The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban

Literary Studies
Jeremy Tambling
Editor

The Palgrave
Encyclopedia of Urban
Literary Studies

With 86 Figures
Editor
Jeremy Tambling
University of Social Sciences and Humanities
Warsaw, Poland

ISBN 978-3-319-62418-1 ISBN 978-3-319-62419-8 (eBook)

[Link]
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
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Preface and Acknowledgments

This Encyclopedia follows on from The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and

the City which appeared in 2017, and like it, was a commission from Ben
Doyle, who worked then as Humanities editor at Palgrave Macmillan. I am
grateful to him, and to the wonderful Managing Editor at Palgrave, Ruth
Lefevre, who has at all times given me advice, and taken on so many duties,
and been helpful throughout, and made difficulties disappear before they could
be discussed on the phone. I must also acknowledge the help of four students
whom I taught at Manchester, and whose friendship and support have been
invaluable since with various entries: Jack Sullivan, Tristan Burke, Kaspar
Loftin, and Jo Rose. In helping to sub-edit, they have made life much smoother
than it would otherwise have been. Many thanks, too, are due to those
contributors who have suggested other subjects, and other writers, and
suggested other contributors. They have given the project a wonderful lift
and encouraged it to be more ambitious than was its original intention.
Entries in the Encyclopedia are alphabetical, rather than thematic, or coun-
try by country, and because the work is in progress, it is not in any sense
complete: it is there to be dipped into. Readers are recommended to search in
several places for what they are seeking for; consistency of how to enter names
and subjects has proved impossible to obtain. What appears here is a snapshot,
no more, and it is hoped, too, that entries will be supplemented, and improved,
as time goes by. The aim is to be empirical and historical and theoretical and
speculative by turns, and by drawing on as many contributors as possible, to
have as many critical voices speaking as there can be – some of them in
contradiction with others, all of them attempting to go beyond the merely
descriptive, and to argue a position about the city.
Authors of entries are literally from all over the world, writing about their
own enthusiasms, and in many cases, suggesting them to the editor; and
though English is not the first language of many of them, and some of them
have battled with it, English has been used throughout, and works and titles
translated unless it seemed unduly pedantic to do so. Varieties of English must
be accepted in these articles, therefore. Each entry gives references, and in
some cases, suggestions for further reading, though the aim here is not to be
exhaustive but to point readers towards things that will really help.
The help I have received from contributors – and I thank them all, warmly,
and sincerely, especially those who have written on one topic and then thought
they could do another – has been indispensable. Many have written major
essays in what they have contributed. There are hundreds of suggestions here

v
vi Preface and Acknowledgments

for further reading and exploration. But I may also say that collecting contrib-
utors for this task has been difficult. In fact at times it has been well-nigh
impossible, and if a contributor promised and then failed to bring forth the
goods, that usually meant that a topic has had to remain uncovered. It has not
been helped, since the beginning of 2020, by the COVID pandemic – indeed,
more than one contributor has been lost to the project because of it. There is no
question but that city-life will alter through COVID, whose relation to climate
change is also significant: the impact of both on social existence, and on the
configuration of spaces in cities could hardly have been guessed at when the
project began, and at the time of writing it is too early to say what lasting
effects either and both will have on the communal spaces in cities, on work
practices, on social mobility, and on everything that makes good cities so rich
in what they have to offer. The present warfare in Europe, disastrous whichever
way it is regarded, threatens not just lives and cities but the validity of thinking
about cities as forms of civilisation.
I also think that enlisting contributors has not been helped by the research
culture in the UK, and elsewhere, which, concerned as it is with grant capture
on a massive scale, and so on praising big projects, makes University teachers
less inclined to contribute to others which look less impressive or less profes-
sional in research ratings. Some areas are not as well covered as the Editor
would wish, making the project look more USA-dominated and Eurocentric
than it ought to be. It reflects an imbalance between research and teaching
which is familiar, but which spoils both: this Encyclopedia has felt the impact
since it has the function of being both research work, some of it very original,
and teaching, being a place where people can begin looking.
Nonetheless, there have been very many high points in editing the Ency-
clopedia; in fact, there has been a high point in every contribution coming
in. There is much here which I hope will be a genuine contribution to
knowledge, and will I hope be stimulating, pleasurable, and helpful to read.
If that is so, much of the praise, and my last thanks, must go to Pauline, who
has, as ever, helped, prompted, and been full of encouragement throughout the
preparation.

London, UK Jeremy Tambling

September 2022
 List of Topics

African Cities: Modernity and Slums, Urban Be’er-Sheva in Shulamit Lapid’s Lizzie Badiḥi
Literature, and Culture Series
Ahmed Essop’s Johannesburg Beijing: A Cultural History
Alfred Döblin’s Journey to Poland Beijing: City and Film
Algerian Cities: Kateb Racine’s Nedjma Ben Okri: The Famished Road
Allen Fisher’s Poetry and the City Benjamin, Surrealism, and Paris
Almodóvar and Madrid Benjamin, Walter
Amitav Ghosh and the Ibis Trilogy Benjamin, Walter, Siegfried Kraucauer, T.W.
Ann Hui’s Cinematics of the Ordinary: July Adorno, and Companions Writing the City
Rhapsody 男人四十 (2002) Benjamin, Walter: Berlin Childhood Around 1900
Arcades Project of Walter Benjamin Berlin Alexanderplatz
Asian Phantasmagorias of the Interior Berlin: An Overview
At the Back of the North Wind, George The Billboard Community: The Visual Culture of
MacDonald Seoul and Its Multiplicity
Atget and Marville, Photographers of Paris Birmingham as “Composite Monster”: Roy
Athens and Travel Literature Fisher’s City (1961)
Bakhtin and Cities: Petersburg, Paris, and Rome Bleak House
Baldwin, James: Multisensorial Spaces of Borges and Buenos Aires: Creating Place from
Harlem, New York Space in Poetry and Prose
Balzac Brasília and the Literature It Has Inspired
Balzac: Cousin Pons Brecht in Berlin
Balzac: Cousin Bette Broken Glass: Alain Mabanckou
Balzac: Le Père Goriot (Father Goriot) Brooklyn Neighborhoods in the Making
Balzac: Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes Bucharest and Chicago: A Tale of Two Cities in
Balzac: The History of the Thirteen (Historie des Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December
Treize) Budapest as a Product of the Biedermeier
Barnes, Djuna Imagination
Barney Simon’s Johannesburg Buenos Aires, 1910 Centenary of the Nation
Baroque Venice Bulgakov, Moscow, and The Master and
Baudelaire and Benjamin: ‘Le vin des Margarita
chiffonniers’ Call It Sleep by Henry Roth: A Leap out of
Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal Murderer’s Row
Baudelaire: Life Carlos Fuentes and Mexico City
Baudelaire: The Painter of Modern Life César Vallejo’s Paris in Peru

vii
viii List of Topics

Chaucer, Geoffrey Eça de Queirós’s Lisbon: Between Paris and the

Cheng Xiaoqing and the Genesis of Chinese Mountains
Detective Fiction Edward Said and New York
Chicago and the Irish-American Identity Crisis in Edward Yang, Taipei, and Fredric Jameson
J.T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan Trilogy (1932– Empson, William (1906–1984)
1935) Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in
Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney England
(1934): Eccentric Modernism and Radical Erich Kästner and Berlin
Politics in an Australian Metropolis Eugène Sue, Les Mystères de Paris (The
Cinematic Berlin and the Construction of Identity Mysteries of Paris)
and Alterity in Postwar Germany Everyday Hong Kong and the Writings of Yesi
Cities in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Cinema Fanny Burney and Bath
Cities in Lucía Puenzo’s Films Felix Nussbaum: Osnabrück to Auschwitz
Cities in Ruins in Modern Poetry Fenyang, China: From Xiao Wu to Swimming
Cities in the South Asia Subcontinent Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
Citizenship, Diaspora, and Toronto in Bezmozgis’ Fergus Hume: Dunedin and Melbourne
Immigrant City Finances and Focalization in Flynn’s Gone Girl
The City as Pure Feeling: Cavafy’s Alexandria The Flâneur
City Comedy and Bartholomew Fair Florence in the Nineteenth Century c. 1840–c.
City Snapshots: Walter Benjamin’s “Little History 1900 (2): Foreign Residents, Visitors, and
of Photography” Writing
City-Without-Any-Quality (CWAQ) and Its Florence in the Nineteenth Century c. 1840–c.
Counterparts 1900 (51): Italian Writing and Culture
Cologne Fontane’s Berlin
Conrad and the City Forster’s (Un)Seen City
Copenhagen Frank O’Hara and the New York Poets
Crime and Punishment Frith, William Powell
Cruikshank, George From Public to Private: Space and Heterotopia in
Dada and Surrealism and American Cities the Writings of Pai Hsien-Yung
Dada and Surrealism and European Cities Galdós and Madrid
The Dandy Gao Xingjian and the Hong Kong Handover
Daniel Libeskind and Deconstructive Gaskell, Elizabeth, and Manchester
Architecture: Osnabrück and Berlin Gentrification, Mobility, and the Representation
Debord, Guy of Toronto in Atwood’s The Testaments
Defoe, Cities and the Plague George Gissing’s The Nether World and
Defoe, Daniel and London Clerkenwell
Deleuzean Perambulations: Urban and Rural George Gissing’s Thyrza and Lambeth
Walking in W.G. Sebald Giedion, Sigfried
Dhaka and Akhtaruzzaman Elias The Gift and Torment of Lesbian Bars in Audre
Dhaka and Bangladesh Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
Dickens, the City, and the Prison Ginsberg, Allen (1926–1997)
Dickens, Great Expectations and the Thames Gio Black Peter’s Sublime Subway Maps:
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Reading the Routes of a Queer New York City
Dunciad, The, (Alexander Pope): The Literary Gissing’s Representation of 1870s Fitzrovia
Topography of Eighteenth-Century London Glissant, Edouard
Durrell’s Alexandria Globalization and the City in Mohsin Hamid’s
Eastwood and D.H. Lawrence Novels
List of Topics ix

Gogol and Petersburg and Other Cities Johannesburg

Golgonooza Johannesburg the Edgy City
González Prada, Manuel: Lima, the Colonial City John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925):
in Postcolonial Peru Naturalism, Modernism, and Radical Politics
Grossman, Life and Fate and the Second World in the Modern American Novel
War John Gay and Trivia
Grub Street John Gay, Bertolt Brecht, and Urbanized Opera
Guatemala City and the Colonial Past in the John Stow and Early Modern London
Historical Novels of José Milla Jules Laforgue and Berlin
H. G. Wells’s London Julio Cortázar in Paris
Hanoi in Literature and Cinema Karachi
Haussmann, Georges Eugène Kawakami Mieko’s Breasts and Eggs
Hedayat and Isfahan Kingston, Jamaica: A Colonial City Portrayed by
Hedayat, Sadegh Novelist John Hearne
Hedayat, The Blind Owl and the City Lagos and the New Nollywood
Henry James’s Boston Lao She
Here and There: The Pillars and Sounds of Lao She and Beijing
Carpentier’s Havana Last Nights of Paris
Hessel: Walking in Berlin Latin-American Urban Chroniclers
Hjalmar Söderberg’s Stockholm: The Life and Death of Jack Engle, Walt Whitman
Precinematic Flâneur in Förvillelser Lima and Mario Vargas Llosa
[Diversions] Liu Cixin (刘慈欣)
Hotels in Literature Liverpool Poets, Novelists, and Life-Writers
Huysmans and Fin de Siècle Paris London Early Modern Playhouses
Imaginary Cities: Giorgio de Chirico and Los Angeles
Hebdomeros Mac Orlan
Indian Subcontinent Cities in Colonialism and MacDonald: Aberdeen, London, Manchester,
Postcolonialism Bulika
Intercity and Intracity Railway Travel in the Machinery, Mud, and the Metropolis: The
World of Arnold Bennett: A Literary Portrayal of Łódź in Władysław Reymont’s
Excursion The Promised Land
Iquitos: The Big Island of the Jungle and Its Maha Khan Phillips, The Curse of Mohenjodaro
Literary Representation Mahfuz, Najib, and Cairo
Iris Murdoch: Dear London, Divided Mandelstam and Cities
Dublin Marc Augé and Non-place
Isaak Babel’s “Odessa Tales” Marseille
Isabella Whitney and London Martí, José
Istanbul in the Turkish Novel: Ambiguity and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976)
Resistance Mass-Observation
It’s a Real Nowhere Map: Ricardo Piglia’s The Maupassant: Bel-Ami
Absent City Measure for Measure: Shakespeare’s City
Ivan Vladislavić’s Johannesburg Cartography
Jaime Saenz and the urbe of La Paz Medieval London as New Troy
James Joyce’s Dubliners: Geography “Taking Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”
Substance” Under Our Eyes Metropolitan Travel Writing
James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Multivocal Dublin Mexico City and Haussmann
Japanese Cinematic Music Mexico City: Queer Slumming
x List of Topics

