The City in Postmodern Fiction : Towards New Ways of Reading Urban Images in Contemporary Literature

ISBN-13: 9783836487962 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 356 str.

Lievens Jeroen

Opis

Over the course of the 20th century, the city haschanged almost beyond recognition: from a dense,central city into a sprawling urban realmrestructured by escalating processes ofdelocalization, globalization, simulation,diversification, segregation, . In fact, the city haschanged so much that literary scholars seem at a lossto make sense of the omnipresent, but atypical urbanimages in postmodern fiction. Paradoxically, then, aonce prolific literary category - the urban novel -is falling into disuse precisely when the process ofurbanization is climaxing. This book aims toreconcile literary studies with the postmodern cityby providing new and updated strategies for readingurban images. Literary studies are brought into closedialogue with the richly interdisciplinary field ofcontemporary urban studies. Also, the spatialdimension of the "urban novel" is deepened bypolitically more savvy theories of space. Thisrejuvenated notion of the city in fiction is thenapplied to a corpus of "new narrative" novels,emerging largely from New York''s redevelopingdowntown area in the 1980s and 90s. This studyshould be of interest to all students of the cityimage in fiction.

O autorze

Jeroen Lievens, Dr., is a member of the Ghent Urban Studies Team
(Ghent University, Belgium). Currently, he also teaches at the
University College of Limburg.