1st Edition

Urban Undergrounds Contemporary Literary and Cultural Perspectives

Edited By Patricia García, David Pike Copyright 2025
202 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

202 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

202 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Research in urban development in the social sciences has increasingly emphasized the importance of underground infrastructure for envisaging sustainable cities and for critiquing the economies of extraction. Urban Undergrounds: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Perspectives demonstrates the urgency of integrating a below-ground perspective into the emerging field of the Urban Humanities. The... Read more

List of Contributors

Chapter 1. Introduction: Underground Studies in the Humanities Today, Patricia García and David Pike

Displaced

Chapter 2. Literary Hellscapes and Urban Ontologies, Madeleine Scherer

Chapter 3. Katabasis and Climate Change, Rachel Falconer

Chapter 4. Platform Change: The Santiago Metro as an Underground Portal in Chilean Science Fiction, Guillermo González Hernández

Chapter 5. Intersecting Modernity’s Underground Imaginaries in Paris and the RER, Irène Langlet

Buried

Chapter 6. Collectivity and Care in the Necropolis: Mexico City Underground in Gabriela Jauregui’s Feral, Liesbeth François

Chapter 7. Urban Undergrounds and "Deep" Psychology in the Maximalist Novels of Ernesto Sabato and Mircea Cărtărescu, Jobst Welge

Chapter 8. A Psychogeographic Exploration of Johannesburg’s Literary Urban Underground, Sophie U. Kriegel

Chapter 9. Buried Chaos: Elden Ring’s Undergrounds and the Videoludic Palimpsest(s), Loris Rimaz

Chapter 10. Myth No More? The Warsaw Sewers in Literature, Music and Film, Anna Seidel

Chapter 11. Into the Bowels of London: Underground as Margin of the Fantastic in Michael Moorcock’s Mother London and Peter Ackroyd’s London Under, C. Bruna Mancini

Chapter 12. “Welcome to the realm of the homeless”: Athens’ Underworld in Contemporary City Literature, Riikka P. Pulkkinen

Index

Biography

Patricia García is Ramón y Cajal Senior Researcher in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. Her publications include the monographs The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature (2021) and Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature (2015). She is the Chair of the research network Fringe Urban Narratives.

David Pike is Professor of Literature and Film at American University, USA. Among his monographs are Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (1997); Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London 1800–1945 (2005); Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001 (2007); Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades (2021); Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (with Malini Ranganathan and Sapana Doshi; 2023) and After the End: Cold War Culture and Apocalyptic Imaginations in the Twenty-First Century (2024).