Mexico City: Women, Class, and Urban Spaces in Pessoa’s Lisbon: Afterlives in Saramago and
Salvador Novo’s Nueva grandeza mexicana Tabucchi
MIÀN 面: Jia Zhangke’s Artistic Encounter with Phantasmagoria
Prada Rong Zhai Physiognomy
Minsk or Mensk Pierce Egan: Life in London (1821)
Modern Rome: Mapping the City of Decline Piers Plowman
Modernist Paris Piglia and Buenos Aires
Mohsin Hamid’s Twin Cities: New York and Pixação in São Paulo: Subverting the Lettered
Lahore City
Moosbrugger and The Man Without Qualities Platonov: Soviet Writing and Happy Moscow
Moscow, St Petersburg, and Constructivism Poe, Edgar Allan
Moscow: Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary Premchand: Rangbhoomi
Nadine Gordimer’s Johannesburg Princess Casamassima, The (James)
Nadja: André Breton Raymond Williams: The Country and the City
Nantonaku, kurisutaru [Somewhat, Crystal] by Recife and Clarice Lispector
Tanaka Yasuo Recife: Three Poets of Memory
Naples Restoration Comedy and London
Narrating the City in Film Noir Richard Wright and Chicago
Neoliberal Urbanism: The Global City and the Riga
Shantytown Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities
Neruda, Pablo Rome and the Shelleys
Nesbit: Magic Cities or “Prison[s] for Children” Rose Macaulay’s London
New York and How the Other Half Lives (Jacob Ruskin and London
A. Riis) Ruskin and Venice
New York City and the Traumatic Imagination Russian Cities: A Summary History
New York City in Paul Auster’s The New York Salvador Novo and Mexico City
Trilogy Sam Selvon: The Lonely Londoners
The Newgate Novel: Jack Sheppard Sanditon
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Other Kenyan Writers Santa: A Novel by Federico Gamboa
Nonsensified Municipalities: Urbanization in Santo Domingo in Rita Indiana Hernández’ La
Edward Lear’s Nonsense estrategia de Chochueca
Notre Dame de Paris Saul Bellow and Chicago
Odessa in Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, and Sewers: Urban Reality and Urban Imagination
Yiddish Literature Shakespeare and The City
Oslo/Kristiania/Christiania: Ibsen, Hamsun, and Shanghai: A City with No Heroes
the Modern Urban Breakthrough Sherlock Holmes and London
Paris Simmel and The Metropolis and Mental Life
Paris Peasant: Louis Aragon Singapore
“Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” Sipho Sepamla’s Johannesburg
(Benjamin) Slums and Urbanization of Poverty in
Past, Present, and Place: Setting in Cline’s Ready Postcolonial India
Player One Stanley Kubrick’s Cities
Paul Verlaine and the Parisian Bohème Stockholm, Stora Nygatan, and the City Writing
Perec, Georges of August Strindberg
Performance, Performativity, Spectacle: Arthur Suburbs in Wilkie Collins’s Fiction
Schnitzler, Der junge Medardus Sydney, Interwar Modernity, and Modernism
Peshawar: Past and Present Sydney: The Unknown City
List of Topics xi

T.S. Eliot: Cities and the City Walking the Everyday in Xi Xi’s Literary Works
Taipei and the Urban Mangrove in Wu Ming-yi’s Wang Shuo
Fiction Washington Irving: A History of New York
Thomas Anstey Guthrie (“F. Anstey”) “What Else Is a Woman to Do?” Negotiating
(1856–1934) Urban Spaces in Ann Petry’s The Street
Tokyo Nostalgia in Autobiographical Writings in Wilde and Fin de Siècle London
Contemporary Japan Willa Cather and the Metropolis
Translating the Poetry of the Urban Women in the City: Berlin (1900–1933)
Tsai Ming-liang’s Cinematic Cities: The River Woody Allen’s Manhattan
(1997) and Stray Dogs (2013) Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway
Tsuyu no atosaki [During the Rain] by Nagai Kafū The Word London in Dickens
Urbanity and the Court Case Fiction Wordsworth, The Prelude Book 7 (“Residence in
Venice and Renaissance Plays London”)
Victorian Investigative “Slumming” Youssef Chahine’s Cinematic Alexandria
Villas Miseria in Buenos Aires Yū Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station: “I Write for the
Villon and Paris People Who Don’t Belong Anywhere”
Walking in the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Zagreb
Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin Zola to Impressionism: Picturing Paris
Walking in the Crowd: Undoing Male Sexuality Zola, Emile, The Kill
Walking the City: A Chinese Perspective
About the Editor

Jeremy Tambling has been Professor of Comparative Literature at the Uni-

versity of Hong Kong and at the University of Manchester, UK, and is author
of over 20 books on literary and cultural theory, many engaged with cities and
urban theory. He is currently Professor of English at the University of Social
Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw.

xiii
Contributors

Ackbar Abbas University of California at Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

Marie-Françoise Alamichel Université Gustave Eiffel, Champs-sur-Marne,
France
Graham Allen University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
Ikuho Amano University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA
Vaughn Anderson Maryville University, St Louis, MO, USA
Ann Ang University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Peter Arnds Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Eugene L. Arva University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA
Paul Baines University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
Peter Barry Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK
Sophia Beal University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Carolyn Betensky University of Rhode Island, Kingston, NY, USA
Mehrdad Bidgoli University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran
Alexander Binns University of Hull, Hull, UK
Marek Błaszak University of Opole, Opole, Poland
Meg Brayshaw Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia
Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier Universität Hildesheim, Hildesheim, Germany
Nicholas Carr University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Richard Carr University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA
Allan Chavkin Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA
Zhaoxiang Cheng Shihezi University and Beijing University, Beijing, China
Michael Ka Chi Cheuk The Open University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong,
China
Stuart Christie Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China
xv
xvi Contributors

