1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies

Edited By Lieven Ameel Copyright 2023
    514 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

    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, SOAS, University of London

    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

    Biography

    Lieven Ameel is Senior Lecturer in comparative literature at Tampere University, Tampere, Finland. He has published widely on literary experiences of space, narrative planning, and urban futures. He is co-founder and currently president of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS).