Speaking to the ongoing debate over the development of urban space and culture, this book demonstrates the centrality of the physical and social being of cities to American literature and other arts in the twentieth century. The author's reading of aesthetic texts alongside urban planning, economics, sociology, law, and historiography--discourses he treats as form-producing arts in their own right--shows as misleading the common dichotomy of models that focus on the structure of urban space and institutions, and those that describe cities as fluid constellations of social practices. The ideal...
Speaking to the ongoing debate over the development of urban space and culture, this book demonstrates the centrality of the physical and social being...
Los Angeles has a tantalizing hold on the American imagination. Its self-magnifying myths encompass Hollywood glamour, Arcadian landscapes, and endless summer, but also the apocalyptic undertow of riots, environmental depredation, and natural disaster. This Companion traces the evolution of Los Angeles as the most public staging of the American Dream - and American nightmares. The expert contributors make exciting, innovative connections among the authors and texts inspired by the city, covering the early Spanish settlers, African American writers, the British and German expatriates of the...
Los Angeles has a tantalizing hold on the American imagination. Its self-magnifying myths encompass Hollywood glamour, Arcadian landscapes, and endles...