Agnese Codebò Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA

Jorge Conde Recife, Brazil
Will Daddario Independent Scholar, Asheville, NC, USA
Pauls Daija University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia
Ina Danzer-Radecker Heidelberg, Germany
Claudia Darrigrandi Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile
Ushashi Dasgupta Pembroke College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
J. Madison Davis University of Oklahoma, Palmyra, VA, USA
Brian Davisson Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS, USA
Anna Despotopoulou National and Kapodistrian University of Athens,
Athens, Greece
David Deutsch University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA
Terence Diggory Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA
Athanasios Dimakis National and Kapodistrian University of Athens,
Athens, Greece
Edward Dimendberg School of Humanities, University of California,
Irvine, CA, USA
William E. Dow The American University of Paris, Paris, France
Om Prakash Dwivedi BENNETT University, Greater Noida, India
Ahmed Elbeshlawy Independent Scholar, Hong Kong SAR, China
Cecilia Enjuto Rangel University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
Ramón Espejo University of Seville, Seville, Spain
Gustavo Faverón Patriau Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, USA
Ian Fong Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Paul Fung The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Elena Furlanetto University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany
Gwennaël Gaffric Université Jean Moulin, Lyon, France
Manuel Ghilarducci Institute of Slavic and Hungarian Studies, Humboldt-
University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Sean Grass Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA
Malcolm Gray D H Lawrence Society, Nottingham, UK
Simon Grimble Durham University, Durham, UK
Charmion Gustke Belmont University, Nashville, TN, USA
Contributors xvii

Magnus Halldin Literary Critic, Stockholm, Sweden

Kaiser Haq University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB), Dhaka,
Bangladesh
Nick Havely University of York, York, UK
Jack Heeney London, UK
Patrick Herald Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, USA
Jean-Yves Heurtebise FuJen Catholic University, Taipei, Taiwan
French Centre for Research on Contemporary China, Hong Kong, China
Tran Ngoc Hieu Hanoi University of Education, Hanoi, Vietnam
Joanna Hofer-Robinson University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
Daniel Holcombe Department of World Languages and Cultures, Georgia
College and State University, Milledgeville, GA, USA
Norman S. Holland Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, USA
Owen Holland XJTLU, Suzhou, China
Michael Hollington Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Brian J. Hudson Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane,
Queensland, Australia
Isaac Hui Department of Translation, Lingnan University, Hong Kong,
China
Shiau-Ting Hung Paris, France
Rebecca Hutcheon Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Louis James University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Simon J. James Department of English Studies, Durham University,
Durham, UK
Steen Bille Jørgensen Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
Tatjana Jukić Department of English, University of Zagreb, Zagreb,
Croatia
Benedikts Kalnačs University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia
Greg Kerr University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
Simon Knowles University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
Anat Koplowitz-Breier Comparative Literature Department, Bar-Ilan
University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Loren Kruger Comparative Literature, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL,
USA
xviii Contributors

Jo Labanyi Department of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University,

New York, NY, USA
Adam Lam University of Southern Queensland, Springfield Central,
Queensland, Australia
Liam Lanigan English, Governors State University, Chicago, IL, USA
Svend Erik Larsen Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
Mirja Lecke Ruhr-University, Bochum, Germany
Norbert Lennartz University of Vechta, Vechta, Germany
Esther Leslie Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK
Robert Lethbridge University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Qingxin Lin Peking University, Beijing, China
Cecilia Lindskog Whiteley Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Jakub Lipski Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz, Poland
Louis Lo Institute of Visual Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung
University, Taipei, Taiwan
Kaspar Loftin Recife, Brazil
Viviane Mahieux University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA
Adnan Mahmutović Department of English, Stockholm University, Stock-
holm, Sweden
Asma Mansoor International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan
Chryssa Marinou National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens,
Greece
Priscilla Martin University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Sam Matthews Paris, France
Peter Merchant Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, UK
Efterpi Mitsi National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens,
Greece
Ben Moore University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Rosa Mucignat King’s College London, London, UK
Joseph Mulligan Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
James Munday Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Dalhousie
University, Halifax, NS, Canada
Rifat Munim Literary ed., Dhaka Tribune, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Jacek Mydla University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland
Contributors xix

Oleski Miranda Navarro Westminster College, Fulton, MO, USA

Emory & Henry College at Emory, VA, USA
Catalina Neculai Coventry University, Coventry, UK
Brian Nelson Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Małgorzata Nitka University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland
Alastair Niven Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Magdalena Ożarska Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Jan
Kochanowski University, Kielce, Poland
Seunghan Paek Catholic Kwandong University, Gangneung, South Korea
Nic Panagopoulos English Literature & Culture, National & Kapodistrian
University of Athens, Athens, Greece
Václav Paris City College of New york, New York, NY, USA
Leonora S. Paula Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
Tadeusz Rachwał University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw,
Poland
Cecilia Rangel Enjuto University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
Irina D. Rasmussen Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Ellen Rees Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Gareth Reeves University of Durham, Durham, UK
Monica Riera University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK
David Roberts School of English, Birmingham City University, Birming-
ham, UK
Alma García Rodríguez Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA
Monique Roelofs University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Samuel Rogers University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
Yomna Saber Qatar University, Doha, Qatar
Sirpa Salenius University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland
Christiane Schönfeld Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland
Sharin Schroeder Department of English, Taipei Tech (NTUT), Taipei,
Taiwan
Evelyn Schulz Japan Center, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich,
Germany
Clive Scott University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Inela Selimović Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA
xx Contributors

Muneeza Shamsie Independent Scholar, Karachi, Pakistan

Jacqueline Sheean Department of World Languages and Cultures, Univer-
sity of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Efraim Sicher Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel
Dafydd John Sinden School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics,
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Rebecca M. Stephanis Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA, USA
Youli Sun Beijing, China
Zeynep Tüfekçioğlu University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany
Jeremy Tambling University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw,
Poland
Antony Tatlow University of Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Barbara E. Thornbury Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages
and Studies, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Tom Ue Department of English, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada
Przemysław Uściński University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
Gábor Vaderna Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
Simão Valente Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon,
Lisbon, Portugal
Michael K. Walonen Saint Peter’s University, Jersey City, NJ, USA
Yiyan Wang Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Thomas Ward Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA
Catherine Waters School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Giles Whiteley Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Carolyn Wolfenzon Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, USA
Mou-Lan Wong National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
Joakim Wrethed Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Timothy Wright Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
Allen Hai Xiao Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madi-
son, Madison, WI, USA
Jia Xu Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China
Nettah Yoeli-Rimmer Universiteit Gent, Ghent, Belgium
Honggeng Yuan Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China
Aili Zheng Willamette University, Salem, OR, USA
Introduction

This Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies is dedicated to thinking about

cities and urban contexts in all ways possible, both in predictable and non-
predictable ways, and linking these to literary and cultural studies of cities. It is
intended in its online version to go on accumulating details of cities around the
globe, and refining entries already made: in its print version, it will be an
encyclopedic handbook which should be a first reference-point for students
and all other readers interested in the interactions of cities and literature. And
literature is interpreted widely here; it includes film, as indispensable for
considering modern cities, art, and photography, street art, and music. These
forms are especially important, for this specific project, where the city does not
have English or a European language as an accessible resource, and where for
instance film has been a way in which the city has stamped itself on people’s
awareness.
The aim is to be informational, but also critical: each contributor has been
chosen for his or her knowledge, and for their readiness to comment freely, to
criticize, and give an opinion about their subject. It follows on the Palgrave
Handbook to Literature and the City (Tambling 2017) but intends to be more
comprehensive than that book could be, while knowing that the project could be
double the length, and still not have achieved its purpose of being encyclopedic.
Why are cities the focus for this approach to literary studies? Why are literary
studies inseparable from thinking about the urban? Apologies are offered for
flagrant omissions. This Introduction tries to fill in some gaps. Sometime
between the Millennium and 2010, the world’s population (in 2017, when this
Encyclopedia began to be assembled, this was 7.6 billion) passed from being
primarily rural to primarily urban. This important shift was first signaled in the
1851 British census, which against official expectations, showed that Britain had
a majority population living in towns. Britain was the first country where that
was the case. This move from rural to urban will not be reversed, barring
catastrophic and unforeseen changes, and it has as a sober corollary, the point
that virtually half the present world population (especially Asia and sub-Saharan
Africa) lives in slums. (And how many words for “slums” are there in various
languages and cultures?) The biggest slums are, in no order, to be found in
Bombay, Karachi, Nairobi, Cape Town, and Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, which is
part of Mexico City. And many of these are also rich cities. But in the USA, the
richest country, with the most highly developed urban culture, with a population
of 326 million, poverty levels, though of course not confined to cities, are of the
order of 18 million. On a statistical basis alone, it might be expected that urban

xxi
xxii Introduction

literature would have protest as its principal theme, and that it would be
registering the fact of inequality, as something most visible in cities.
But if cities, and “megacities,” a word of the second half of the twentieth
century, and applying to places with populations larger than 20 million (Tokyo,
Shanghai, Beijing, Jakarta, Delhi, Seoul, Manila, and Lagos are examples), are
obviously no new thing, but part of early defining moments in the diverse
histories of cultures.

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal (Eliot, 1963: 77)

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is one of the defining poems of
modernism, and it is thoroughly urban, giving a kind of history, which some-
times includes oblique references to, besides these cities, Munich, and Smyrna,
Bradford, Thebes, Margate, and Carthage, and Sydney, as well as London.
These, and especially London, are woven in and out of the text. London is
specially named: London Bridge, Thames Street; St Mary Woolnoth and
Magnus Martyr churches, the Thames, as it passes by the Tower of London (a
“falling tower” in the perception of the poem). A falling tower would also
suggest Babel, the Biblical “city and tower” of Genesis chapter 11, and the
first which was polyglot – always an issue for modern cities. It would be
interesting to ask readers what associations each of the cities The Waste Land
mentions have. Eliot, who came from St Louis, Missouri, whose context frames
early poems such as his “Preludes,”, sees different cities, with their belief
systems, and their distinctiveness, repeating each other, and so becoming
generic, exchangeable the one with the other. Even the hotel in the poem is
called the “Metropole.”’. And if they are “unreal,” that may imply that they have
the reality of dreams, or that the fog that pervades so many of them obliterates
them, or that the rebuilding within them takes away any history, which would
confer reality on them. Cities are being slowly engulfed in the “violet” (violent?
– violated?) air, which is itself nothing but fog: filthy air, such as forms the
atmosphere in such mega-polluted cities as Mumbai, or Delhi, or Riyadh. It is the
idea of the city as always building itself up, and always in ruins.

Cities in History

That cities may disappear into sand is a pervasive possibility, and it is not
necessary here to think of huge cities: some of the most interesting cities are
small, not capitals at all, perhaps not giant industrial bases, but significant all
the same: France and Italy have examples; so does the United States, so long as
we are not thinking of the “small town” folksy ethos which countries, espe-
cially the USA make so much of, as with the musical film, Meet Me in St Louis.
(Thinking of musicals, we know that “everything’s up to date in Kansas city,”
and we know the place that 42nd Street gives to Broadway.)
Introduction xxiii

Perhaps one feature of the twenty-first century has been the number of cities
that have become “tech cities,” such as Singapore, Bangalore, Los Angeles,
Silicon Valley (i.e., San Francisco and San José), Tokyo; this has become an
area of ongoing research, along with virtual cities and smart cities. And issues
of sustainability, and how many cities are not sustainable in their present form
accelerated in prominence as the Encyclopedia has been in the making. Here
we may evoke Manama in Bahrain, or Dubai or Abu Dhabi in the United Arab
Emirates, built on the wealth brought by oil, or Doha in Qatar, whose eco-
nomic wealth has given it a special sports status (the FIFA World Cup in 2022);
the cost in the destruction of lives imported from Bangladesh, India, and Nepal
into virtual forced labor and the manipulation of interests for the sake of a
“business” community, tells its own story of the separation of cities from
people, and of how sustainability is incompatible with people’s alienation
and the universal model of how cities project images of wealth.
The pride of Troy, one of the major cities in ancient literature, as in Homer’s
The Iliad, was the theme of many later authors, such as Dante, moralizing the
reasons for its being burned by the Greeks. So was Babylon, situated in
present-day Iraq, which in the last book of the Bible “is fallen.” Rome,
destroyed in 410 CE – but not for the last time: the city was sacked in 1527
– lent its fame to Augustine’s City of God, one of those most influential for
thinking of the place that cities must have in any utopia. And Blake’s poem
“London” or his prophetic work Jerusalem are also fundamental statements of
the importance of cities, however visionary and allegorical the conception
which produces them. The idea of cities having a rise and fall, like Sodom and
Gomorrah, Biblical names forming one of the titles of Proust’s In Search of
Lost Time (A La Recherche de Temps perdu) is basic and formative for ways of
thinking about cities. Medieval cities grew up as places for defense, or as
market-towns, especially when they could be situated at major crossroads, or
trade routes. North American settlers made much of the Biblical image of them
being “a city set on a hill,” and derived their exceptionalism from that. Early
and “early modern” literary texts shaped themselves around cities as destina-
tions for pilgrims, as with The Canterbury Tales, or else saw the city as
somewhere to be left behind, as with the company (the brigata) which leaves
Florence in the plague of 1348, in Boccacco’s Decameron. But the company of
ten, then spend their time telling stories (fabliaux) about bourgeois life in
Florence, and in doing so, linked short stories, money-making, and sex and
cities together forever in Western literature.

