ABSTRACT
From a critical and scholarly perspective, the urban novel in American literature remains at best ignored in favor of works wherein the protagonist is more likely to attempt to escape civilization, figuratively and literally the city This status seems ironic since in addition to being a figurative and literal errand into the wilderness, the settlement of the U.S. also has been seen as a metaphoric attempt to build a shining city on a hill. Besides the attempt to escape civilization, the canonical works of American literature tend to represent humans in relation to such concepts as the taming of the wilderness in one fashion or another, or attempts to wrest a living from the land, struggling perhaps, to live out the Jeffersonian rural ideal. In any case, cities have generally been represented as antithetical to a well-rounded human existence; in such early works as Brockden Brown’s Arthur Merwyn and Melville’s Pierre, the city was a place of evil and plague in contrast to the more bucolic, pastoral rural settings. Even today, when the great majority of the American population is urbanized, the American mythos continues to be dominated by rural and wilderness imagery. This overall favorable view of the rural over the urban continues to exist in spite of the fact that such cherished American metaphors as the melting pot and the salad bowl would seem impossible without the close spatial proximity and mixture of ethnicities found in urban environments.
