This book is about the impact of literature upon cities world-wide, and cities upon literature. It examines why the city matters so much to contemporary critical theory, and why it has inspired so many forms of writing which have attempted to deal with its challenges to think about it and to represent it. Gathering together 40 contributors who look at different modes of writing and film-making in throughout the world, this handbook asks how the modern city has engendered so much theoretical consideration, and looks at cities and their literature from China to Peru, from New York to Paris, from London to Kinshasa. It looks at some of the ways in which modern cities ¿ whether capitals, shanty-towns, industrial or ¿rust-belt¿ ¿ have forced themselves on people¿s ways of thinking and writing.

Represents the most substantial, comprehensive handbook in literary urban studies

Introduction and Acknowledgements.- Prologue: City-Theory and Writing in Paris and Chicago: Space, Gender, Ethnicity.- PART I. THE CITY IN THEORY.- Introduction.- 1. Modern Urban Theory and the Study of Literature; Jason Finch.- 2. Theorists of the Postmodern, Global, and Digital City; J. A. Smith.- 3. Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project; Ben Moore.- 4. 'How did the Everyday Manage to become so Interesting?'; Alfie Bown.- PART II. EUROPEAN CITIES.- Introduction.- 5. Dublin; Daniel Bristow.- 6. Medieval and Early Modern Cities: London, Paris, Florence, and Amsterdam; Jeremy Tambling.- 7. Modern London: 1820-2020; Jason Finch.- 8. Balzac: A Socio-Material Archaeology of Paris; Jonathan White.- 9. Berlin: Flesh and Stone, Space and Time; Ulrike Zitzlsperger.- 10. Petersburg on the Threshold; Paul Fung.- 11. St. Petersburg and Moscow in Twentieth-century Russian Literature; Isobel Palmer.- 12. Spain'sLiterature of the City; Aitor Bikandi-Meijas and Paul Vita.- 13. Lisbon: What the Tourist Should Read; Daniel Bristow.- 14. Vienna; Jeremy Tambling.- 15. Venice: Impossible City; David Spurr.- PART III. NORTH AMERICAN CITIES.- Introduction.- 16. Merging Naturalism and the Unreal: An Approach to America's Literary Cities; Markku Salmela.- 17. 'I would go to Toronto': The City in Contemporary Writing; Tom Ue.- 18. New York Fiction; Markku Salmela and Lieven Ameel.- PART IV: LATIN AMERICAN CITIES.- Introduction.- 19. The Repeating City: Urban Space in Hispanic Caribbean Literature; Elena Valdez.- 20. Mexico City; David William Foster.- 21. Cities, Territories, and Conflict: Narrative and the Colombian City in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century; Andrés Mesa.- 22. Peru: Words Under the Fog; Fernando Rivera.- 23. Brasília's Literature; Sophia Beal.- 24. Rio's Favelas: Mapping the Periphery; Leila Lehnen.- 25. The Case of Rio de Janeiro: Exploring Geographies of Resistance and Domination; Kátia da Costa Bezerra.- 26. São Paulo in Transit; Leila Lehnen.- 27. Santiago, Chile from the Mapocho River: Landscape, Border, and Waste; Claudia Darrigrandi Navarro.- 28. Buenos Aires; David William Foster.- PART V. AFRICAN CITIES.- Introduction.- 29. An Overview of African Cities and Writing; Alastair Niven.- 30. Cairo and Alexandria; Ahmed Elbeshlawy.- 31. Lagos in Nigerian Literature; Louis James.- 32. Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo: Cowboys, Cosmonauts and Capitalism; Kaspar Loftin.- 33. What is the City in Africa?; Patrick Williams.- 34. South African Cities; Marita Wenzel.- PART VI. ASIAN CITIES.- Introduction.- 35. Istanbul; Valerie Kennedy.- 36. Beirut; Ghenwa Hayek.- 37. India and Its Cities Through the Eyes of Its Writers; Alastair Niven.- 38. Out of Place in Delhi: Some Vignettes of Loss;Stuti Khanna.- 39. Fictional and Cinematic Representations of the Journey of Bombay to Mumbai; Nilufer E. Bharucha.- 40. City and Country in Chinese Fiction: An Historical Survey; Leo Ou-fan Lee.- 41. A Cinematic Guide to Asian Cities: Taipei, Seoul, and the Cinema of Destruction; Louis Lo.- 42. A Megalopolis in Transit: Waterways as the Witness of Early Twentieth-Century Tokyo; Ikuho Amano.- 43. Australasian City Writing; Michael Hollington.- PART VII: URBAN THEMES.- Introduction and Epilogue.- 44. Realism and its revelations: City Perspectives in London and Paris; Sara Thornton.- 45. Conceptualising the Modernist City; Iain Bailey.- 46. Travel Writing and the City; Paul Smethurst.- 47. The Urban Connections of Crime Fiction; Stephen Knight.- 48. Cities Utopian, Dystopian and Apocalyptic; Lieven Ameel.- Further Reading.