Urban Intersections: Meetings of Life and Literature in United States CitiesWhat is "urban" literature? In Urban Intersections, Sidney Bremer looks beyond the skyscraper to reveal earlier and continuing images of the neighborhood, the street, and the family home challenging the universality of urban alienation. She reminds us of the many regional, women, and ethnic writers who have articulated the expressive and communal life of cities in the United States. Tracking the development of the American city from "city-town" through "economic city", "neighborhood city", and "megalopolis", Bremer explores how our perceptions and expectations of urban areas have changed over time. Texts by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, William Dean Howells before 1890, then Chicagoans Edith Wyatt and Elia Peattie document city dwellers creating communities and connections. While Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Nathanael West went on to describe the alienating machinery of the city, other writers were exploring life on New York's Jewish Lower East Side, in Harlem during its renaissance, in the South, and even in Chicago, in stories of home within the city, of struggling toward social identity, of dignity and strength. Bremer argues that these works constitute a countertradition worthy of attention. Beginning with a discussion of how we define texts as "urban", Bremer shows how city-town imagery in literature emphasizes flexibility, communal values, and multiple perspectives as characters create and interpret newborn American cities. She then shifts from this regional perspective to post-Romantic, turn-of-the-century Chicago as the national epitome of literature's anti-natural economic city. Bremer argues that writers such as Dreiser and Frank Norris dramatize howindividualism "both exacerbates the excesses of modern urban life and proves inadequate to control it". While this literature rose to prominence, inscribing "urban alienation" in America's consciousness, another genre of urban literature - from a female perspective - continued to challenge it. Willa Cather, Edith Wyatt, Elia Peattie, and others wrote of the civic family that existed alongside the more resonant alienation. A similar communalism parading in the streets of Harlem and the Upper East Side of New York symbolized African- and Jewish-American struggles for identity, as individuals and as groups, within the modern city. James Weldon Johnson, Abraham Cahan, and their successors enlighten us about the vitality of modern urban experience in literature. |
Contents
PreCivil War CityTowns | 19 |
Toward a National Economic City | 36 |
The Standard Chicago Novel | 60 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic African Americans Age of Innocence Alice Gerstenberg alienation artists autobiography Boston Carl Van Vechten Cather's characters city-town city's civic Cliff-Dwellers clubs continuities contrast critical cultural dreams Dreiser economic city Edith Edith Wyatt epitomized ethnic expressive fictional Fisher Fitzgerald Fuller Gatsby Gerstenberg Harlem Renaissance Harlem Renaissance writers Harlem's streets Henry Blake Fuller Herrick House Howells Howells's Hughes Hughes's Hull-House human Hurston imagery images immigrant individual industrial James Weldon Johnson Jewish Laughlin literary literature's lives Lower East Side McKay megalopolis megalopolitan metaphor middle-class Miss Lonelyhearts Monroe nature Negro neighborhood novelists numbers organic pastoral Peattie Peattie's perspective poem poetry political pre-Civil railroad regional residential novels Roth rural skyscraper social society southern southern literature standard Chicago novels stereotypes stories structure symbolic town tradition University Press urban experience urban literature Vechten Correspondence vision Washington Whitman women Wyatt Yezierska's York York's