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"City and town life in literature."
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The Cambridge companion to the city in world literature
\"Through a series of chapters spanning a number of metropolises across the globe, this book addresses the way cities have given rise to key aesthetic dispositions, acts of linguistic and cultural translation, topographic and global imaginaries, and narratives of self-fashioning that are central to debates in World Literature\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Paris as Revolution
In nineteenth-century Paris, passionate involvement with revolution
turned the city into an engrossing object of cultural speculation.
For writers caught between an explosive past and a bewildering
future, revolution offered a virtuoso metaphor by which the city
could be known and a vital principle through which it could be
portrayed. In this engaging book, Priscilla Ferguson locates the
originality and modernity of nineteenth-century French literature
in the intersection of the city with revolution. A cultural
geography, Paris as Revolution \"reads\" the
nineteenth-century city not in literary works alone but across a
broad spectrum of urban icons and narratives. Ferguson moves easily
between literary and cultural history and between semiotic and
sociological analysis to underscore the movement and change that
fueled the powerful narratives defining the century, the city, and
their literature. In her understanding and reconstruction of the
guidebooks of Mercier, Hugo, Vallès, and others, alongside the
novels of Flaubert, Hugo, Vallès, and Zola, Ferguson reveals that
these works are themselves revolutionary performances, ones that
challenged the modernizing city even as they transcribed its
emergence. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program,
which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek
out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach,
and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived
makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again
using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally
published in 1994.
eBook
Main Street and Empire
The small town has become a national icon that circulates widely in literature, culture, and politics as an authentic American space and community. Yet there are surprisingly few critical studies that analyze the small town's centrality to the United States' identity and imagination.InMain Street and Empire, Ryan Poll addresses this need, arguing that the small town, as evoked by the image of \"Main Street,\" is not a relic of the past but rather a metaphorical screen upon which America's \"everyday\" stories and subjects are projected on both a national and global scale.
Bringing together a broad selection of texts-from Thornton Wilder'sOur Town, Grace Metalious'sPeyton Place, and Peter Weir'sThe Truman Showto the speeches of William McKinley, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama-Poll examines how the small town is used to imagine and reproduce the nation throughout the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century. He contends that the dominant small town, despite its innocent, nostalgic appearance, is central to the development of the U.S. empire and global capitalism.
eBook
Narrating the city : histories, space, and the everyday
\"In recent decades, the insight that narration shapes our perception of reality has inspired and influenced the most innovative historical accounts. Focusing on new research, this volume explores the history of non-elite populations in cities from Caracas to Vienna, and Paris to Belgrade. Narration is central to the theme of each contribution, whether as a means of description, a methodological approach, or basic story telling. This book brings together research that both asks classical socio-historical questions and takes narration seriously, engaging with novels, films, local history accounts, petitions to municipal authorities, and interviews with alternative cinema activists\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Barrio-Logos
Struggles over space and resistance to geographic displacement gave birth to much of Chicano history and culture. In this pathfinding book, Raúl Villa explores how California Chicano/a activists, journalists, writers, artists, and musicians have used expressive culture to oppose the community-destroying forces of urban renewal programs and massive freeway development and to create and defend a sense of Chicano place-identity. Villa opens with a historical overview that shows how Chicano communities and culture have grown in response to conflicts over space ever since the United States' annexation of Mexican territory in the 1840s. Then, turning to the work of contemporary members of the Chicano intelligentsia such as Helena Maria Viramontes, Ron Arias, and Lorna Dee Cervantes, Villa demonstrates how their expressive practices re-imagine and re-create the dominant urban space as a community enabling place. In doing so, he illuminates the endless interplay in which cultural texts and practices are shaped by and act upon their social and political contexts.
eBook
Beyond the Overlooked Rural Narrative in Chinese Migrant Worker Literature: On Liang Hong’s and Sun Huifen’s works
The focus of literary works about Chinese rural-to-urban migrant workers is often on their urban experience, in which they are mostly portrayed as a socially disadvantaged group and a deviant presence in urban life. The reader less frequently encounters a complementary rural narrative on migrant workers’ experience of their native countryside. This is remarkable, since the countryside holds demonstrable importance for migrant workers, and studying the associated rural narrative is essential for understanding the intricacies and diversity of the migrant worker experience as a whole. By closely reading two literary texts, Liang Hong’s nonfictional China in One Village: The Story of One Town and the Changing World (2010), and Sun Huifen’s novel Jikuan’s Carriage (2007), this paper shows the complex connection between migrant workers and the countryside, adding a key element to our understanding of this much discussed demographic, its literary representations, and of subaltern cultural production in general.
Journal Article
Postcolonial London
London's histories of migration and settlement and the resulting diverse, hybrid communities have engendered new forms of social and cultural activity reflected in a wealth of novels, poems, films and songs. Postcolonial London explores the imaginative transformation of the city by African, Asian, Caribbean and South Pacific writers since the 1950s. John McLeod engages freshly with the work of both well-known and emergent writers, including Sam Selvon, Doris Lessing, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Colin MacInnes, Bernardine Evaristo, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Fred D'Aguiar. In reading a select body of writing in its social contexts and exploring contrasting attitudes to London's diasporic transformation, he traces an exciting history of resistance to the prejudice and racism that have at least in part characterised the postcolonial city. Rewritings of London, he argues, bear witness to the determination, imagination and creativity of the city's migrants and their descendants. This is a superb study of the ways in which 'imperial centre' might be rewritten as postcolonial metropolis. It represents essential reading for those interested in British or postcolonial literature, or in theorisations of the city and metropolitan culture.
eBook