The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies

515 Pages·2022·7.743 MB·English

by  Lieven Ameel

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO

LITERARY URBAN STUDIES

Over the past decades, the growing interest in the study of literature of the city has led to the
development of literary urban studies as a discipline in its own right. The Routledge Companion
to Literary Urban Studies provides a methodical overview of the fundamentals of this developing
discipline and a detailed outline of new directions in the field.
It consists of 33 newly commissioned chapters that provide an outline of contemporary
literary urban studies. The Companion covers all of the main theoretical approaches as well as
key literary genres, with case studies covering a range of different geographical, cultural, and
historical settings. The final chapters provide a window into new debates in the field. The three
focal issues are key concepts and genres of literary urban studies; a reassessment and critique of
classical urban studies theories and the canon of literary capitals; and methods for the analysis of
cities in literature.
The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides the reader with practical insights
into the methods and approaches that can be applied to the city in literature and serves as an
important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on city literature.
Lieven Ameel is Senior Lecturer in comparative literature at Tampere University, Tampere,
Finland. He has published widely on literary experiences of space, narrative planning, and urban
futures. He is co-founder and currently president of the Association for Literary Urban Studies
(ALUS).
ROUTLEDGE LITERATURE COMPANIONS

Also available in this series:
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Edited by Jessica Gildersleeve
The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen
Edited by Cheryl A. Wilson and Maria H. Frawley
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class
Edited by Gloria McMillan
The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine
Edited by Tim Lanzendörfer
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion
Edited by Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish and Lalita Pandit Hogan
The Routledge Companion to Yan Lianke
Edited by Riccardo Moratto and Howard Yuen Fung Choy
The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature
Edited by Heekyoung Cho
The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature
Edited by Michael Bryson
The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory
Edited by Paul Dawson and Maria Mäkelä
The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South
Edited by Katharine A. Burnett, Todd Hagstette, and Monica Carol Miller
The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies
Edited by Lieven Ameel
The Routledge Companion to World Literature, Second Edition
Edited by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir
For more information on this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Literature-
Companions/book-series/RC4444
THE ROUTLEDGE

COMPANION TO LITERARY

URBAN STUDIES

Edited by Lieven Ameel
Cover image: Getty
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Lieven Ameel; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Lieven Ameel to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form
or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-64521-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-64524-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-12493-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003124931
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix
List of Contributors x
Acknowledgments xiv
1 Literary Urban Studies: An Introduction 1
Lieven Ameel
2 Teaching Literary Urban Studies 11
Lieven Ameel, Chen Bar-Itzhak, Jason Finch, Patricia García,
Silja Laine, Liam Lanigan, Anni Lappela, Juho Rajaniemi,
and Markku Salmela
Key Concepts 27
3 The Map in City Literature 29
Liam Lanigan
4 The Spatial Practice of Idling as a Bridge Between Victorian and
Modernist City Literature 44
Heidi Lucja Liedke
5 The Aesthetics of the City 57
Bart Keunen
6 Palimpsest 72
Jens Martin Gurr
v
Contents
7 Recursive Cities: Seriality and Literary Urban Studies 87
Maria Sulimma
Key Genres 103
8 Urban Satire in Ancient Rome 105
Grace Gillies
9 Medieval Civic Encomium: A Theme and Variations in Praise of
Italian Cities 120
Carrie Beneš and Laura Morreale
10 The Metropolitan Miniature 136
Andreas Huyssen
11 The City in Crime Fiction: The Case of Bologna as a
Branching City 149
Barbara Pezzotti
12 Infrastructural Forms: Comics, Cities, Conglomerations 163
Dominic Davies
Case Studies 177
13 The North African City: Literary Portraits of Colonial, Socialist,
and Neoliberal Spaces 179
Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed
14 Embodying City Writing: Theatre as Bridge Between the Literary and
the Urban in Johannesburg 193
Alex Halligey
15 Urban Mobilities in Francophone African Return Narratives 209
Anna-Leena Toivanen
16 Fictions and Frictions of Race and Space: Excavating the Transatlantic
Urban Memoryscapes of Stuart Hall’s Familiar Stranger and
Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies 223
Julia M. Hori
17 The Form of a City: Geographies of Constraint in
Contemporary Urban Writing from France 237
Michael G. Kelly
vi
Contents
18 Literary Representations of the 2008 Revolt in Athens:
The Urban Minds’ Viewpoint 253
Riikka P. Pulkkinen
19 The Russian Provincial Town and the Modernist Bildungsroman:
Leonid Dobychin’s The Town of N 271
Tintti Klapuri
20 Shaping the Right to the Megalopolis: Earthquake Crónicas in
Mexico City 284
Liesbeth François
21 Mobilities in Montreal Fiction 299
Ceri Morgan
22 Black Metropolis 313
Patrice Nganang
23 Make the Neighborhood Great Again! Literature of
Urban Decline and the Palimpsestic Imagination 333
Chen Bar-Itzhak
24 Writing Urban Warfare: Pedestrian Perspectives in Post-2003 Baghdad 346
Annie Webster
25 City Imaginaries From the Margins: Anosh Irani’s Bombay Novels 360
Rita Nnodim
26 Contemporary Travel Writing of Delhi: From Belatedness and Decay to
Globalist Eruption in William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns and
Rana Dasgupta’s Capital 373
Tim Hannigan
27 The Urban Child and Hong Kong’s Public Housing and Public Space in
Yeung Hok-Tat’s How Blue Was My Valley 388
Elizabeth Ho
28 An Invitation to the Critical Literary Urban Vocabularies of 1970s Japan 406
Franz K. Prichard
New Debates 419
29 City Outcasts: Perspectives From the Hispanic Female Fantastic 421
Patricia García
vii
Contents
30 Mapping the Informal City in World Literature 436
Eric Prieto
31 Queer and Trans Theories of Urban Change 451
Davy Knittle
32 Future Cities in Literature 464
Paul Dobraszczyk
33 Translocality in City Literature 479
Lena Mattheis
Index 490
viii
ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures
12.1 The opening page of the original Arabic edition of Magdy El Shafee’s Metro. 171
12.2 Maurício remembers his project with the French photographer JR. 174
14.1 Maja Marx’s 2008 stencil-cut metal installation of a quote from
Phaswane Mphe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow running both ways, up- and
downstairs off Nugget Street in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, November 2021. 196
14.2 #ArtMyOrangeGrove performers in Birds of the Grove, performed in
Paterson Park, 22–24 June 2018. 202
14.3 Text from Macbeth, in Zulu and English, painted on a wall on Bezuidenhout
Avenue in Yeoville, Johannesburg, in 2016 as part of the Macbeth Quand Même
rehearsal process, November 2021. 202
14.4 The author pictured in a propositional staging of Ivan Vladislavic’s snorkeler
vignette from Portrait with Keys. 205
22.1 The panopticon by Jeremy Bentham. 314
27.1 Lam Tin Estate, block 15. 392
27.2 Panels as urban form. 394
27.3 Design of the North Point Housing Estate (1956). 395
27.4 The marketplace. 396
27.5 The Kid as urban child. 399
27.6 The typhoon. 400
27.7 Lam Tin Estate in the present. 402
Tables
5.1 The Sublime City, the Symptomatic City, the Inspired City, and the Embodied City 62
ix