The City in American Literature and Culture

This book examines what literature and film reveal about the urban USA. Subjects include culture, class, race, crime, and disaster.

Kevin R. McNamara (Edited by)

9781108841962, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 August 2021

350 pages, 6 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.9 cm, 0.78 kg

'Most of the essayists have some training and/or professional experience in literary study, but they write with a breadth of view and depth of insight that is notable; for instance, they repeatedly address the role of urban and regional planning. McNamara … can be praised for the cast of contributors he assembled, ranging from such well-established figures as John Carlos Rowe and William Boelhower to young scholars such as Kathy Knapp, Carlo Rotella, and Douglas Reichert Powell. ' W. Franklin, Choice Connect

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.

Introduction Kevin R. McNamara
1. Antebellum urban publics David Henkin
2. Intersections: streets and other democratic spaces John Fagg
3. The literature of neighborhood Carlo Rotella
4. Writing the ghetto, inventing the slum Thomas Heise
5. Urban borders, open wounds Ana María Manzanas Calvo and Jesús Benito Sánchez
6. Gentrification James Peacock
7. House rules: The New Yorker and the making of the white suburban liberal woman Kathy Knapp
8. Transnational American cities: Camilo Mejía's ar Ramadi, Iraq, and Jason Hall's Topeka, Kansas John Carlos Rowe
9. The poetics of rims: New Orleans Ruth Salvaggio
10. American vertigo: the metropolis and the new biopolitical order William Boelhower
11. Labor's city Joseph Entin
12. White immigrant trajectories in US urban literature: the Italian American case Fred Gardaphé
13. Crime and violence, or hard-boiled chronicles of mean streets and their hidden truths Brian Tochterman
14. Disaster, apocalypse, and after Sean Grattan
15. Bohemia Erik Mortenson
16. The spatial turn and critical race studies Sophia Bamert and Hsuan L. Hsu
17. From trauma theory to systemic violence: narratives of post-katrina New Orleans Arin Keeble
18. Security theory Johannes Voelz
19. Posthuman cities Andrew Pilsch
20. Critical regionalism: why Hillbilly Elegy and its critics matter to writing about cities Douglas Reichert Powell
Coda: city and polis Kevin R. McNamara.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS]