Table of Contents

Introduction and Acknowledgements.- Prologue: City-Theory and Writing in Paris and Chicago: Space, Gender, Ethnicity.- PART I. THE CITY IN THEORY.- Introduction.- 1. Modern Urban Theory and the Study of Literature; Jason Finch.- 2. Theorists of the Postmodern, Global, and Digital City; J. A. Smith.- 3. Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project; Ben Moore.- 4. ‘How did the Everyday Manage to become so Interesting?’; Alfie Bown.- PART II. EUROPEAN CITIES.- Introduction.- 5. Dublin; Daniel Bristow.- 6. Medieval and Early Modern Cities: London, Paris, Florence, and Amsterdam; Jeremy Tambling.- 7. Modern London: 1820-2020; Jason Finch.- 8. Balzac: A Socio-Material Archaeology of Paris; Jonathan White.- 9. Berlin: Flesh and Stone, Space and Time; Ulrike Zitzlsperger.- 10. Petersburg on the Threshold; Paul Fung.- 11. St. Petersburg and Moscow in Twentieth-century Russian Literature; Isobel Palmer.- 12. Spain’sLiterature of the City; Aitor Bikandi-Meijas and Paul Vita.- 13. Lisbon: What the Tourist Should Read; Daniel Bristow.- 14. Vienna; Jeremy Tambling.- 15. Venice: Impossible City; David Spurr.- PART III. NORTH AMERICAN CITIES.- Introduction.- 16. Merging Naturalism and the Unreal: An Approach to America’s Literary Cities; Markku Salmela.- 17. 'I would go to Toronto': The City in Contemporary Writing; Tom Ue.- 18. New York Fiction; Markku Salmela and Lieven Ameel.- PART IV: LATIN AMERICAN CITIES.- Introduction.- 19. The Repeating City: Urban Space in Hispanic Caribbean Literature; Elena Valdez.- 20. Mexico City; David William Foster.- 21. Cities, Territories, and Conflict: Narrative and the Colombian City in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century; Andrés Mesa.- 22. Peru: Words Under the Fog; Fernando Rivera.- 23. Brasília’s Literature; Sophia Beal.- 24. Rio’s Favelas: Mapping the Periphery; Leila Lehnen.- 25. The Case of Rio de Janeiro: Exploring Geographies of Resistance and Domination; Kátia da Costa Bezerra.- 26. São Paulo in Transit; Leila Lehnen.- 27. Santiago, Chile from the Mapocho River: Landscape, Border, and Waste; Claudia Darrigrandi Navarro.- 28. Buenos Aires; David William Foster.- PART V. AFRICAN CITIES.- Introduction.- 29. An Overview of African Cities and Writing; Alastair Niven.- 30. Cairo and Alexandria; Ahmed Elbeshlawy.- 31. Lagos in Nigerian Literature; Louis James.- 32. Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo: Cowboys, Cosmonauts and Capitalism; Kaspar Loftin.- 33. What is the City in Africa?; Patrick Williams.- 34. South African Cities; Marita Wenzel.- PART VI. ASIAN CITIES.- Introduction.- 35. Istanbul; Valerie Kennedy.- 36. Beirut; Ghenwa Hayek.- 37. India and Its Cities Through the Eyes of Its Writers; Alastair Niven.- 38. Out of Place in Delhi: Some Vignettes of Loss;Stuti Khanna.- 39. Fictional and Cinematic Representations of the Journey of Bombay to Mumbai; Nilufer E. Bharucha.- 40. City and Country in Chinese Fiction: An Historical Survey; Leo Ou-fan Lee.- 41. A Cinematic Guide to Asian Cities: Taipei, Seoul, and the Cinema of Destruction; Louis Lo.- 42. A Megalopolis in Transit: Waterways as the Witness of Early Twentieth-Century Tokyo; Ikuho Amano.- 43. Australasian City Writing; Michael Hollington.- PART VII: URBAN THEMES.- Introduction and Epilogue.- 44. Realism and its revelations: City Perspectives in London and Paris; Sara Thornton.- 45. Conceptualising the Modernist City; Iain Bailey.- 46. Travel Writing and the City; Paul Smethurst.- 47. The Urban Connections of Crime Fiction; Stephen Knight.- 48. Cities Utopian, Dystopian and Apocalyptic; Lieven Ameel.- Further Reading.- 

Promotional Information

"The relationship between literature and the city is a Gordian knot, that becomes more tangled the more the critic tries to unpick it. Rather than slicing through it, this ambitious collection of essays instead catalogues its dimensions, ranging far beyond the familiar studies of European and Ameriacan cities into Latin America, Africa, and Asia. With essays on Brasilia, Lagos, Beiruit, and Tokyo, as well as Lisbon and Vienna, the result is a fascinating, almost encyclopaedic, account of urban literature on a scale that no one else has yet attempted." (Scott McCracken, Queen Mary University of London, UK)

About the Author

Jeremy Tambling has been Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong and at the University of Manchester, UK; and is author of over twenty books on literary and cultural theory, many engaged with cities and urban theory.

Reviews

“This large compendium explores the importance of writings about a city to how cities become embedded in the popular imagination. … The handbook abounds with examples of themes and locations. … of interest to those who believe that fiction can be as illuminating as nonfiction, and that the way cities have become inscribed in literature shapes and reflects perceptions of these spaces.” (E&U Environment & Urbanization, environmentandurbanization.org, February, 2018)

“The book fundamentally addresses what effect on literature the various great cities around the world have (intrinsically) had. … there is a rich tapestry of depth running throughout this stunning book, that, for anyone remotely interested in literature and/or cities, comes both highly and regally recommended.” (David Marx Book Reviews, davidmarxbookreviews.wordpress.com, November, 2017)