ABSTRACT
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; 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.
Table of contents
1. Literary Urban Studies: An Introduction
Lieven Ameel, Tampere University
2. Teaching Literary Urban Studies
Lieven Ameel, Tampere University; Chen Bar-Itzhak, Stanford University; Patricia Garcia, University of Alcalá; Jason Finch, Åbo Akademi; Silja Laine, Åbo Akademi; Liam Lanigan, Governors State University; Anni Lappela, Helsinki University; Juho Rajaniemi, Tampere University; Markku Salmela, Tampere University
Key Themes
3.The Map in City Literature
Liam Lanigan, Governors State University
4. The Spatial Practice of Idling as a Bridge Between Victorian and Modernist City Literature
Heidi Liedke, University of Koblenz-Landau
5. The Aesthetics of the City
Bart Keunen, Ghent University
6.The Palimpsest
Jens Gurr, University of Duisburg-Essen
7. Recursive Cities: Seriality and Literary Urban Studies
Maria Sulimma, University of Duisburg-Essen
Key Genres
8. Urban Satire in Ancient Rome
Grace A Gillies, Bates College
9. Medieval Civic Encomium: A Theme and Variations in Praise of Italian Cities
Carrie Beneš, New College of Florida, and Laura Morreale, independent scholar/Georgetown University
10.The Metropolitan Miniature
Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University
11. The City in Crime Fiction: The Case of Bologna as a Branching City
Barbara Pezzotti, Monash University
12. Infrastructural Forms: Comics, Cities, Conglomerations
Dominic Davies, City, University of London
Case Studies
13. The North African city: Literary Portraits of Colonial, Socialist, and Neoliberal Spaces
Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed, Columbia University
14. Embodying City Writing: Theatre as Bridge between the Literary and the Urban in Johannesburg
Alex Halligey, University of Johannesburg
15. Urban Mobilities in Francophone African Return Narratives
Anna-Leena Toivanen, University of Eastern Finland
16. Fictions and Frictions of Race and Space: Excavating the Transatlantic Urban Memoryscapes of Stuart Hall’s Familiar Stranger (2017) and Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies (2019)
Julia Hori, University of Cambridge
17. The Form of a City: Geographies of Constraint in Contemporary Urban Writing from France
Michael G. Kelly, University of Limerick
18. Literary representations of the 2008 revolt in Athens: The Urban Minds’ viewpoint
Riikka P. Pulkkinen, University of Helsinki
19. The Russian provincial town and the modernist Bildungsroman: Leonid Dobychin’s The Town of N
Tintti Klapuri, University of Helsinki
20. Shaping the Right to the Megalopolis: Earthquake Crónicas in Mexico City
Liesbeth Francois, KU Leuven
21. Mobilities in Montreal fiction
Ceri Morgan, Keele University
22. Black Metropolis
Patrice Nganang, Stony Brook University
23. Make the Neighborhood Great Again! Haifa’s Literature of Urban Decline and the Palimpsestic Imagination
Chen Bar-Itzhak, Stanford University
24. Writing Urban Warfare: Pedestrian Perspectives in post-2003 Baghdad
Annie Webster, Cambridge University
25. City Imaginaries from the Margins: Anosh Irani’s Bombay Novels
Rita Nnodim, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
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
Tim Hannigan, Technological University of the Shannon
27. The Urban Child, Hong Kong’s Public Housing and Public Space in Yeung Hok-Tat’s How Blue Was My Valley
Liz Ho, University of Hong Kong
28. An Invitation to the Critical Literary Urban Vocabularies of 1970s Japan
Franz Prichard, Princeton University
New Debates
29. City outcasts: perspectives from the Hispanic female fantastic
Patricia Garcia, University of Alcalá
30. Mapping the Informal City in World Literature
Eric Prieto, UC Santa Barbara
31. Queer and Trans Theories of Urban Change
Davy Knittle, College of New Jersey
32. Future cities in literature
Paul Dobraszczyk, Bartlett School of Architecture
33. Translocality in City Literature
Lena Mattheis, University of Duisburg-Essen
