The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City

1. North American Cities

   1. Merging Naturalism and the Unreal: An Approach to America’s Literary Cities

      • Markku Salmela

      Pages 283-299

   2. ‘I Would Go to Toronto’: The City in Contemporary Writing

      • Tom Ue

      Pages 301-315

   3. New York Fiction

      • Markku Salmela, Lieven Ameel

      Pages 317-332

2. Latin American Cities

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 333-336

      PDF

   2. The Repeating City: Urban Space in Hispanic Caribbean Literature

      • Elena Valdez

      Pages 337-354

   3. Mexico City

      • David William Foster

      Pages 355-368

   4. Cities, Territories and Conflict: Narrative and the Colombian City in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

      • Andrés Mesa

      Pages 369-377

   5. Peru: Words Under the Fog

      • Fernando Rivera

      Pages 379-393

   6. Brasília’s Literature

      • Sophia Beal

      Pages 395-406

   7. Rio’s Favelas: Mapping the Periphery

      • Leila Lehnen

      Pages 407-417

   8. The Case of Rio de Janeiro: Exploring Geographies of Resistance and Domination

      • Kátia da Costa Bezerra

      Pages 419-431

   9. São Paulo in Transit

      • Leila Lehnen

      Pages 433-445

   10. Santiago, Chile, from the Mapocho River: Landscape, Border, and Waste

       • Claudia Darrigrandi Navarro

       Pages 447-459

   11. Buenos Aires

       • David William Foster

       Pages 461-474

3. African Cities

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 475-479

      PDF

   2. An Overview of African Cities and Writing

      • Alastair Niven

      Pages 481-497

   3. Cairo and Alexandria

      • Ahmed Elbeshlawy

      Pages 499-509

   4. Lagos

      • Louis James

      Pages 511-518

   5. Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo: Cowboys, Cosmonauts and Frontiers of Capitalism

      • Kaspar Loftin

      Pages 519-526

   6. What Is the City in Africa?

      • Patrick Williams

      Pages 527-544

This book is about the impact of literature upon cities world-wide, and cities upon literature. It examines why the city matters so much to contemporary critical theory, and why it has inspired so many forms of writing which have attempted to deal with its challenges to think about it and to represent it. Gathering together 40 contributors who look at different modes of writing and film-making in throughout the world, this handbook asks how the modern city has  engendered so much theoretical consideration, and looks at cities and their literature from China to Peru, from New York to Paris, from London to Kinshasa. It looks at some of the ways in which modern cities – whether capitals, shanty-towns, industrial or ‘rust-belt’ – have forced themselves on people’s ways of thinking and writing.

• Space
• Subjectivity
• World
• Postmodernism
• Postcolonialism

“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)

“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 Brasília, 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)

• London, United Kingdom

  Jeremy Tambling

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.

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