The City in American Literature and Culture

Kevin R. McNamara, Professor of Literature at the University of Houston–Clear Lake, is editor of The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature (2014) and The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles (2010) and author of Urban Verbs: Arts and Discourses of American Cities (1996).

Introduction Kevin R. McNamara; 1. Antebellum urban publics David Henkin; 2. Intersections: streets and other democratic spaces John Fagg; 3. The literature of neighborhood Carlo Rotella; 4. Writing the ghetto, inventing the slum Thomas Heise; 5. Urban borders, open wounds Ana María Manzanas Calvo and Jesús Benito Sánchez; 6. Gentrification James Peacock; 7. House rules: The New Yorker and the making of the white suburban liberal woman Kathy Knapp; 8. Transnational American cities: Camilo Mejía's ar Ramadi, Iraq, and Jason Hall's Topeka, Kansas John Carlos Rowe; 9. The poetics of rims: New Orleans Ruth Salvaggio; 10. American vertigo: the metropolis and the new biopolitical order William Boelhower; 11. Labor's city Joseph Entin; 12. White immigrant trajectories in US urban literature: the Italian American case Fred Gardaphé; 13. Crime and violence, or hard-boiled chronicles of mean streets and their hidden truths Brian Tochterman; 14. Disaster, apocalypse, and after Sean Grattan; 15. Bohemia Erik Mortenson; 16. The spatial turn and critical race studies Sophia Bamert and Hsuan L. Hsu; 17. From trauma theory to systemic violence: narratives of post-katrina New Orleans Arin Keeble; 18. Security theory Johannes Voelz; 19. Posthuman cities Andrew Pilsch; 20. Critical regionalism: why Hillbilly Elegy and its critics matter to writing about cities Douglas Reichert Powell; Coda: city and polis Kevin R. McNamara.