Cities and Literature

Cities and Literature PDF Author: Malcolm Miles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131541483X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book offers a critical introduction to the relation between cities and literature (fiction, poetry and literary criticism) from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It examines examples of writing from Europe, North America and post-colonial countries, juxtaposed with key ideas from urban cultural and critical theories. Cities and Literature shows how literature frames real and imagined constructs and experiences of cities. Arranged thematically each chapter offers a narrative which introduces a number of key thinkers and writers whose vision illuminates the prevailing idea of the city at the time. The themes are extended or challenged by boxed cases of specific texts or images accompanied by short critical commentaries; the structure provides readers with a map of the terrain enabling connections across time and place within manageable limits, and offers elements of critical discussion to serve a growing number of university courses which involve the intersections of cities and literature. This volume offers access to literature from an urban perspective for the social sciences, and access to urbanism from a literary viewpoint. It is an excellent resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of urban studies and English literature, planning, cultural and human geographies, architecture, cultural studies and cultural policy.

Cities and Literature

Cities and Literature PDF Author: Malcolm Miles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131541483X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book

Book Description
This book offers a critical introduction to the relation between cities and literature (fiction, poetry and literary criticism) from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It examines examples of writing from Europe, North America and post-colonial countries, juxtaposed with key ideas from urban cultural and critical theories. Cities and Literature shows how literature frames real and imagined constructs and experiences of cities. Arranged thematically each chapter offers a narrative which introduces a number of key thinkers and writers whose vision illuminates the prevailing idea of the city at the time. The themes are extended or challenged by boxed cases of specific texts or images accompanied by short critical commentaries; the structure provides readers with a map of the terrain enabling connections across time and place within manageable limits, and offers elements of critical discussion to serve a growing number of university courses which involve the intersections of cities and literature. This volume offers access to literature from an urban perspective for the social sciences, and access to urbanism from a literary viewpoint. It is an excellent resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of urban studies and English literature, planning, cultural and human geographies, architecture, cultural studies and cultural policy.

October Cities

October Cities PDF Author: Carlo Rotella
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520211448
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
"Rotella does an extraordinary job of describing both the ideology of urban planning and its actual realization in the built environment, and he shows how cultural (literary) constructions of meaning simultaneously reflect and inform social reality."—Richard Slotkin, author of Gunfighter Nation "A wonderful book, a wholly authoritative mapping of urban literature in the United States from the industrial city of the 1930s and 1940s to the post-industrial landscape of the 1960s. Fascinating and pathbreaking."—Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft

The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City

The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City PDF Author: Jeremy Tambling
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137549114
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 863

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Book Description
This book is about the impact of literature upon cities world-wide, and cities upon literature. It examines why the city matters so much to contemporary critical theory, and why it has inspired so many forms of writing which have attempted to deal with its challenges to think about it and to represent it. Gathering together 40 contributors who look at different modes of writing and film-making in throughout the world, this handbook asks how the modern city has engendered so much theoretical consideration, and looks at cities and their literature from China to Peru, from New York to Paris, from London to Kinshasa. It looks at some of the ways in which modern cities – whether capitals, shanty-towns, industrial or ‘rust-belt’ – have forced themselves on people’s ways of thinking and writing.

The City in Literature

The City in Literature PDF Author: Richard Lehan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520920511
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
This sweeping literary encounter with the Western idea of the city moves from the early novel in England to the apocalyptic cityscapes of Thomas Pynchon. Along the way, Richard Lehan gathers a rich entourage that includes Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Bram Stoker, Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Raymond Chandler. The European city is read against the decline of feudalism and the rise of empire and totalitarianism; the American city against the phenomenon of the wilderness, the frontier, and the rise of the megalopolis and the decentered, discontinuous city that followed. Throughout this book, Lehan pursues a dialectic of order and disorder, of cities seeking to impose their presence on the surrounding chaos. Rooted in Enlightenment yearnings for reason, his journey goes from east to west, from Europe to America. In the United States, the movement is also westward and terminates in Los Angeles, a kind of land's end of the imagination, in Lehan's words. He charts a narrative continuum full of constructs that "represent" a cycle of hope and despair, of historical optimism and pessimism. Lehan presents sharply etched portrayals of the correlation between rationalism and capitalism; of the rise of the city, the decline of the landed estate, and the formation of the gothic; and of the emergence of the city and the appearance of other genres such as detective narrative and fantasy literature. He also mines disciplines such as urban studies, architecture, economics, and philosophy, uncovering material that makes his study a lively read not only for those interested in literature, but for anyone intrigued by the meanings and mysteries of urban life.

The City in American Literature and Culture

The City in American Literature and Culture PDF Author: Kevin R. McNamara
Publisher:
ISBN: 1108841961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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

Seattle City of Literature

Seattle City of Literature PDF Author: Ryan Boudinot
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
ISBN: 1570619867
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This bookish history of Seattle includes essays, history and personal stories from such literary luminaries as Frances McCue, Tom Robbins, Garth Stein, Rebecca Brown, Jonathan Evison, Tree Swenson, Jim Lynch, and Sonora Jha among many others. Timed with Seattle's bid to become the second US city to receive the UNESCO designation as a City of Literature, this deeply textured anthology pays homage to the literary riches of Seattle. Strongly grounded in place, funny, moving, and illuminating, it lends itself both to a close reading and to casual browsing, as it tells the story of books, reading, writing, and publishing in one of the nation's most literary cities.

Cities for Life

Cities for Life PDF Author: Jason Corburn
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1642831727
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
In cities around the world, planning and health experts are beginning to understand the role of social and environmental conditions that lead to trauma. By respecting the lived experience of those who were most impacted by harms, some cities have developed innovative solutions for urban trauma. In Cities for Life, public health expert Jason Corburn shares lessons from three of these cities: Richmond, California; Medellín, Colombia; and Nairobi, Kenya. Corburn draws from his work with citizens, activists, and decision-makers in these cities over a ten-year period, as individuals and communities worked to heal from trauma--including from gun violence, housing and food insecurity, poverty, and other harms. Cities for Life is about a new way forward with urban communities that rebuilds our social institutions, practices, and policies to be more focused on healing and health.

Literature & the American Urban Experience

Literature & the American Urban Experience PDF Author: Michael C. Jaye
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719008481
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description


Cities I've Never Lived In

Cities I've Never Lived In PDF Author: Sara Majka
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979246
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
In subtle, sensuous prose, the stories in Sara Majka's debut collection explore distance in all its forms: the emotional spaces that open up between family members, friends, and lovers; the gaps that emerge between who we were and who we are; the gulf between our private and public selves. At the center of the collection is a series of stories narrated by a young American woman in the wake of a divorce; wry and shy but never less than open to the world, she recalls the places and people she has been close to, the dreams she has pursued and those she has left unfulfilled. Interspersed with these intimate first-person stories are stand-alone pieces where the tight focus on the narrator's life gives way to closely observed accounts of the lives of others. A book about belonging, and how much of yourself to give up in the pursuit of that, Cities I've Never Lived In offers stories that reveal, with great sadness and great humor, the ways we are most of all citizens of the places where we cannot be. Cities I've Never Lived In is the second book in Graywolf's collaboration with the literary magazine A Public Space.

At Home in the City

At Home in the City PDF Author: Elizabeth Klimasmith
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584654971
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
A lucidly written analysis of urban literature and evolving residential architecture.