Place and Space

This book offers a critical introduction to the relation between cities and literature (fiction, poetry and literary criticism) from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries.

A series of ten chapters on cities as pictured and explored by as many novelists. In these ten separate, yet connected, chapters, the city is not merely a setting for the events, but a moving force and the catalyst for action.

Using concepts from urban and cultural studies, City Fictions examines the representation of the city in the works of five important late-twentieth-century Spanish American authors, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortazar, Christina Peri Rossi, Diamela Eltit, and Carlos Monsavais.

The city has been the main setting for modern African-American literature, and the fifteen essays in this collection show that this body of writing has been remarkable for the variety of ways in which it has made significant affirmations about urban society in America.

The city intrigues and fascinates in every era. In this book, the author explores images of urban life and the city as depicted in 18th-century French writings, with particular reference to Paris, Geneva and the utopian ideal.

This sweeping literary encounter with the Western idea of the city moves from the early novel in England to the apocalyptic cityscapes of Thomas Pynchon.

In Imagined Cities, Robert Alter traces the arc of literary development triggered by the runaway growth of urban centers from the early nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth.

Cities have always been defined by their centrality. But literature demonstrates that their diverse peripheries define them, too: from suburbs to slums, rubbish dumps to nightclubs and entire failed cities.

The mean streets of San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago have dominated American crime fiction from Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett to Sara Paretsky and Ed McBain.

Returning to his native Chicago after World War II, Nelson Algren found a city transformed. The flourishing industry, culture, and literature that had placed prewar Chicago at center stage in American life were entering a time of crisis.

The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics provides a comprehensive statement and reference point for urban politics. The scope of this handbook's coverage and contributions engages with and reflects upon the most important, innovative and recent critical developments to the interdisciplinary field of urban politics, drawing upon a range of examples from within and across the Global North and Global South.

Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature.

Utilizing cross-cultural strands, this comparative study analyzes Caribbean literary representations of magic and invisible cities reworking the notion of the city as both instituted social space and imaginary community.

Theories of urban space have become the focus of a great deal of work by scholars in cultural geography, urban studies and critical theory.

The city of Rome is built not only of bricks and marble but also of the words of its writers. For the ancient inhabitant or visitor, the buildings of Rome, the public spaces of the city, were crowded with meanings and associations.

During the last few decades suburbia has grown enormously and become a phenomenon attracting the attention of scholars as well as practitioners by whom it is seen as an increasingly significant and complex area of modern life.

With essays by Stephanie Brown, Ladislava Khailova, Kathlene McDonald, Ian Peddie, Harry Thomas, and Jennifer Worley Were the 1950s an oppressive or a liberating time?

Explores how American writers articulate the complexity of twentieth-century suburbia Examines the ways American writers from the 1960s to the present have sought to articulate the complexity of the US suburbs.

We all know what suburbia is, indeed the majority of us live in it. Yet, despite this ubituity, with no formal definition of the contept, the suburbs have developed in our collective imagination through representations in popular culture, charting changing trends both in the suburbs and popular media consumption and production.

This book reevaluates fiction devoted to the postwar American suburb, examining the way these works imagine suburbia as a communal structure designed to advance a particular American identity.

The Promise of the Suburbs reveals that, far from enforcing oppressive conformity, the suburbs offered diverse social interactions, opportunities for female professionalism, and new ideas about domestic space and urban modernity.

Beginning with Shirley Jackson's The Road Through the Wall , Murphy discusses representative texts from each decade, including I Am Legend , Bewitched , Halloween and Desperate Housewives .

Maura D'Amore explores how Henry David Thoreau, Henry Ward Beecher, Donald Grant Mitchell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and others utilized the pen to plot opportunities for a new sort of male agency grounded, literarily and spatially, in a suburbanized domestic landscape.

Green lawns, swimming pools, backyard barbecues: welcome to suburbia, the promised land of the American middle class. Or is it? To judge by the depiction of suburbia in prominent works of American fiction and film, the suburbs are also home to dysfunctional families, broken communities, and widespread misery.

Tracing the suburb's emergence as a crucial setting and subject of the twentieth-century American novel, Catherine Jurca identifies a decidedly masculine obsession with the suburban home and a preoccupation with its alternative--the experience of spiritual and emotional dislocation that she terms "homelessness."

Rural spaces are connected with different cultural, economic, social and political codes and meanings. In this book these meanings are analysed through gender. The articles concretely show the process of producing gender and the ways in which accepted gender-based behaviour has been constructed at different times and in different groups.

The idea of place--any place--remains one of our most basic yet slippery concepts. It is a space with boundaries whose limits may be definite or indefinite; it can be a real location or an abstract mental, spiritual, or imaginary construction.

Southwestern writers face a dilemma: their writing about the region's open spaces attracts new residents who "love the desert to death" by building homes and paving roads.

Georg Guillemin's visionary approach to the work of Western novelist Cormac McCarthy combines an overall survey of McCarthy's eight novels in print with a comprehensive analysis of the author's evolving ecopastoralism.

