An innovative, interdisciplinary, incisive scholarly study remapping and redefining domains and dynamics of modernism, EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of modernism critically considers how geo-historically distant and disparate urban sites, concentrating Russian and Luso-Brazilian cultural dialogue and definition, give rise to peculiarly parallel anachronistic and alternative fictional forms. While comparatively reframing these literary traditions through an extensive survey of Russian and Brazilian literature, cartography, urban design and development, foregrounding innovative close readings of works by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bely, Almeida, Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Mário de Andrade, the book also redefines new constellations (eccentric, concentric, ex-centric) for understanding geo-cultural and generic dimensions of modernist and post-modern literature and theory.

Introduction1. Eccentricity and modernity
2. Eccentric cities and citytexts: transposition, translation, and transformations of authority and authorship
3. Gogol's open prospects: digressive copy clerks
4. Dostoevsky's and Machado de Assis's undergrounds: dead men writing
5. Hallucinated cities
Postscript: Theory of the novel and the eccentric novel's early play with theory