Urban Literature Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

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- Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Cultural Geography, Media Studies

An analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmesian Canon in the light of the scientific theorizations of his time is here proposed, aimed at highlighting how they shape the use of Gothic spatial tropes in the representation of London. The city, seen in its double capacity of capital of the Empire and positivistic rational environment, is internally disrupted in many of its facets, from the microcosm of the house, to the urban fabric, to the composition of its social body. Introduced by deviant individuals or polluting substances, the atavistic or degenerative threat invades the metropolis, materializing the anxieties underlying the late Victorian psyche: the persistence of the past in the present, and the possibility of reversion. The detective, armed with the tools that rationality and the scientific method itself offer, is tasked with the almost impossible duty of fighting Nature with its own means: his taxonomical organization of London is the ultimate attempt at normalising what eschews categorisation. Yet in so doing, he also reveals the contradictions and disruptions of the society he is trying to protect, effectively disclosing the very items it wishes to repress. Among the many disturbances that rippled through the purportedly smooth surface of Victorian and Edwardian life, scientific advancement and the consequential development of a scientistic mindset were two of the most pervasive and uncanny. Innovative means of communication consolidated Britain's position as head of an empire, immensely speeding the trading of goods and people with the most remote outskirts of its dominions and the exchange of information both at a domestic and at an international level. At the same time, they also rendered the "motherland" permeable to centripetal forces forever altering its sense of wholeness and unblem-ished isolation. New scientific (or pseudo-scientific) theorizations escalated, rather than rationalized , this profound unease, offering perhaps the greatest shock to Victorian psyche.

- by Camilla Del Grazia
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- Gothic Literature, Crime fiction, Detective Fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle

The worlding of South Asian cities has brought deep structural transformations in their governance and planning paradigms, and in the cultural bases of what constitutes desirable urban habitats and livelihoods. Contemporary literature in English on these cities tends to reflect these pervasive changes: they manifest most visibly as an abiding tension between form and content, medium and message in writings from across the region. With specific reference to literature on Delhi, this is potently apparent in Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis. Published in 2010, Trickster City is a unique literary artefact: originally in Hindi, it is a collection of anecdotes, recollections, and musings from and on various bastis in Delhi. The book emerged from the Cybermohalla project, an innovative alternative education programme which de-territorialized information and communications technology by providing open platforms to young people from bastis in Delhi to generate life narratives on their experience of and role in urban life. Operating at the cusp of the formal and informal, the materiality of these narratives in Trickster City as product, as record, and as archive of ways of life and of settlements is what interests this paper. In a context wherein regular demolition erases all tangible trace of marginalised settlements such as bastis, compilations such as Trickster City act as substitutes for the materiality of built form by narrating the unnarratable. Hence, this paper is interested in engaging with the psychosomatic wreckage of the experience of urbanisation in cities like Delhi so as to understand how their articulation acts as a publicly available, tangible record of vulnerable urbanisms in South Asia.

- by Anubhav Pradhan
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- Urban History, South Asian Studies, Urban Planning, Urban Studies

This collection of essays examines the contribution of the aesthetic of the sublime to the representation of the urban field. The corpus examined in these essay ranges from the late nineteenth century to the present. The collection focuses in turn on the turn-of-the-twentieth-century metropolis, the postmodern megalopolis, and the contemporary survival of local urban conviviality.

- by Christophe Den Tandt
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- Edmund Burke, Urban Studies, Thomas Pynchon, Immanuel Kant

This thesis adopts a contrapuntal reading of Johannesburg through the work of Ivan Vladislavić. While it evaluates the dominant and pervasive readings of the city in current and historical scholarship, carefully considering the way in which its gold-mining origins have shaped a city that is dominated by a culture of surface, violence, and socio-historical amnesia, it ultimately aims to show how Vladislavić’s fiction subverts and challenges these prevailing means of perceiving Johannesburg. As part of inaugurating a depth reading of the city, Vladislavić sets about defamiliarising both the textual and urban landscape as a means of engendering a momentary state of lostness. The experience of lostness means that habitual markers are no longer able to guide or provide comfort to the textual and urban navigator. As a result, lostness dislodges accustomed ways of seeing, reading, and writing the city, thus allowing for both textual and urban rediscovery to ensue. The abandonment of conventions of meaning allows Vladislavić to render the city afresh. What his depictions reveal are the less commonly noticed aspects of Johannesburg city-life – in other words, what lies beneath its culture of surface. This depth reading uncovers a variety of palimpsests of both an urban and natural variety. Moreover, in this process, nature, something we tend to view as peripheral to the urban environment, is exposed and shown to exist in the shadows of the postcolonial city – haunting culture. This revelation ultimately deconstructs Johannesburg’s often paranoid culture of surface and proffers the ameliorative alternatives of natural flow, provisionality, and flux.