In this stimulating study, Mary Weaks-Baxter views the Southern Renaissance, 1900--1960, from a fresh perspective. Many writers in the South began consciously to create new myths for the region at the start of the twentieth century, and these myths,

Essays in Rough South, Rural South describe and discuss the work of southern writers who began their careers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The contributors to this work address how the environmentalist Henry David Thoreau and his successors attempted to cope with the epistemological split between the perceiver and place inherent in writing about nature.

Uneven Land explores the ambiguous conceptual position of agriculture and nature in American literature during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Nicholas Spencer argues that the radical American fiction of Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, and Josephine Herbst reimagines the spatial concerns of late nineteenth-century utopian American texts.

This far-reaching study explores the utopian narrative as a medium for understanding the social space of the modern nation-state. Considering the narrative utopia from its earliest manifestation in Thomas More's sixteenth-century work Utopia to some of the most influential utopias of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book is an astute study of a literary genre as well as a nuanced dialectical meditation on the history of utopian thinking as a quintessential history of modernity.

Narrating Utopia is about that story, the curious hybrid of the traveler’s tale and the classical dialogue that emerges in the Renaissance, but whose outlines remain clearly apparent even in some of the most recent utopian writing.

This volume charts the rich spectrum of literary utopian projects between 1885 and 1945, and reconstructs their cultural work by locating them in the material 'spaces' in which they originated. The book brings together work by leading academics and younger scholars.

The first full length study of women's utopian spatial imagination in the seventeenth and eigtheenth centuries, this book explores the sophisticated correlation between identity and social space.

Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of 13 years - the theatre, as the author called it, of all my struggles and all my ideas.

Anderson's essay shows how the European processes of inventing nationalism were transported to the Third World through colonialism and were adapted by subject races in Latin America and Asia.

This book sheds light on the intimate relationship between built space and the mind, exploring the ways in which architecture inhabits and shapes both the memory and the imagination.

This text challenges some of the more pious views of Emily Dickinson. The author examines her background, letters and poems from a social, cultural and historical perspective, and presents a more complex portrait of Dickinson and her work.

James Krasner offers an interdisciplinary, humanistic investigation of the sense of touch in our experience of domestic space and identity.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Few concepts are more widely discussed or more passionately invoked in American public culture than that of privacy.

By setting these novels and poems in conversation with the work of contemporary theorists, she illuminates pressing and unanswered questions about subjectivity.

This book investigates shifts in the gendered spaces assigned to men and women in the public & private domains and their changing modes of interconnection; in concert with these social spaces.

Polly Allen examines Gilman's approach to architecture, landscape, and neighborhood design and discusses Gilman's case against prevailing household design and looks at her philosophy of world improvement.

Dressing rooms, introduced into English domestic architecture during the seventeenth century provided elite women with imprecedented private space at home and in so doing promised them an equally unprecedented autonomy by providing a space for self-fashioning, eroticism and contemplation.

Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson have brought together some of our most highly regarded southern historians and literary critics to consider race, gender, and texts through three centuries and from a wealth of vantage points.

Domestic interiors and housing environments have historically been portrayed as a framing device for the representation of individuals and social groups.

In a breathtakingly provocative and original study that forever de-mythologizes the masculinist west of Owen Wister and Wallace Stegner, Krista Comer makes a persuasive case that there is a new literary female regionalism and that the heart of this new regionalist sensibility is decidedly feminist and postmodern.

The ten essays in this collection explore the discrete yet overlapping female spaces of privacy and domesticity in early modern England.

The study shows how women¿s literature has inscribed itself into the American discourse of the Whitmanesque ¿open road¿, or, more generally, the ¿freedom of the road¿. Women writers have participated in this powerful American myth, yet at the same time also have rejected that myth as fundamentally based on gendered and racial/ethnic hierarchies and power structures, and modified it in the process of writing back to it.

This book provides the reader with a representative picture of modern utopian imagination in its negotiations with questions of sex and gender, discussing the utopian philosophy of Thomas More and Ernst Bloch.

This book brings together Massey's key writings on three areas central to a range of disciplines. In addition, the author reflects on the development of these ideas and outlines her current position on these important issues.

Recent revisions of the idea of separate spheres, which governed Victorian scholarship of the past two decades, have provoked considerable interest in both domestic and political fiction of the period and in the political dimensions of domestic life.

This timely and thought-provoking book explores children's lives in modern cities. At a time of intense debate about the quality of life in cities, this book examines how they can become good places for children to live in.

This collection highlights the interplay between language and liminal places and spaces in building distinct narratives of selfhood.

This study examines the interdependence of gender, sexuality and space in the early modern period, which saw the inception of architecture as a discipline and gave rise to the first custodial institutions for women, including convents for reformed prostitutes.

This collection addresses the concept of gender in the middle ages through the study of place and space, exploring how gender and space may be mutually constructive and how individuals and communities make and are made by the places and spaces they inhabit.

Lucinda Cole's Imperfect Creatures offers the first full-length study of the shifting, unstable, but foundational status of "vermin" as creatures and category in the early modern literary, scientific, and political imagination.

