cities and towns.

Cities and towns--Social aspects--United States.

City and town life in literature.

Cities and towns in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvi, 399 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Summary:

The city's 'Americanness' has been disputed throughout US history. Pronounced dead in the late twentieth century, cities have enjoyed a renaissance in the twenty-first. Engaging the history of urban promise and struggle as represented in literature, film, and visual arts, and drawing on work in the social sciences, The City in American Literature and Culture examines the large and local forces that shape urban space and city life and the street-level activity that remakes culture and identities as it contests injustice and separation. The first two sections examine a range of city spaces and lives; the final section brings the city into conversation with Marxist geography, critical race studies, trauma theory, slow/systemic violence, security theory, posthumanism, and critical regionalism, with a coda on city literature and democracy.

Contents:

Cover

Half-title page

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

City Spaces

Chapter 1 Antebellum Urban Publics

Chapter 2 Intersections: Streets and Other Democratic Spaces

Chapter 3 The Literature of Neighborhood

Chapter 4 Writing the Ghetto, Inventing the Slum

Chapter 5 Urban Borders, Open Wounds

Chapter 6 Gentrification

Chapter 7 House Rules: The New Yorker and the Making of the White Suburban Liberal Woman

Chapter 8 Transnational American Cities: Camilo Mejía's ar Ramadi, Iraq, and Jason Hall's Topeka, Kansas

Chapter 9 The Poetics of Rims: New Orleans

City Lives

Chapter 10 American Vertigo: The Metropolis and the New Biopolitical Order

Chapter 11 Labor's City

Chapter 12 White Immigrant Trajectories in US Urban Literature: The Italian American Case

Chapter 13 Crime and Violence

or, Hard-boiled Chronicles of Mean Streets and Their Hidden Truths

Chapter 14 Disaster, Apocalypse, and After

Chapter 15 Bohemia

Theory in the City

Chapter 16 The Spatial Turn and Critical Race Studies

Chapter 17 From Trauma Theory to Systemic Violence: Narratives of Post-Katrina New Orleans

Chapter 18 Security Theory

Chapter 19 Posthuman Cities

Chapter 20 Critical Regionalism: Why Hillbilly Elegy and Its Critics Matter to Writing about Cities

Coda City and Polis

Further Reading

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 06 Aug 2021).

ISBN:

1-108-90216-2

1-108-90154-9

1-108-89526-3

OCLC:

1268275972