- by C. S. Bhagya
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- Literature, Poetry, Arun Kolatkar, Indian Writing in English

La intención de esta investigación es abonar a la discusión sobre la literatura del norte por medio del estudio del ejercicio narrativo que plantea Hugo Valdés en The Monterrey News (Grijalbo, 1990), obra que si bien contiene elementos del género de la novela histórica, es también unas de las primeras novelas urbanas donde se retrata a la ciudad moderna de Monterrey. La hipótesis es que el principio narrativo de la novela es la cualidad palimpséstica de la ciudad, por lo cual en el primer capítulo titulado “El país tiene más de una urbe: Monterrey en la década de 1980” se presentan las condiciones en las que se encontraba el ámbito cultural y social de Monterrey en la época de producción de la novela posicionando la creación del Centro de Escritores como un hecho fundamental para el auge literario del que fue parte The Monterrey News; además de plantear el paradigma de la ciudad-palimpsesto a partir dos eventos traumáticos para la ciudad como es el caso de la creación de la Macroplaza y el cierre de Fundidora Fierro y Acero. En capítulo 2 titulado “The Monterrey News como literatura urbana” se argumenta la lectura de la novela como una obra que privilegia la reconstrucción de la urbe regiomontana, para lo cual se conciben tres ejes que articulan la estructura de la novela. Por medio del mito fundacional, la ciudad sin estilo y los espacios subversivos se estudian las propuestas temáticas de la novela tanto en su línea narrativa histórica como en la contemporánea. El último capítulo de la investigación gira en torno al concepto de palimpsesto que Gérard Gennette plantea en su libro Palimpestos. Literatura en segundo grado (1989) en el cual presenta la acepción de hipertexto, que resulta de la interacción de un texto con otros textos originales a los cuales llama hipotextos. Así, The Monterrey News funciona como un como un hipertexto que se transforma cada vez que interactúa con los textos originales, llámese el Acta de Fundación, las crónicas de Manuel Payno o incluso los nombres reales de los fundadores de la ciudad y los miembros de la élite regiomontana cuya carga de significado permea a través de las genealogías planteadas por el autor.

- by Nancy M
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- Creative Writing, Critical Theory, History, Gender Studies
- by Özlem ATAY
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- Balkan Studies, Modern Greek literature, Urban Studies, Urban Literature
- by Ross Wilson
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- Literature, New York history, Literature and Urban Space, New York City

This article traces literary depictions of the city of Haifa, starting from its utopian literary prototype in Theodor Herzl’s influential Altneuland (1902), and continuing with later Israeli writing, by Yehudit Hendel, Sami Michael, and Hillel Mittelpunkt. The article shows how the Israeli works discussed set literary Haifa as a stage for examining questions of identity, belonging, and the relations between individual and society, through an emphasis on the complex ties between language, ethnicity, and space. The literary city of these works is compared to the city of Herzl’s utopian vision. I argue that the evolution of literary Haifa is associated with shifts in Israeli collective self-perception: from the utopian mode of thought, in which difficulties and complexities remain invisible, through the gradual turning of the gaze towards the difficulties and fractures in the emergent new society (first within the Jewish society, but then also outside it — among the Arab minority); and finally, to an inability to accept the absence of utopia from the present, leading to escapism and a quest for the longed-for ideal in the pre-national past.

- by Chen Bar-Itzhak
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- Hebrew Literature, Israel Studies, Utopian Studies, Zionism
- by Bibi Burger
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- Comparative Literature, Art, Ecocriticism, South African Literature

Theorising the basis of any sub-genre requires an understanding of the etymology of the terms. Urban Fantasy is a sub-genre built upon a mixed heritage of low fantasy and urban realism. This paper is an overview examination of the Oxford... more

- by Sarai Mannolini-Winwood
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- Etymology, Fantasy Literature, Urban Literature, Urban fantasy

By selecting six academic monographs published since 2015, this paper examines three new approaches of overseas sinologists
in the field of urban research in China: locality, textual modernity, and “emotion”. These three independent yet interrelated approaches can also
be regarded as three perspectives to understand Chinese modernity. Overseas researchers have created new paradigms to understand China’s
modernity, including the world pattern, national narrative, local experience, family life and individual circumstances. Recent urban studies in
English academic circles have enriched our understanding of the uniqueness and complexity of China’s modernity since the late Qing Dynasty..