Ideas and concepts of liminality have long shaped debates around the uses and practices of space in constructions of identity, particularly in relation to different forms of travel such as tourism, migration and pilgrimage, and the social, cultural and experiential landscapes associated with these and other mobilities.

This book sits in the intersection between cultural studies and performance studies. It seeks to break theoretical and empirical ground by reframing understandings of home and exile.

This edited collection explores the axis where monstrosity and borderlands meet to reflect the tensions, apprehensions, and excitement over the radical changes of the early modern era.

Sacred Thresholds. The Door to the Sanctuary in Late Antiquity offers a far-reaching account of boundaries within pagan and Christian sanctuaries: gateways in a precinct, outer doors of a temple or church, inner doors of a cella.

This edited book provides a unique opportunity for international scholars to contribute to the exploration of liminality in the field of Anglo-American literature written by or about women between the Victorian period and the Second World War.

In Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones: Ecocriticism and the Liminal from "Invisible Man" to "The Walking Dead," Lee Rozelle chronicles the weirdest, ugliest, and most mixed-up characters to appear on the literary scene since World War II--creatures intimately linked to damaged habitats that rise from the muck, not to destroy or rule the world, but to save it.

In Ambient Rhetoric, Thomas Rickert seeks to dissolve the boundaries of the rhetorical tradition and its basic dichotomy of subject and object.

Written by one of the most prominent thinkers in sound studies, Amplifications presents a perspective on sound narrated through the experiences of a sound artist and writer.

An invitation to contemplate what would happen if we heard the world as attentively as we see it. Balancing big ideas with playful wit and lyrical prose, this imaginative volume identifies the role of sound in Western experience as the primary medium in which the presence and persistence of life acquire tangible form.

The act of drawing a line or uttering a word is often seen as integral to the process of making art. This is especially obvious in music and the visual arts, but applies to literature, performance, and other arts as well.

Schweighauser traces the acoustic imagination of American literature from naturalism to postmodernism. He reads the noises writers represent as fictional responses to the social, cultural, and political changes and conflicts of modernity and postmodernity.

Drawing on a wide range of materials, including experimental movies, pop songs, photographs, and well-known poems and paintings, Pop Modernism shows that experimental art in the early twentieth century was centrally concerned with the reinvention of everyday life.

The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies is an extensive volume presenting a comparative and historically informed understanding of the workings of sound in culture, while also mapping potential future directions for research in the field.

This study examines postmodern literature-- including works by Kurt Vonnegut, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Ishmael Reed, and Thomas Pynchon --arguing that one of the formal logics of postmodern fiction is heterophonia: a pluralism of sound.

What does it mean to write in and about sound? How can literature, seemingly a silent, visual medium, be sound-bearing? This volume considers these questions by attending to the energy generated by the sonic in literary studies from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Sounds and Perception is a collection of original essays on auditory perception and the nature of sounds - an emerging area of interest in the philosophy of mind and perception, and in the metaphysics of sensible qualities.

Rangel argues that the portrayal in poetry of the modern city as a disintegrated, ruined space is part of a critique of the visions of progress and the historical process of modernization that developed during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Enjuto Rangel's study investigates the virtually unexplored map of modern ruins in modern poetry.

Gay Hawkins explores the ethical significance of waste in everyday life―from the broadest conceptions of waste and loss to how the environmental movement has affected the ways we think about garbage, the ways we deal with it, and the ways in which we view others' reactions to waste.

Francesco Orlando explores Western literature's obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc.). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, Orlando traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional becomes the dominant value of Western culture.

Greg Kennedy inquires into the meaning of disposable objects and explores the nature of our prodigious refuse. He takes trash as a real ontological problem resulting from our unsettled relation to nature. The metaphysical drive from immanence to transcendence leaves us in an alien world of objects drained of meaningful physical presence. Consequently, they become interpreted as beings that somehow essentially lack being, and exist in our technological world only to disappear.

Andrew Hui explains how the invention of the ruin propelled poets into creating works that were self-aware of their absorption of the past as well as their own survival in the future.

For many of us, ruins are alluring, puzzling and endlessly fascinating: this elegant book seeks to explore why. What is it that makes us suspicious of works or histories that are too smooth, too continuous? Is it that urban experience is inherently discontinuous and fragmented, or that the only truths we can believe are partial ones?

This study reexamines the ethos of national progress by analyzing how American writers import images of ruins from European aesthetics to cast the city as a site of instability and cultural impermanence.

Waste: A Philosophy of Things investigates the complexities of waste in sculpture, literature and architecture. It traces a new philosophy of things from the ancient to the modern and will be of interest to those working in cultural and literary studies, archaeology, architecture and continental philosophy.

Little suggests that American culture tries to resolve this tension through prudent 'waste management' transforming and recycling where possible, or casting out the polluted other that cannot be integrated within the culture. Yet, Little argues, there is always a troubling remainder, which he calls 'virtual waste.' His study is an examination of the production of virtual waste in selected twentieth-century American texts.