Modernity and the City

These points are made to indicate that thinking about cities and literature
cannot simply be about the modern city, which will be spoken of in the next
section, but must pay attention to the past, to cities which were important
(Canterbury for Chaucer) but which have lost much of their centrality. In
“modernity,” if, oversimplifying, we think of this as a nineteenth-century
concept, one which was first defined by Baudelaire, and which receives a lot
of discussion in this Encyclopedia (it is not to be confused with “modernism,”
xxiv Introduction

which is also discussed), cities were re-created, and created. Modernity gives
the sense that a new thinking and theorization of what cities were, is required,
and in the nineteenth-century, a challenge had to be faced, of explaining them.
It is the subject of Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City (1973), which
explores how the country has always been thought of in idyllic terms – as
pastoral, or as full of rural retreats – and yet how people have moved away
from the land and found the industrial or commercial city essential, even if they
ended up in poverty. The task of thinking what changes in mentality (to put it at
the least) the city required, began to be taken on in such texts as Crime and
Punishment, or Great Expectations, or Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall
Street, or Baudelaire’s poems about Paris (Tableaux Parisiens), or in his prose-
poems. The task appears with the creation of Sherlock Holmes of 22B Baker
Street, London, Holmes being one of many detectives who have found the city
and what Raymond Chandler called its “mean streets” their sphere of opera-
tion. In modernism, the city takes a new life in The Waste Land, or Ulysses, or
in Manhattan Transfer or Berlin Alexanderplatz. All these texts, and many
more like them, need analysis for what they indicate about the direction
literature takes under the influence of modern cities.
One way of conceptualizing city writing is to think about the provenance of
those who have written about it. If classical Rome produced no writers, all its
authors came from outside the city, sometimes from Spain, a Roman colony,
that implies the city itself did not feel the need to question its mode of
existence. In contrast, modern cities have produced their own writers, who
know the territory: Dickens is an outstanding example. And much American
writing has come from first-generation settlers, such as Upton Sinclair, writing
about Chicago as seen by immigrants from Lithuania in The Jungle, or, Henry
Roth, born in the Ukraine, wrote Call It Sleep, a novel about approaching and
settling in New York, and engaging with its language, and showing, too, that
the city focuses problems of needing to have more than one language to cope
with it. Or there is Richard Wright (1908–1960), born in Rucker’s Plantation in
Mississippi, but coming to Chicago which he writes about in Native Son
(1940) through the experience of Bigger Thomas, the alienated black youth
in a city whose hegemony is white. Wright himself died in Paris, like so many
American intellectuals, so that his life becomes a parable of trying to read the
city from outside as a normative condition.
Cities have been places which exclude people on grounds of color, and
class, and gender and sexuality: but the city has been specifically complicated
for women, whose confrontations with it have brought out some of the most
interesting writing and film-making, only some, however, by women-direc-
tors: randomly chosen examples of films include When a Woman Ascends the
Stairs (Mikio Naruse, for Tokyo), A Taste of Honey (Shelagh Delaney’s play,
set in Salford, near Manchester), or Vivre sa Vie (Godard’s film of 1962, with
Anna Karina, set in Paris), or Wadjda (2012, set in Riyadh, and directed by
Haifaa Al-Mansour). Perhaps cities have been, despite much of the evidence,
which implies that women have been kept out of public spaces, a valuable
place for women, and opportunities. They have often been degraded to being
considered streetwalkers, for example, in coming up to London in William
Hogarth’s illustration series The Harlot’s Progress. And walking the street has
Introduction xxv

a very different meaning for the woman than it does for the man, where it might
imply the flâneur, strolling through the city, though the flâneur is not as free as
that sounds. (In the “situationist” writer Guy Debord, the important activity in
the city, to be preserved for as long as possible, is “drifting.”) Dawdling and
loitering both have rich associations and both define urban culture. But there
are signs that women have been able to find an urban room of their own,
however contested, for example in Victorian literature, as with Elizabeth
Gaskell’s treatments of Manchester; and in modernism. Here, examples of
women’s writing that come to mind include Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage
or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and much else in Woolf, or Kathleen
Mansfield, or Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, or in the writings of the Lebanese-
born Etel Adnan, or the Brazilian, though Ukrainian-born, Clarice Lispector,
or in Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), her memoir of being an
immigrant from Barbados in New York; or Vivian Gornick’s New York
memoir, The Odd Woman and the City (2015). Eileen Chang’s novels are
important for Hong Kong. Sophie Calle has made much of the independence of
walking the streets, and, in Venice, of following a man, as women are stalked
by men. It is a subject which was recently written up by Lauren Elkin (1916).
The geographer Doreen Massey’s writings about Kilburn in London have
shown how much that area owes to Britain as a postcolonial country. Lynsey
Hanley has written memorably on Birmingham council estates in Estates: An
Intimate History (2008). Saskia Sassen’s work on global cities (1991) has been
defining for the topic, and a reminder that the city is not simply related to a
country, but its identity is defined by, questioned by, its relation to the world
(Squier 1984). And the relationship of women to cities in many countries is
unquestionably more limited in opportunities than it is for men, and an
inequality of opportunity remains a significant barrier, a point which feminism
addressing itself to lower-income countries, as with Gayatri Spivak, does well
to stress.
The city entails a deterritorializing, a term from Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari: it takes away old allegiances and controls, it leaves people without a
sense of boundaries; it creates what the sociologist Emile Durkheim called
“anomie”: the sense of not being enframed by traditions and laws which
regulate and sustain. That is particularly true in the motif of the person coming
to the town from the country, one of the most standard ways in which literature
and film have worked. The city has done more to question personal identity
than anything else, as in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy – a title which is a
reminder of how cities have become parts of titles, both of novels: think of
Charlie Chaplin’s silent film, City Lights (1931 – filmed in Los Angeles) or
Death in Venice or Dubliners, or Bely’s Petersburg, or Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s
Nairobi Heat (2009). Or there are plentiful examples from film, which is the
form which comes from Paris, the “city of light” – though that title has been
claimed by many cities, especially in the USA. Perhaps Paris is the most
cinematic city of all. Though many films shaped by Hollywood have mythi-
cized cities, as with Casablanca, or Lady from Shanghai, or Manhattan, some
have tried to work from the city itself, as with Roma, Città Aperta, Battle of
Algiers or 24 City, or Last Tango in Paris, or Mulholland Drive, or Hiroshima
Mon Amour, or Chungking Express. But if such titles take off the emphasis
xxvi Introduction