- by Fanghao Chen
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- Modernity, Urban Culture, China studies, Urban Literature

Abstract
Urban fantasy (UF) as a sub-genre arose in the 1980s and presented an alternative view of the heroic female protagonist. As UF has developed, a new archetype has emerged – the urban hunter. Defined by its situation in the urban environment this archetype draws on elements of gendered bodies, hybridization, the other and narrative purpose to create a unique character. Present in a myriad of texts, including works by Emma Bull, Laurell K. Hamilton, Kelly Gay and Patricia Briggs, this archetype represents a changing understanding of what it means to be a hero. The urban hunter can be perceived as a complex reflection of an increasingly urbanized world, and of central importance to understanding UF’s resonance with contemporary readers.

- by Sarai Mannolini-Winwood
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- Literature and Urban Space, Urban Literature, Urban fantasy

This paper’s theoretical framework is twofold: on one hand it is rooted in classic theories of urban representation, on the other it shows a constant preoccupation for contemporary debates about what is generally known as the ‘digital revolution’. Computer and software development have given birth to a whole new field of digital texts, which are not bound to the book as a medium. These texts can be read from computer screen or, increasingly, from different reading devices, so called e-books. It is my contention that digital textuality opens an infinite field to expand literary expression, especially when it comes to the city - urban metaphors are not surprisingly abundant when describing the Internet. Often digital textuality is seen as an alternative medium for literature, there is, however, literature which uses digital textuality much more effectively

- by Ada Bieber
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- Picture Books, Children's and Young Adult Literature, New York City, Urban Literature

Similarly to other cities of the period, in the first years of the 20th Century, Curitiba – the capital city of Paraná – has undergone a significant process of transformations that affected both its material and socio-cultural spheres. A grammar has been built in order to nominate this new universe: leisure, pleasure, adventure, hedonism; but also individualism, estrangement, indifference, multitude, insecurity, risk. This article’s intent is to highlight the different ways of perusing modernization and modernity and their representations in the production of discourses, especially the literary ones. We understand that they are especially responsible for the lexicon that tries to represent the new urban experiences, sociabilities and esthesia.

- by Clóvis Gruner
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- Contemporary History, History and literature, Urban Literature

SPACE International Conference 2020 on Architecture and Literature will be held in London on 25-26 September 2020. We hope that the Conference will be an ideal platform to discuss the recent advances and research results in the intersection of architecture and literature. The Conference aims to explore the interrelations between writing and building. As a field of research, literature provides possibilities that can enable ways to explore architectural imagination. Thus, SPACE Studies of Planning and Architecture invites researchers, writers, architects, urban designers and social partners to share knowledge from their fields of expertise according to the themes of the Conference.

Since the twentieth century São Paulo has been a vital economic centre showing in its fast growth and industrialization the dynamism that makes it the true cultural capital of the country. Today, it is a tentacular megalopolis of more than 25 million inhabitants, advanced in many ways despite its apparent stratifications, walls and wounds. On the one hand, the modernist poets such as Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade were able to understand, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the various overlapped and contradictory sides of the city of São Paulo as well as incorporating them into their texts; on the other hand, how do its poets reckon the city now? Which neighbourhoods, streets, squares and avenues have been going through a time of dispersion and disintegration in which rhythm has become frantic? What beings fill their poems? In order to answer such questions, I will focus on two poets who address the city of São Paulo in an intimate and visceral way, Donizete Galvão and Fabio Weintraub. The books involved in this investigation have been O homem inacabado (2010) and Falso trajeto (2016), respectively by Donizete Galvão (1955-2124) and Fabio Weintraub 1967).

This chapter takes the aftermath of World War II as its point of departure. Its arch rests on three thematic pillars: the wounded city, the imagined city, and the multicultural city. These pillars will provide a context to explore thematically some of the urban representations in the vast terrain of city literature. The section on the wounded city examines literary representations of architectural and psychological ruination by looking at the urban landscape of post-World War II Europe, including literature written on the Balkan War of the 1990s. Imagined cities entail utopian visions that embody the desire for the reconstruction of Europe after World War II, as well as “corrective” dreams alluding, in one way or another, to the European urban phenomenon. In the last section of this chapter, the multicultural city, resulting from mass migration and globalisation, is explored in novels that address its social and cultural diversity.

