Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Writing the City PDF full book. Access full book title Writing the City by Peter Preston. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Peter Preston Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134843682 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 366
Book Description
`The expression of human experience it embodies ... includes all personal history'. Saul Bellow's view of the city is far from that of classic geographical descriptions which look at growth or decline, demographic patterns, traffic flows and economic potential: these empirically conceived models of urban geography fail to accommodate the crucial human aspect of city life. Located at the interface of geography and literature, Writing the City visualizes the city through the hopes, aspirations, disappointments and pains of international novelists and creative writers. From Manchester, Montreal and Sydney to Osaka, Varanasi amd Odessa, cities become more than their built environment, more than a set of class or economic relationships: they are also an experience to be lived, suffered and undergone. Thus cities are seen in terms of the innocence of an Eden now lost, a threat of sinful Babylon and the promise of a New Jerusalem.
Author: Desmond Harding Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135947473 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 237
Book Description
Writing the City examines and challenges the traditional transatlantic axis of urban modernism, London-Paris-New York, an axis that has often elided the historical importance of other centers that have shaped metropolitan identities and discourses. According to Desmond Harding, James Joyce's internationalist vision of Dublin generates powerful epistemic and cultural tropes that reconceive the idea of the modern city as a moral phenomenon in transcultural and transhistorical terms. Taking up the works of both Joyce and John Dos Passos, Harding investigates the lasting contributions these author's made to transatlantic intellectual thought in their efforts to envisage the city.
Author: James S. Amelang Publisher: Central European University Press ISBN: 9637326545 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
Only one out of ten early modern Europeans lived in cities. Yet cities were crucial nodes, joining together producers and consumers, rulers and ruled, and believers in diverse faiths and futures. They also generated an enormous amount of writing, much of which focused on civic life itself. But despite its obvious importance, historians have paid surprisingly little attention to urban discourse; its forms, themes, emphases and silences all invite further study. This book explores three dimensions of early modern citizens’ writing about their cities: the diverse social backgrounds of the men and women who contributed to urban discourse; their notions of what made for a beautiful city; and their use of dialogue as a literary vehicle particularly apt for expressing city life and culture. Amelang concludes that early modern urban discourse increasingly moves from oral discussion to take the form of writing. And while the dominant tone of those who wrote about cities continued to be one of celebration and glorification, over time a more detached and less judgmental mode developed. More and more they came to see their fundamental task as presenting a description that was objective.
Author: Judith Freeman Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 1400095174 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 370
Book Description
Raymond Chandler was among the most original and enduring crime novelists of the twentieth century. Yet much of his pre-writing life, including his unconventional marriage, has remained shrouded in mystery. In this compelling, wholly original book, Judith Freeman sets out to solve the puzzle of who Chandler was and how he became the writer who would create in Philip Marlowe an icon of American culture. Visiting Chandler's many homes and apartments, Freeman uncovers vestiges of the Los Angeles that was Chandler's terrain and inspiration for his imagination. She also uncovers the life of Cissy Pascal, the older, twice-divorced woman Chandler married in 1924. A revelation of a marriage that was a wellspring of need, illusion, and creativity, The Long Embrace provides us with a more complete picture of Raymond Chandler's life and art than any we have had before.
Author: Lindsay Bremner Publisher: ISBN: 9780986985003 Category : Architecture and society Languages : en Pages : 347
Book Description
Writing the City into Being is Bremner's long-awaited collection of essays, spanning more than a decade of work on Johannesburg. It is both an unflinching analysis of the characteristics of an extraordinary city and a work of imagination - a bringing of the evasive city into being through writing. Johannesburg has become a touchstone in critical thinking on the development of the twenty-first-century city, attracting scholars from around the world who seek to understand how cities are changing in the face of urban migration in all its myriad forms and the inflow of foreign capital and interest. Bremner is at the forefront of this scholarship. Her intimate knowledge of the city makes this a deeply personal but authoritative collection of essays. Writing the City into Being is an important book for those seeking to understand cities in a rapidly changing and fragmenting world. Lindsay Bremner is an extraordinary guide to the city of Johannesburg, and one of its most incisive commentators.
Author: Peter Preston Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134843682 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 366
Book Description
`The expression of human experience it embodies ... includes all personal history'. Saul Bellow's view of the city is far from that of classic geographical descriptions which look at growth or decline, demographic patterns, traffic flows and economic potential: these empirically conceived models of urban geography fail to accommodate the crucial human aspect of city life. Located at the interface of geography and literature, Writing the City visualizes the city through the hopes, aspirations, disappointments and pains of international novelists and creative writers. From Manchester, Montreal and Sydney to Osaka, Varanasi amd Odessa, cities become more than their built environment, more than a set of class or economic relationships: they are also an experience to be lived, suffered and undergone. Thus cities are seen in terms of the innocence of an Eden now lost, a threat of sinful Babylon and the promise of a New Jerusalem.
