The City in American Literature and Culture

This book examines what literature and film reveal about the urban USA. Subjects include culture, class, race, crime, and disaster.

This book engages literature's and film's insights into the making and meaning of urban space and spectacle, and the in-the-streets activity of everyday life that remakes culture and identities. This fresh take on urban promise and crisis is a must read for anyone interested in literature and American Studies.The city's 'Americanness' has been disputed throughout US history. Pronounced dead in the late twentieth century, cities have enjoyed a renaissance in the twenty-first. Engaging the history of urban promise and struggle as represented in literature, film, and visual arts, and drawing on work in the social sciences, The City in American Literature and Culture examines the large and local forces that shape urban space and city life and the street-level activity that remakes culture and identities as it contests injustice and separation. The first two sections examine a range of city spaces and lives; the final section brings the city into conversation with Marxist geography, critical race studies, trauma theory, slow/systemic violence, security theory, posthumanism, and critical regionalism, with a coda on city literature and democracy.