The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature

This book addresses the way cities have given rise to key aesthetic dispositions that are central to debates in World Literature.

Ato Quayson (Edited by), Jini Kim Watson (Edited by)

9781316517888, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 July 2023

300 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.653 kg

This book forges new ground in the relationship between cities and World Literature. Through a series of essays spanning a variety of metropolises, it shows how cities have given rise to key aesthetic dispositions, acts of linguistic and cultural translation, topographic conceptualizations, global imaginaries, and narratives of self-fashioning that are central to understanding World Literature and its debates. Alongside an introduction and three theoretical chapters, each chapter focuses on a particular city in the Global North or Global South, and brings World Literary debates—on translation, literary networks, imperial and migrant imaginaries, centers and peripheries—into conversation with the urban literary histories of Beijing, Bombay/Mumbai, Dublin, Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Lagos, London, Mexico City, Moscow and St Petersburg, New York, Paris, Singapore, and Sydney.

1. Introduction: world literature, cities and urban imaginaries Jini Kim Watson and Ato Quayson
Part I. Critical Approaches: 2. Chicago schools: the skyscraper in translation Reinhold Martin
3. Writing the Manichean city from colonial to global metropolis Jini Kim Watson
4. The urban itinerary and the city map: the experience of metropolitan space Robert T. Tally, Jr
Part II. Spotlight Literary Cities: 5. The neighbourhood and the sweatshop: immigrant and diasporic rites-of-passage in the literature of New York Ato Quayson
6. The whole World in little: London as the capital of world literature Rashmi Varma
7. Unworlding Paris: Flânerie and epistemic encounters from Baudelaire to Gauz Ruth Bush
8. Sketching the city with words: Istanbul through time in Turkish literary texts Hatice Aynur
9. Romance and liminal space in the 20th Century Cairo Novel Noor Naga
10. Bombay/Mumbai and its multilingual literary pathways to the world Anjali Nerleker
11. At home in the world: Singapore's literary trans locality Philip Holden
12. Imagining the migrant in 21st century Johannesburg Megan Jones
13. Russia: borders and centers Anne Lounsbery
14. Cityful passing away: resituating Dublin Christopher Morash
15. From altepetl to megacity: narrating Mexico City as world literature María Moreno Carranco and José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra
16. (In)Visible Beijing within and without world literature Weijie Song
17. Worlding Lagos in the long 20th Century Madhu Krishnan
18. Haunted vitality: Sydney, colonial modernity and world literature Brigid Rooney.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]