from individual destinies, and evoke different atmospheres in which events

happen, that must also take into account how cities have thrown out and
discarded concepts of single gender, or have questioned heteronormativity,
or have brought sexuality into focus in a way which is again characteristic of
modernity.
Any awareness of cities will have to be in the light of the way they are,
many of them, now conurbations, a word of 1915, which was coined by Patrick
Geddes (1854–1932), whose upbringing was in Scottish cities, and who
became an utopist town-planner, and so not single entities at all. We have
already named some “megacities”: Mexico City, Cairo, Los Angeles, São
Paolo, Kyoto and Osaka and Kobe together (called Keihanshin) are a few
others to add to these: Moscow and Istanbul – which was an old planned city,
when it was Constantinople – are not far behind. Many of these cities – the
majority of them belonging to developing countries with a low or a lower-
middle income – and many of them in countries which have known coloniza-
tion at first hand, have produced an extraordinary, often contestatory post-
colonial literature, which is quite different from the way they have been
presented in colonial texts, or in travel-writing. Some of this has attempted
to get inside their uniqueness and difference, while recognizing, sometimes,
the impossibility of doing that. Other writers have started from an awareness of
the city as offering an unspecifiably different experience, for which only
considering a non-existent city will do: as with Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis,
or Italo Calvino’s Imaginary Cities, or Brecht’s Mahagonny, with its rise and
fall in an America which is Chicago, and Los Angeles, and also a city in
colonial India, such as those that Rudyard Kipling describes.
Perhaps it can be argued that “modernity” is partly defined by those texts
which confront cities, so that in urban literature, the principal challenges are
found for thinking about such issues as race, and gender and class, and poverty,
the city showing each of these things up most starkly; or to consider such
categories as crowds, or power, or identity, whether personal or collective.
Capital cities define or speak for a nation, but they also question national
identity. Is Barcelona Spanish or Catalan, either or both? Does London’s ethnic
diversity make it the most representative town by which we define “English-
ness” – in which case “Englishness” is a hybrid concept – or is the idea of
nationhood incompatible with city living? Which contemporary city would
comprise “Englishness”? Bath or Manchester? If the answer is neither, or both,
perhaps the point about cities is that they cannot support nationalist thinking,
despite having national monuments, and statues, some of which are under
threat because of the colonial past they speak of. Cities often seem to have one
prominent function: many, for instance, are associated with religion and
religious aspirations and groupings, such as Rome, or Mecca, or Jerusalem,
if not with monotheism (in Europe, a city used to be defined by having a
cathedral), but a modern city is also plural in its forms of life, and disallows
such singleness. Cities are made to embody memories, as with their religious
buildings, their museums, war-memorials, and sites of pilgrimage, but they are
also places of forgetting since they are forever modernizing, their topography
and buildings always changing. Perhaps they create places of memory, the title
of three books by the French sociologist and historian Pierre Nora (Les Lieux
Introduction xxvii

de Mémoire) because they threaten it: the city confronts people with history,
and asks too, whose history is being recorded. At the same time, and it is
perhaps the case with Nora, cities are used to create a sense of national history.
They may try to erase the past by being completely new: several planned cities
have already been mentioned, but others should be named, whose existence is
a political statement, such as Brasilia, or Abuja, in Nigeria, or Canberra, or
New Delhi, or Islamabad, or Putrajaya in Malaysia, or Washington DC, and
Ottawa. Dostoesvky’s Underground Man, a completely urban type, speaks in
Notes from Underground (1864) of “having the misfortune to live in St
Petersburg, the most abstract and intentional city in the whole round world.
(Towns can either be intentional or unintentional.)” (Dostoevsky 1972: 17–
18). The insight suggests three ways of thinking about cities, quite apart from
speculating on why the Underground Man finds this particular city so uncon-
genial. What characterizes an intentional – a premeditated, a fabricated city
(alternative translations), and what marks out an unintentional one? What
intentions underline a planned city? And what would be an example of an
unintentional city? St Petersburg was planned for the greater glory of Russia
and to westernize it: colonial cities, such as Lima, have been planted to be
models of a new regime, and to have control of their hinterland.

Areas for Research

How these things may be thought through has been the subject of much
speculation and of theoretical work which ask how we have been compelled
to think anew about cities. The present writer dislikes titles like Peter
Ackroyd’s London: The Biography because it (a) assumes that there is a single
narrative possible to describe an entity – London – which remains the same
whatever its changes, and (b) because it makes the city animate, in a form of
thinking which encourages the thought that there is a spirit of the place which
conditions its history. A similar distaste for psychogeography – taken as the
idea that there may be a pervasive inescapable spirit within cities and their
histories – is also at work here. What continuities are there, or what can there
be, between the conditions of the city in the eighteenth century, for instance (St
Petersburg, Washington, Paris, London) and the city of the twenty-first cen-
tury? From the standpoint of today’s globalization, is it simply exaggerative
and over-simplifying language if we call London at the end of the eighteenth
century a global city? Is there any continuity in the life of the city, or else, is
there such a radical break between them that even the physical conditions of
the eighteenth-century city, where they survive, do not allow us to think of the
city as being one over time? The modernity of the eighteenth-century city is
not the same as that of the present moment, though there may be fascinating
analogies to be drawn between them. It is always possible to find writers
absorbed by what their city-conditions mean, and finding that older ways of
thinking about cities – for instance adopting the classical modes of Horace’s
satires or those of Juvenal – may not be adequate to represent their now present
city. The old familiar terms and satire, the old ways of thinking, no longer fit.
That happens with Balzac (1799–1850), who is one of the most inventive of
xxviii Introduction

