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; 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 https://www.taylorfrancis.com

chapter 1|10 pages

Literary Urban Studies

An Introduction

part |76 pages

Key Concepts

chapter 3|15 pages

The Map in City Literature

chapter 5|15 pages

The Aesthetics of the City

chapter 6|15 pages

Palimpsest

chapter 7|16 pages

Recursive Cities

Seriality and Literary Urban Studies

part |74 pages

Key Genres

chapter 8|15 pages

Urban Satire in Ancient Rome

chapter 9|16 pages

Medieval Civic Encomium

A Theme and Variations in Praise of Italian Cities

chapter 10|13 pages

The Metropolitan Miniature

chapter 11|14 pages

The City in Crime Fiction

The Case of Bologna as a Branching City

chapter 12|14 pages

Infrastructural Forms

Comics, Cities, Conglomerations

part |241 pages

Case Studies

chapter 13|14 pages

The North African City

Literary Portraits of Colonial, Socialist, and Neoliberal Spaces

chapter 14|16 pages

Embodying City Writing

Theatre as Bridge Between the Literary and the Urban in Johannesburg

chapter 16|14 pages

Fictions and Frictions of Race and Space

Excavating the Transatlantic Urban Memoryscapes of Stuart Hall's Familiar Stranger and Hazel Carby's Imperial Intimacies

chapter 17|16 pages

The Form of a City

Geographies of Constraint in Contemporary Urban Writing from France

chapter 18|18 pages

Literary Representations of the 2008 Revolt in Athens

The Urban Minds' Viewpoint

chapter 19|13 pages

The Russian Provincial Town and the Modernist Bildungsroman

Leonid Dobychin's The Town of N

chapter 20|15 pages

Shaping the Right to the Megalopolis

Earthquake Crónicas in Mexico City

chapter 21|14 pages

Mobilities in Montreal Fiction

chapter 22|20 pages

Black Metropolis

chapter 24|14 pages

Writing Urban Warfare

Pedestrian Perspectives in Post-2003 Baghdad

chapter 25|13 pages

City Imaginaries From the Margins

Anosh Irani's Bombay Novels

chapter 26|15 pages

Contemporary Travel Writing of Delhi

From Belatedness and Decay to Globalist Eruption in William Dalrymple's City of Djinns and Rana Dasgupta's Capital

part |71 pages

New Debates

chapter 29|15 pages

City Outcasts

Perspectives From the Hispanic Female Fantastic

chapter 32|15 pages

Future Cities in Literature 1

chapter 33|11 pages

Translocality in City Literature