Chicago, a literary history / edited by Frederik Byrn Køhlert.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Køhlert, Frederik Byrn, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--Illinois--Chicago--History and criticism.

American literature.

Chicago (Ill.)--In literature.

Chicago (Ill.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvi, 492 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Summary:

Chicago occupies a central position in both the geography and literary history of the United States. From its founding in 1833 through to its modern incarnation, the city has served as both a thoroughfare for the nation's goods and a crossroads for its cultural energies. The idea of Chicago as a crossroads of modern America is what guides this literary history, which traces how writers have responded to a rapidly changing urban environment and labored to make sense of its place in - and implications for - the larger whole. In writing that engages with the world's first skyscrapers and elevated railroads, extreme economic and racial inequality, a growing middle class, ethnic and multiethnic neighborhoods, the Great Migration of African Americans, and the city's contemporary incarnation as a cosmopolitan urban center, Chicago has been home to a diverse literature that has both captured and guided the themes of modern America.

Contents:

Cover

Half-title page

Title page

Copyright page

Contents

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Literary History of Chicago

Part I The Rise of Chicago and the Literary West

Chapter 1 From Prairie to Metropolis: Chicago as the American "Shock City"

Chapter 2 Birth, Fire, and Rebirth: Edward Payson Roe's Barriers Burned Away and the Invention of Chicago Literature

Chapter 3 "This Broad, Free Inland America of Ours": Hamlin Garland, Chicago, and the Literary West

Chapter 4 White City: The World's Columbian Exposition in Literature

Chapter 5 New Realities, New Realisms: Chicago Literature against the Genteel Tradition

Part II Business Unusual: A New Urban American Literature

Chapter 6 Among the Skyscrapers: Henry B. Fuller's Chicago Novels

Chapter 7 The Price of Success: Robert Herrick's The Memoirs of an American Citizen and the American Business Novel

Chapter 8 "A Story of Chicago": The Future of Place in Frank Norris's The Pit

Chapter 9 Amid Forces: Theodore Dreiser's Chicago

Chapter 10 Eugene Field, Finley Peter Dunne, and George Ade: A New Urban Vernacular

Part III Radicalism, Modernism, and the Chicago Renaissance

Chapter 11 Progressive Chicago: Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, and Social Reform Literature

Chapter 12 From the Prairie to the City: Willa Cather's "City of Feeling"

Chapter 13 Poetry, the Little Review, and Chicago Modernism

Chapter 14 A Spirit of Two Ages: The Romantic Modernism of Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems

Chapter 15 Building a Movement: Mary Reynolds Aldis and Little Theatre in Chicago

Chapter 16 Father to Son: Floyd Dell, Sherwood Anderson, and the Chicago Renaissance

Part IV A City of Neighborhoods: The Great Depression, Sociology, and the Black Chicago Renaissance.

Chapter 17 Chicago Ecology and James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan

Chapter 18 Chicago Gets the Blues: Migration, Depression, and the Black Renaissance

Chapter 19 Black Chicago: Richard Wright's South Side

Chapter 20 Life in Bronzeville: Humanism and Community in the Work of Gwendolyn Brooks

Chapter 21 Hustlers, Junkies, and Prostitutes: Nelson Algren's White Slums

Chapter 22 From Emptyland to Uncanny City: Saul Bellow's Jewish Chicago

Part V Traditions and Futures: Contemporary Chicago Literatures

Chapter 23 Division Street America: The Nine Chicago Literary Lives of Studs Terkel

Chapter 24 Sexual and Other Perversities: David Mamet and Contemporary Chicago Theater

Chapter 25 Chicago Crime, Blue Collar and White: Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski Novels

Chapter 26 Drawing Chicago: Chris Ware's Graphic City

Chapter 27 Across Neighborhood and National Boundaries: Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Mexican Chicago

Chapter 28 Stuart Dybek and the New Chicago's Literature of Neighborhood

Chapter 29 Chicago Now: Aleksandar Hemon, Dmitry Samarov, Erika L. Sánchez, and the Contemporary City of Immigrants

Chapter 30 Afterword: What Will Become of Us? The Future of Chicago Literatures

Selected Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 03 Sep 2021).

ISBN:

9781108800426

1108800424

9781108802659

1108802656

9781108763738

1108763731

OCLC:

1285171017