Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (The American Literatures Initiative) - Hardcover
Urban Underworlds is an exploration of city spaces, pathologized identities, lurid fears, and American literature. Surveying the 1890s to the 1990s, Thomas Heise chronicles how and why marginalized populations immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities have been selectively targeted as "urban underworlds" and their neighborhoods characterized as miasmas of disease and moral ruin.
The quarantining of minority cultures helped to promote white, middle-class privilege. Following a diverse array of literary figures who differ with the assessment of the underworld as the space of the monstrous Other, Heise contends that it is a place where besieged and neglected communities are actively trying to take possession of their own neighborhoods.
The quarantining of minority cultures helped to promote white, middle-class privilege. Following a diverse array of literary figures who differ with the assessment of the underworld as the space of the monstrous Other, Heise contends that it is a place where besieged and neglected communities are actively trying to take possession of their own neighborhoods.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
THOMAS HEISE is an assistant professor of English at McGill University and the author of Horror Vacui: Poems.
Review:
"Heise's illuminating history of the urban underworld in twentieth-century American literature makes excellent use of critical geography to show how urban planners, social reformers, and literary artists conceived the metropolis and its ostensibly dark nether depths." (Sean McCann author of A Pinnacle of Feeling 2010-03-17)
"A timely and eloquent contribution to a growing body of critical work on the stratified meanings of the modern city. Heise convincingly weds textual and spatial analysis in a nuanced reading of the capitalist dialectic whereby uneven development produces urban underworlds and underworld contradictions spur uneven development." (David Pike author of Metropolis on the Styx 2010-07-13)
"Urban Underworlds offers sensitive, satisfying close readings of a vast body of urban literature to argue that these intimate portraits of America's ethnic, racial, and sexual underworlds expose the larger forces of uneven capitalist development. It also happens to be a beautifully written book."
(Modern Fiction Studies 2012-08-29)
"A timely and eloquent contribution to a growing body of critical work on the stratified meanings of the modern city. Heise convincingly weds textual and spatial analysis in a nuanced reading of the capitalist dialectic whereby uneven development produces urban underworlds and underworld contradictions spur uneven development." (David Pike author of Metropolis on the Styx 2010-07-13)
"Urban Underworlds offers sensitive, satisfying close readings of a vast body of urban literature to argue that these intimate portraits of America's ethnic, racial, and sexual underworlds expose the larger forces of uneven capitalist development. It also happens to be a beautifully written book."
(Modern Fiction Studies 2012-08-29)
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherRutgers University Press
- Publication date2010
- ISBN 10 0813547849
- ISBN 13 9780813547848
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages304
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Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (The American Literatures Initiative)
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Rutgers University Press
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0813547849
ISBN 13: 9780813547848
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Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (The American Literatures Initiative)
Published by
Rutgers University Press
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0813547849
ISBN 13: 9780813547848
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