novelists of the city and full of the sense that something has changed; that Paris
in the 1830s demands new ways by which it can be considered, and therefore
new ways of writing. The same crisis was felt by Baudelaire, and by Rimbaud,
and by the Surrealists, Bréton, Aragon, and Soupault. In London, the challenge
of mapping the city was felt keenly by Dickens, almost alone among his
English contemporaries, with the exception of Disraeli, and Elizabeth Gaskell,
and later in the century, George Gissing. One attempt to chronicle the city
comes in the thoroughly Parisian Emile Zola (1840–1902), whose twenty
Rougon-Macquart novels use various Paris working-class locales, and show
the city from a de-centred viewpoint, stressing what deceit and sexual vice
underpins bourgeois polite Paris.
City writing engages with the question of how to represent the city, while
knowing that the city in its bigness may be outside representation, and calls
representation, and representability, into question: the point is crucial for
considering what is meant by realism, and what is claimed for it. To represent
something assumes that it can be controlled, and spoken for. Yet the city’s
diversity and size resists summary, and the question arises: what is the city
now, is it its center, or its peripheries? Is the center a peripheral area (Ameel et
al. 2015). The city center may be historic, and tourist-geared, in which case it
may raise questions about its artificiality as being a “heritage” site, kept alive
only by being given a protected status; but reaching that center often means
passing by huge areas of suburbs, or slums, or shanty-towns, which redefine
the meaning of the urban and ask what it is that is to be encompassed. Perhaps
airports have become the new cities, as railway stations were before; more than
points of entrance, but almost miniatures of the city. Such writers as J.G.
Ballard, as in High-Rise (1975), imply that this is now a post-urban world, in
the sense that it all bears the signs of ruin, of decay, of the sense that there can
be now no sense of a city which has a controlled infrastructure, or super-
intending power. If the city is in ruins, it cannot be the triumphant manifesta-
tion of power, or of national identity, but the city can be gazed and written
about selectively, and its ruined quality concealed or repressed.

The Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies

With no thought that the Encyclopedia could ever be other than work in
progress, that it could never cover all the ground, and allowing personal
responses from contributors and personal preferences by the editor, whose
own blindness will help make the work incomplete, this Encyclopedia starts
from the idea of writing up cities as they appear in literature, or as they
construct literary texts. It attempts to draw connections, and parallels, and
occasionally conclusions. There has been an attempt to be as global as
possible: to include cities from Africa, and South Asia, for instance, and this
has not always been successful, not out of a lack of desire on the part of the
editor, but because it has been hard to find contributors. Omissions should be
repaired in a second edition, should one appear.
It also attempts to work with the immense amount of theoretical material
available from sociologists, town planners and architects, photographers, and
Introduction xxix

literary and cultural critics, many of them coming out of a modernist Marxism.
With as much attention as possible to women’s experience of the city, and
feminist addresses to it, it looks at the writers who have most responded to
globalization and who have wanted to engage with the city. In thinking of
theorists who matter here, space must be given to Engels, to Simmel, to
Tönnies, and to Walter Benjamin, who was perhaps the twentieth century’s
outstanding writer on the city, especially through the Arcades Project, consid-
eration of which occupies several entries here. In France, the theorizations of
space and everyday life by Henri Lefebvre, and Guy Debord and Michel de
Certeau have been essential, and some of their work is reflected here, so too are
the writings of Paul Virilio, and Marc Augé. Also to be thought about are
Raymond Williams, Elizabeth Wilson, and Iain Sinclair; while the architect
Rem Koolhaas has been one of those crucial for thinking about cities as
opposing, by their bigness and their heterogeneity, and their “delirious”
quality, the attempts of architecture to organize space. Not that architecture
itself is necessarily a rational concept, as Anthony Vidler’s work on The
Architectural Uncanny (1992), drawing on the psychoanalysis of Freud and
Lacan has shown.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the USA produced the influential and
highly influential Chicago School, more empiricist in its methods than anything
from Europe, and whose main teachers and researchers in urban sociology were
Robert E. Park, and Louis Wirth, and Lewis Mumford, the latter greatly
influenced by Geddes. Coming forward from then there was the influential
work of Jane Jacobs in the 1960s, and more recently, Saskia Sassen, associated
with the phrase “global city,” the title of a book of 1991, and Mike Davis. Global
issues have been the subject of the work of Arjun Appadurai, who in 2001 was
theorizing cities in terms of “flows” in constant movement; these create cities
which he identified as “ethnoscapes,” “mediascapes,” “technoscapes,”
“financescapes,” and “ideoscapes.” The question is whether such descriptions
contest or support by a certain blandness the way that neoliberalism and
international capital, often shaped by oil interests, create such “scapes,” and
whether they look as plural and diverse as they are claimed to be. Here literature,
contesting received images, by its presentation of lives in their urban environ-
ments, shows the need for critical engagement with the way that modern cities
are indeed “abstract and intentional” in the way they move populations, and
produce not a “deep democracy,” but one which is more controlled.
It is relevant to ask whether literature and film, for instance, in the condi-
tions of globalization, can contest the downsides of the global city, or whether
they repeat its problems because they are implicated in them in terms of modes
of production, so that they share, perhaps reluctantly, the need to compete. If
we speak of “world literature,” that too is susceptible to the market, and to the
preparedness to accept translation, and to accept the differences in culture from
city to city, and the differences of cities from each other, instead of seeing them
in an homogenizing perspective, which makes the American city the para-
digm. That literature may not be able to claim a public sphere outside such
interests, whose focus is the city, is a depressing possibility. It was always
easier to find contributors who would write about New York, or Berlin, or
Paris, than who would approach cities in developing countries. It makes it
xxx Introduction

more important that such an Encyclopedia as this should exist, to bring out
how much writing, and film, and other art forms, have, often with a very minor
status, succeeded in shaping critical perceptions of cities and the world they
dominate.

References

Ameel, Lieven, Jason Finch, and Markku Salmela, eds. 2015. Literature and
the periphera; city. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 1972. Notes from underground and the double. Trans.
Jessie Coulson. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Squier, Susan Merrill, ed. 1984. Women writers and the city: Essays in feminist
literary criticism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Tambling, Jeremy. 2017. The Palgrave handbook of literature and the city.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Further Reading

Appadurai, Arjun. 2001. Deep democracy: Urban governmentality and the

horizon of politics. Environment and Urbanisation 13: 23–43.
Eliot, T.S. 1962. Collected poems, 1909–1962. London: Faber.
Elkin, Lauren. 2016. Flâneuse: Women walk the City. London: Chatto and
Windus.