City Codes
Reading the Modern Urban Novel

This is a study of the representation of the city in the modern novel.

Hana Wirth-Nesher (Author)

9780521060042, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 4 February 2008

260 pages, 12 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.422 kg

Review of the hardback: 'The book, rich in bibliography, is beautifully illustrated, free of obscure academic jargon, and is a pleasure to read.' Jewish Chronicle

City Codes is a study of the representation of the city in the modern novel that takes difference as its point of departure, so that cities are read according to the cultural and social position of the urbanite. These urban narratives are analysed in the context of a cultural repertoire of city codes, from the architectural features of window and street to the social and historical signs of the landmark and the passer-by, with the emphasis on the subject's construction of his or her place as shaped by history, politics, nationality, gender, class and race. The study moves from boundaries inscribed onto the cityscape to distances experienced by the city dwellers; its 'real' and textual cities are Warsaw, Jerusalem, New York, Chicago, Paris, London and Dublin. The novels discussed are by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Amos Oz, Theodore Dreiser, Ralph Ellison, Henry James, Henry Roth, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

Part I. Introduction: Reading Cities: 1. Cultural models of the city - whose city? 2. Narrative cartography, or the language of setting
3. The modern urban novel: new blueprint for self and place
4. The itinerary: Warsaw, Jerusalem, New York, Chicago, Paris, Dublin, and London
Part II. Partitioned Cities: Spatial and Temporal Walls: 5. Issac Bashevis Singer's The Family Moskat
6. Amos Oz's My Michael
Part III. Divided Cities: Social Walls
7. Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie
8. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
Part IV. Translated Cities: Domesticating the Foreign: 9. Henry James The Ambassadors
10. Henry Roth's Call It Sleep
Part V. Estranged Cities: Defamiliarizing Home: 11. James Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
12. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
Epilogue: Metropolitan musings
Works cited.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]