Description
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.
Table of Contents
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.
