Literary Second Cities (eBook)

Jason Finch is Assistant Professor in English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Previously published works include Deep Locational Criticism: Imaginative Place in Literary Research and Teaching and E.M. Forster and English Place: A Literary Topography.Lieven Ameel is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Tampere, Finland.  Previously published works include Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature: Urban Experiences in Finnish Prose Fiction 1890-1940, and Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements (ed.). Markku Salmela is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Tampere, Finland. Previously published works include Paul Auster's Spatial Imagination and The Grotesque and the Unnatural (ed.).

Literary Second Cities 2
Preface and Acknowledgements 5
Contents 8
Editors and Contributors 10
List of Figures 13
Part I Defining the Second City 15
Chapter 1 The Second City in Literary Urban Studies: Methods, Approaches, Key Thematics 16
Secondariness in Urban Studies 19
From Second Cities as Sites of Contestation to the Post-Urban Cittá Diffusa 21
Overview of Contributions to This Book 24
Conclusions: Second Cities, Literary Urban Studies and the Spatial Humanities 30
Works Cited 31
Chapter 2 World Cities and Second Cities: Imagining Growth and Hybridity in Modern Literature 34
On the Concept of “Second City” 34
World Cities and Other Cities 34
The Growth of Cities 36
Late Modern Urbanity and Its “States of Matter” 38
The Representation of Second Cities 44
Second Cities as Sites of Growth and Modernization 44
Hybrid Urbanity in Second Cities 47
Closing Observations: Second Cities in a Network Society and Their Potential as Mediopolitan Utopias 52
Works Cited 54
Part II In the Shadow of the Alpha City 56
Chapter 3 Comic Novel‚ City Novel: David Lodge and Jonathan Coe Reinterpreted by Birmingham 57
Departing from the Comic 59
Becoming City Novels 60
The South-Western Sector of Birmingham: Spatial Partiality 62
The Uses of Precision 64
Names and Structuring Contrasts 67
The Brown Heart of England 69
Panoramic Visions and a Birmingham Symphony 71
Conclusion 74
Works Cited 76
Chapter 4 “A Sort of Second London in Every Thing but Vitiousness”: Bristol in Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 1700–1750 79
Bristol as Britain’s “Second” City 82
A Poetical Description of Bristol (1712) 83
London and Bristol Delineated (1744) 90
Conclusion 96
Works Cited 98
Chapter 5 Cities Within a Second City: The Case of Literary Tartu 101
The Evolution of Tartu’s Literary Image 102
A Different Tartu 107
Tartu on Jaan Kaplinski’s Map 111
Kaplinski’s Urbanature 113
Works Cited 119
Chapter 6 Still Learning from Las Vegas: Imagining America’s Urban Other 121
Navigating Vegas Literature 123
City of Excess 126
City of Exception 130
City of Reflection 134
Works Cited 138
Part III Frontier Second Cities 141
Chapter 7 The Capital of Otherness: A Geocritical Exploration of Diyarbak?r, Turkey 142
Introduction 142
Turkish Modernization and Its Others 144
Memory Surfaces 150
Amed: Capital of the Homeland 153
Conclusions 159
Works Cited 159
Chapter 8 Narva: A Literary Border Town 162
Border Town Cultural and Literal: Narva Since 1703 164
Narva in Literature, 1700–2000 166
Travelogues 167
The Divided Town in the Late Nineteenth Century: Raudsed käed on the Border of the Modern Era 167
Remembering Old Narva After World War II: Soviet Estonia on the Border of the Past 169
Abroad: The Last Border 170
The Reconciliatory Purpose of Literature and Architecture 172
The Building of Narva College 174
“Võõrad lood” and “Leegionärid” 176
Conclusion 178
Works Cited 180
Part IV The Diffuse Second City 184
Chapter 9 Riku Korhonen’s Kahden ja Yhden Yön Tarinoita as Reflection on the Suburban Fragmentation of Community 185
Writing the Concrete Suburb 187
The Episode Novel: The Narrative Form of a Fragmenting Social Cohesion 188
Satirizing Twentieth-Century Planning Discourse: Contact in the Compact City 192
Panorama and Diorama 195
Up and Down 198
The Mansion of the Gods 200
Conclusion 201
Works Cited 202
Chapter 10 “Away from Here to Tjottahejti”: Spatial and Sexual (Re-)Orientation in Places of Secondariness in Contemporary Swedish Fiction 204
Body and Place: Phenomenological Approaches 207
The Body not at Home in the Swedish People’s Home 211
The Literary Second City as the Bodily Experienced City 215
Spatial and Sexual (Re)Orientation 220
Works Cited 224
Chapter 11 Moving Beyond Venice: Literary Landscapes of Movement in Northern Italy’s “Diffused City” 226
Introduction: Leaving Venice Behind 226
Practicing Space in the Diffused City: A Geocritical Approach 230
Enacting Territorial Prose: Roads as Chronotopes and Cognitive Tools 232
Travelling Literary Routes Through North-Eastern Italy’s Road Network 235
Conclusion 245
Works Cited 246
Afterword 250
Second to None: Literary Geographies of Second Cities 250
Thinking of Second Cities as Literary Geographers 252
Second Cities for Writers 257
Works Cited 260
Index 263