Over the past decades, the growing interest in the study of literature of the city has led to the development of literary urban studies as a discipline in its own right. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides a methodical overview of the fundamentals of this developing discipline and a detailed outline of new directions in the field.
It consists of 33 newly commissioned chapters that provide an outline of contemporary literary urban studies. The Companion covers all of the main theoretical approaches as well as key literary genres, with case studies covering a range of different geographical, cultural, and historical settings. The final chapters provide a window into new debates in the field. The three focal issues are key concepts and genres of literary urban studies; a reassessment and critique of classical urban studies theories and the canon of literary capitals; and methods for the analysis of cities in literature.
The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to the city in literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on city literature.
Author(s): Lieven Ameel
Series: Routledge Literature Companions
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 514
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
1 Literary Urban Studies: An Introduction
2 Teaching Literary Urban Studies
Key Concepts
3 The Map in City Literature
4 The Spatial Practice of Idling as a Bridge Between Victorian and Modernist City Literature
5 The Aesthetics of the City
6 Palimpsest
7 Recursive Cities: Seriality and Literary Urban Studies
Key Genres
8 Urban Satire in Ancient Rome
9 Medieval Civic Encomium: A Theme and Variations in Praise of Italian Cities
10 The Metropolitan Miniature
11 The City in Crime Fiction: The Case of Bologna as a Branching City
12 Infrastructural Forms: Comics, Cities, Conglomerations
Case Studies
13 The North African City: Literary Portraits of Colonial, Socialist, and Neoliberal Spaces
14 Embodying City Writing: Theatre as Bridge Between the Literary and the Urban in Johannesburg
15 Urban Mobilities in Francophone African Return Narratives
16 Fictions and Frictions of Race and Space: Excavating the Transatlantic Urban Memoryscapes of Stuart Hall’s Familiar Stranger and Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies
17 The Form of a City: Geographies of Constraint in Contemporary Urban Writing from France
18 Literary Representations of the 2008 Revolt in Athens: The Urban Minds’ Viewpoint
19 The Russian Provincial Town and the Modernist Bildungsroman: Leonid Dobychin’s The Town of N
20 Shaping the Right to the Megalopolis: Earthquake Crónicas in Mexico City
21 Mobilities in Montreal Fiction
22 Black Metropolis
23 Make the Neighborhood Great Again! Literature of Urban Decline and the Palimpsestic Imagination
24 Writing Urban Warfare: Pedestrian Perspectives in Post-2003 Baghdad
25 City Imaginaries From the Margins: Anosh Irani’s Bombay Novels
26 Contemporary Travel Writing of Delhi: From Belatedness and Decay to Globalist Eruption in William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns and Rana Dasgupta’s Capital
27 The Urban Child and Hong Kong’s Public Housing and Public Space in Yeung Hok-Tat’s How Blue Was My Valley
28 An Invitation to the Critical Literary Urban Vocabularies of 1970s Japan
New Debates
29 City Outcasts: Perspectives From the Hispanic Female Fantastic
30 Mapping the Informal City in World Literature
31 Queer and Trans Theories of Urban Change
32 Future Cities in Literature
33 Translocality in City Literature
Index