- by László Munteán and +1
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- Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Literary History, Postmodern Literature, Cities

Scribes on board of a metaphorical ship-city, as in the last book of Cardoso Pires, "Lisboa, livro de bordo: vozes, olhares, memorações"; anonymous pilgrims, passing through the capital of a country whose geography corresponds to an inner map, like José Saramago's traveller in "Viagem a Portugal"; passengers of a modernist car, like the hasty tourist driven by Fernando Pessoa in "Lisbon: What the Tourist Should See"; essentially travellers, such as the "Piéton de Paris" by Léon-Paul Fargue. These are just a few examples of writers who have devoted non-fictional texts to their city (by birth or adoption), books in which the urban universe does not serve as the backdrop for the unravelling of a storyline, being instead the very plot itself, a network of signs, a character on the same level with those who, like the writer, has pledged to track his personal journey, made of memories and feelings.

- by Enrico Martines
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- Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese Literature, Urban Literature, City in literature

- by Enrico Martines
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- Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese Literature, Urban Literature, City in literature

... novels by Anita Desai, Boman Desai, Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Firdaus Kanga, Ashok ... Schlote investigates Ghada Samman&amp;amp;amp;#x27;s Beirut &amp;amp;amp;#x27;75, Muhammad Kamil al-Khatib&amp;amp;amp;#x27;s Just Like a ... dissertation on the concept of the liminal space in contemporary Northern Irish literature ...

- by Emma Martinell Gifre
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- Urban Literature, LIteratura realista XIX

The past few years have seen a resurgence in scholarly and popular interest in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) in honour of the bicentenary of the first edition of Frankenstein (1818) and more recently due to the resonances of its plague narrative with the Covid-19 pandemic. The role of cities in The Last Man has been considered in recent scholarship, particularly in debates around the orientalist attitudes of the novel and its treatment of imperialism, but its urban poetics have yet to take central stage as the primary subject matter of an article or chapter. This conference paper will begin to address this gap, arguing that The Last Man presents a sustained meditation on the interconnectedness of cities at a time of heightened international relations and cultural exchange between Britain and Southern Europe. This paper will further explore the ways in which this interconnectedness fed into what Stephen Prickett has identified as a new cultural appreciation for the fantastic as an act of creation rather than idle daydreaming. It will examine the ways in which the fantastical mode of future history allowed Shelley to imaginatively recreate the cities in which she had experienced love and loss as both familiar and strange, starkly different and yet inextricably bound.

This book brings together geographers and literary scholars in a series of engagements near the boundaries of their disciplines. In urban studies, disproportionate attention has been given to a small set of privileged ‘first’ cities. This volume problematizes the dominance of such alpha cities, offering a wide perspective on ‘second cities’ and their literature. The volume is divided into three themed sections. ‘In the Shadow of the Alpha City’ problematizes the image of cities defined by their function and size, bringing out the contradictions and contestations inherent in cultural productions of second cities, including Birmingham and Bristol in the UK, Las Vegas in the USA, and Tartu in Estonia. ‘Frontier Second Cities’ pays attention to the multiple and trans-national pasts of second cities which occupy border zones, with a focus on Narva, in Estonia, and Turkish/Kurdish Diyarbakir. The final section, ‘The Diffuse Second City’, examines networks the diffuse secondary city made up of interlinked small cities, suburban sprawl and urban overspill, with literary case studies from Italy, Sweden, and Finland.

- by Giada Peterle
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- Urban Geography, Mobility/Mobilities, Literary Criticism, Literary Geography

A comparison between the Gruuthuse MS (ca 1400) and contemporary French and German poetry yields the following propositions:
1. The Gruuthuse poet borrowed the idea that making poetry should be considered a "constich werc", i.e. a craft that requires knowledge and skill, from French courtly literature in the tradition of Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart. In the Gruuthuse MS, this metaphor comes close to experienced reality, as it was used to legitimize poetry in an environment of entrepreneurs, merchants and wealthy artisans.
2. Again in the tradition of Machaut and Froissart, making poetry is conceived of as a writing activity, resulting in ingenious products that deserve to be collected. The Gruuthuse MS may be considered the outcome of such a process.
3. The Gruuthuse MS is not the work of a circle, but the work of one author, Jan van Hulst, who put his pen at the disposal of persons and partly overlapping organizations belonging to the upper crust of Bruges. At the same time, the manuscript mirrors his own evolving opinions about love and devotion.
4. The Gruuthuse songs originated on the crossroads of the French and Lotharingian song cultures. The uniqueness of the Gruuthuse songs is partly due to the artful synthesis of both traditions.

- by Frank Willaert
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- Late Medieval Literature, Urban Literature, Songs

The symposium brings together literary scholars and researchers from UCL's Department of English Language and Literature to discuss the rich and fluctuating relationship between literature and the city. Topics will include Gissing's working-class London, the Los Angeles police novel, Charles Olson’s poetic rendition of Gloucester, Massachusetts, the allegorical city in Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, and public toilets and fire hydrants in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.