Many outsiders might view New York City as inscrutable - a place too vast and complex to understand - never mind to live in. But residents of New York know the city as a place that has both limits and great possibilities. The Place Where We Dwell encourages the reader to explore the city in all of its complexity.
Literature of New York is the first collection of critical essays to look at historical and contemporary images of New York through an examination of works of literature by New York writers about New York. New York City is a study in contradictions; it offers at once a sense of possibility, cultivation, self-realization and a fear of corruption, decay, and despair. The literature of New York is representative of American national identity and of the unique nature of the metropolitan, urban experience. The essays are arranged chronologically to reflect the changing significance of the city in relation to various movements in American literary and cultural history. It includes essays on the relation of urban public space to various editions of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; the theme of surveillance in the literature of New York by Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, and Ann Petry; fear of the cultural Other within modern New York in Henry James’ "The Jolly Corner"; use of the setting of New York City to emphasize both the dynamic energy and increasing anxiety of the modern American cityscape in Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925); the satiric portrayal of New York society in the 1920s and 30s in Dorothy Parker's recently collected stories and sketches; the response to post-WWII New York City in fictionalized autobiography in the personal narratives of Audre Lorde and Diane di Prima; the poetics of second generation New York School poet Ted Berrigan in relation to his predecessors; the representation of New York in postmodern fiction, depicting at once a sense of loss at the inability to return to the old neighborhood of the past in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis and the possibility of reasserting order and meaning amidst the chaos and terror of post-911 New York in Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006). Whether expressing nostalgia for the past, hope for the future, fear of the unknown, or the possibility of self-actualization, the literature of New York continues to draw inspiration from its locale and is as complex, contradictory, and creative as the City itself. Contributors include Karen Karbiener, Mark James Noonan, Jonathan Readey, Heidi E. Bollinger, Sabrina Fuchs-Abrams, Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega, Michael Angelo Tata, Jessica Maucione, and Sonia Baelo-Allué.
Charting the intersection of aesthetic representation and the material conditions of urban space, The City Since 9/11 posits that the contemporary metropolis provides a significant context for reassessing theoretical concerns related to narrative, identity, home, and personal precarity. In the years since the September 11 attacks, writers and filmmakers have explored urban spaces as contested sites—shaped by the prevailing discourses of neoliberalism, homeland security, and the war on terror, but also haunted by an absence in the landscape that registers loss and prefigures future menace. In works of literature, film, and television, the city emerges as a paradoxical space of permanence and vulnerability and a convergence point for anxieties about globalization, structural inequality, and apocalyptic violence. Building on previous scholarship addressing trauma and the spectacle of terror, the contributors also draw upon works of philosophy, urban studies, and postmodern geography to theorize how literary and visual representations expose the persistent conflicts that arise as cities rebuild in the shadow of past ruins. Their essays advance new lines of argument that clarify art’s role in contemporary debates about spatial practices, gentrification, cosmopolitanism, memory and history, nostalgia, the uncanny and the abject, postmodern virtuality, the politics of realism, and the economic and social life of cities. The book offers fresh readings of familiar post-9/11 novels, such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, but it also considers works by Teju Cole, Joseph O’Neill, Silver Krieger, Colum McCann, Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Pynchon, Colson Whitehead, Paul Auster, William Gibson, Amitav Ghosh, and Katherine Boo. In addition, The City Since 9/11 includes essays on the films Children of Men, Hugo, and the adaptation of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, chapters on the television series The Bridge, The Killing, and The Wire, and an analysis of Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence and the 9/11 Memorial.
Brooklyn has all the features of a "global borough": It is a base of immigrant labor and ethnically diverse communities, of social and cultural capital, of global transportation, cultural production, and policy innovation. At once a model of sustainable urbanization and overdevelopment, the question is now: What will become of Global Brooklyn? Tracing the emergence of Brooklyn from village outpost to global borough, Brooklyn Tides investigates the nature and consequences of global forces that have crossed the East River and identifies alternative models for urban development in global capitalism. Benjamin Shepard and Mark Noonan provide a unique ethnographic reading of the literature, social activism, and changing tides impacting this ever-transforming space. Cover and interior images of a rapidly transforming global borough by photographer Caroline Shepard.
The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work.
Encompassing a broad definition of the topic, this Companion provides a survey of the literary magazine from its earliest days to the contemporary moment. It offers a comprehensive theorization of the literary magazine in the wake of developments in periodical studies in the last decade, bringing together a wide variety of approaches and concerns. With its distinctive chronological and geographical scope, this volume sheds new light on the possibilities and difficulties of the concept of the literary magazine, balancing a comprehensive overview of key themes and examples with greater attention to new approaches to magazine research. Divided into three main sections, this book offers: • Theory—it investigates definitions and limits of what a literary magazine is and what it does. • History and regionalism—a very broad historical and geographic sweep draws new connections and offers expanded definitions. • Case studies—these range from key modernist little magazines and the popular middlebrow to pulp fiction, comics, and digital ventures, widening the ambit of the literary magazine. The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine offers new and unforeseen cross-connections across the long history of literary periodicals, highlighting the ways in which it allows us to trace such ideas as the “literary” as well as notions of what magazines do in a culture.
Through a wide-ranging series of essays and relevant readings, A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction presents an overview of American fiction published since the conclusion of the First World War. Features a wide-ranging series of essays by American, British, and European specialists in a variety of literary fields Written in an approachable and accessible style Covers both classic literary figures and contemporary novelists Provides extensive suggestions for further reading at the end of each essay
A History of American Working-Class Literature sheds light not only on the lived experience of class but the enormously varied creativity of working-class people throughout the history of what is now the United States. By charting a chronology of working-class experience, as the conditions of work have changed over time, this volume shows how the practice of organizing, economic competition, place, and time shape opportunity and desire. The subjects range from transportation narratives and slave songs to the literature of deindustrialization and globalization. Among the literary forms discussed are memoir, journalism, film, drama, poetry, speeches, fiction, and song. Essays focus on plantation, prison, factory, and farm, as well as on labor unions, workers' theaters, and innovative publishing ventures. Chapters spotlight the intersections of class with race, gender, and place. The variety, depth, and many provocations of this History are certain to enrich the study and teaching of American literature.
International specialists explore magazines and newspapers from a sociocultural perspective allowing us to understand the relation between its audience and these much beloved friends from the late seventeenth to the twenty first century. A must-read for academic and interested readers who wish to explore new and relevant ways to analyse periodicals.
