“Your Vile Suburbs Can Offer Nothing but the Deadness of the Grave”: The Stereotyping of Early Victorian Suburbia (original) (raw)
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The Literature of Suburban Change: Narrating Suburban Complexity in Metropolitan America
The Literature of Suburban Change: Narrating Suburban Complexity in Metropolitan America, 2020
The Literature of Suburban Change (Edinburgh University Press, in press) examines the diverse body of cultural material produced since 1960 that responds to the defining habitat of twentieth-century USA: the suburbs. Martin Dines explores how writers have innovated across a range of forms and genres – including novel sequences, memoirs, plays, comics and short story cycles – in order to make sense of the complexity of suburbia. Drawing on insights from recent historiography and cultural geography, Dines offers a new perspective on the literary history of the US suburbs, and argues that by giving time back to these apparently timeless places, writers help reactivate the suburbs, presenting them not as fixed, finished and familiar but rather as living, multifaceted environments that are still in production and under exploration. Contents: Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction: The Time of the Suburb 1. The Everyman and his Car: Metropolitan Memory and the Novel Sequence 2. Suburban Gothic and Banal Unhomeliness 3. Some Shared Story: Suburban Memoir 4. Houses, Comics, Fish: Graphic Narrative Ecologies of the Suburban Home 5. Devolved Authorship, Suburban Literacies and the Short Story Cycle Conclusion: Built to Last?: Staging Suburban Historicity in the Teardown Era Notes Index
Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 60.3, 2013
In spite of the practical importance of commuting to everyday suburban life, moments of commuting are rare in American fiction. While the experience of commuting offers chances for reflection and self-knowledge for the suburbanite's psyche, that time for introspection comes at the cost of ignoring the built environment. The separation of home and work that the often-elided moments of commuting perpetuate generates a blindness to the suburban built environment and infrastructure. This article redirects an examination of suburban fiction outside and beyond the bounds of houses and workplaces by paying attention to scenes of commuting. Placing the space between home and work at the centre of the analysis allows us to understand and highlight the price of the suburban way of life, and to uncover the hidden structures of exploitation and inequality which a conventional account of post-war suburbia glides over.
Suburbs in transition: new approaches to suburban history
Urban History, 2007
The history of suburbs has received so much scholarly attention in recent decades that it is time to take stock of what has been established, in order to discern aspects of suburbs that are still unknown. To date, the main lines of inquiry have been dedicated to the origins, growth, diverse typologies, culture and politics of suburbs, as well as to newer topics such as the gendered nature of suburban space. The vast majority of these studies have been about particular times and places. The authors propose a new perspective on the study of suburbs, one which will begin to investigate the transformations of suburbs after they have been established. Taking the entire era from the mid-nineteenth century through to the late twentieth century as a whole, it is argued that suburbs should be subjected to a longitudinal analysis, examining their development in the context of metropolises that usually enveloped them within a generation or two of their founding. It is proposed that investigati...
2013
For decades the suburb has been a maligned space which has been conceived in terms its failings, or what it is not – the city, the countryside, the small town. ‘New Suburban Stories’ examines cultural material which challenges conventional understandings of the places in which an increasing proportion of the world’s population resides. If previous cultural studies of the suburbs have limited themselves to Anglophone contexts and have dwelt on white, middle-class experience, this anthology recognizes the diversity of suburbanites and the changing nature of suburban environments across the globe. It is avowedly interdisciplinary and examines, amongst other forms and genres, poetry, autobiography, photography, social media and public art, as well as new cultural practices emerging from communities inhabiting these innovative spaces. Whilst broad in scope, the anthology advances new and distinct lines of inquiry for the study of the suburbs and their representation, including how such places have begun to be understood as historical and affective, and how suburban communities have sought to take control of their own representation and write their own stories. 'With its robust embrace of the notion of suburban diversity, this book richly explores a panoply of suburban stories spanning global sites and interpretive perspectives. It offers a fresh take on cultural representations of suburbia that push us to think in more open-minded ways about what the suburbs are and how their meanings have varied in fascinating ways across time and space. This is a smart, creative addition to the suburban studies scholarship.' - Becky Nicolaides, University of California, Los Angeles, USA "
Journal of Urban History, 2009
The single-family house as a haven on a cozy lot still lurks in the ever-elastic American imagination. But as real and normative Levittowns and Lakewoods slowly recede into memory, the story of building demands retelling and, with new concerns entering the lexicon, necessarily told differently. Two problems integral to the changing suburban discipline are evident in the books reviewed here. Most readers of this journal recognize that foundational concepts such as city and suburb have been stretched thin for quite some time; analytically they obscure as much as they demonstrate. What kinds of perceptions and ideas are tied up in the term suburb? How do new portrayals shift the assumptions of previous conventions? Alongside this epistemological question is an evidentiary one: how are plans or forms used and interpreted? Are buildings representations or symbols of the social processes from which they emerge, or, conversely, are they formative agents, setting out new unprecedented possibilities for action and perception? This polarity is perhaps overstated, but the weighing of context and agency is the tip of a disciplinary iceberg that cannot be avoided. Each of the three books under review explores these problems of terms and evidence through particular disciplinary lenses and thus each offers a different narrative of the conflicting ways suburbs have been defined, shaped, and experienced and how they might be redefined in the future. In Architecture and Suburbia, John Archer offers a rich history of the representations of self and autonomy that form the ideological core of the design of single-family homes. In Reforming Suburbia, Ann Forsyth describes the labyrinthine planning policies, methods, and strategies used to shape development outside of cities. In Chicagoland, Ann Durkin Keating examines the nature of settlement types that formed the complex carpet of the Chicago region. Simply put, each book is a history from the vantage point, respectively, of architecture, planning, and historic preservation, thus considering different forms, actors, processes, and experiences. Moreover, each author deploys his or her story operatively to guide intervention in the contemporary environment. This is not to say that all scholarship does not in some way imply a politics of design, planning, or action—that all texts are instrumental—but these three treatments lead explicitly into design and policy futures. Archer concludes with an outline of ways to rethink contemporary house design in the
Contested Terrain: Suburban Fiction and U.S. Regionalism, 1945–2020 (U Iowa Press)
Contested Terrain: Suburban Fiction and U.S. Regionalism, 1945–2020, 2022
Contested Terrain explores suburban literature between two moments of domestic crisis: the housing shortage that gave rise to the modern era of suburbanization after World War II, and the mortgage defaults and housing foreclosures that precipitated the Great Recession. Moving away from scholarship that highlights the alienating, placeless quality of suburbia, Wilhite argues that we should reimagine suburban literature as part of a long literary tradition of U.S. regional writing that connects the isolation and exclusivity of the domestic realm to the expansionist ideologies of U.S. nationalism and the environmental imperialism of urban sprawl. Wilhite produces new, unexpected readings of works by Sinclair Lewis, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Yates, Patricia Highsmith, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Chang-rae Lee, Richard Ford, Jung Yun, and Patrick Flanery. Contested Terrain demonstrates how postwar suburban nation-building ushered in an informal geography that recalibrated notions of national identity, democratic citizenship, and domestic security to the scale of the single-family home.