Author: Martin Zerlang Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000865703 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
The history of cities is also the history of city squares. The agora, the forum, the piazza, the plaza: All presuppose the idea of a center. It’s a material and mental phenomenon. Literature is an important part of this history, and the interplay between the square as physical space and the square as literature is the topic of this book. This is an encyclopedic book combining an overview of the history of city squares with a plethora of analytical examples of its reflection in literature: Literature uses the city square as a frame; city squares serve as frames for drama; novels and other kinds of literature comment on city squares; city squares are sources of inspiration for all sorts of literary activities. Socrates in the agora, Cicero in the Forum, Calderón in the Plaza Mayor, Corneille in the Place Royale, Richardson in Grosvenor Square, James in Washington Square, Woolf in Bloomsbury Square, Döblin and Gröschner in Alexanderplatz, Rodoreda in Diamond Square in Barcelona, DeLillo in Times Square, Al Aswany in Tahrir Square, the Maidanistas in the Maidan of Kyiv: These are just some of the examples presented and analyzed in this book. The book is of direct interest for researchers, students, and professionals such as architects and urban planners, but it is written in a way that makes it accessible for all readers with an interest in urban culture, architecture, history, literature, and cultural studies.
Author: Sean McLoughlin Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317679660 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 277
Book Description
In 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act hastened the process of South Asian migration to postcolonial Britain. Half a decade later, now is an opportune moment to revisit the accumulated writing about the diasporas formed through subsequent settlement, and to probe the ways in which the South Asian diaspora can be re-conceptualised. Writing the City in British Asian Diasporas takes a fresh look at such matters and will have multi-disciplinary resonance worldwide. The meaning and importance of local, multi-local and trans-local dynamics is explored through a devolved and regionally-accented comparison of five British Asian cities: Bradford, the East End of London, Manchester, Leicester and Birmingham. Analysing the ‘writing’ of these differently configured cities since the 1960s, its main focus is the significant discrepancies in representation between differently-positioned texts reflecting both dominant institutional discourses and everyday lived experiences of a locality. Part I offers a comprehensive, yet still highly contested, reading of each city’s archives. Part II examines how the arts and humanities fields of History, Religion, Gender and Literary/Cultural Studies have all written British Asian diasporas, and how their perspectives might complement the better-established agendas of the social sciences. Providing an innovative analysis of South Asian communities and their multi-local identities in Britain today, this interdisciplinary book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian Studies, Migration, Ethnic and Diaspora Studies, as well as Sociology, Anthropology, and Geography.
Author: Anthony D King Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317362713 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 267
Book Description
Over the last three decades, our understanding of the city worldwide has been revolutionized by three innovative theoretical concepts – globalisation, postcolonialism and a radically contested notion of modernity. The idea and even the reality of the city has been extended out of the state and nation and re-positioned in the larger global world. In this book Anthony King brings together key essays written over this period, much of it dominated by debates about the world or global city. Challenging assumptions and silences behind these debates, King provides largely ignored historical and cultural dimensions to the understanding of world city formation as well as decline. Interdisciplinary and comparative, the essays address new ways of framing contemporary themes: the imperial and colonial origin of contemporary world and global cities, actually existing postcolonialisms, claims about urban and cultural homogenisation and the role of architecture and built environment in that process. Also addressed are arguments about indigenous and exogenous perspectives, Eurocentricism, ways of framing vernacular architecture, and the global historical sociology of building types. Wide-ranging and accessible, Writing the Global City provides essential historical contexts and theoretical frameworks for understanding contemporary urban and architectural debates. Extensive bibliographies will make it essential for teaching, reference and research.
Author: Carol Bailey Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 197882968X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 134
Book Description
Writing the Black Diasporic City in the Age of Globalization theorizes the city as a generative, “semicircular” social space, where the changes of globalization are most profoundly experienced. The fictive accounts analyzed here configure cities as spaces where movement is simultaneously restrictive and liberating, and where life prospects are at once promising and daunting. In their depictions of the urban experiences of peoples of African descent, writers and other creative artists offer a complex set of renditions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black urban citizens’ experience in European or Euro-dominated cities such as Boston, London, New York, and Toronto, as well as Global South cities such as Accra, Kingston, and Lagos—that emerged out of colonial domination, and which have emerged as hubs of current globalization. Writing the Black Diasporic City draws on critical tools of classical postcolonial studies as well as those of globalization studies to read works by Ama Ata Aidoo, Amma Darko, Marlon James, Cecil Foster, Zadie Smith, Michael Thomas, Chika Unigwe, and other contemporary writers. The book also engages the television series Call the Midwife, the Canada carnival celebration Caribana, and the film series Small Axe to show how cities are characterized as open, complicated spaces that are constantly shifting. Cities collapse boundaries, allowing for both haunting and healing, and they can sever the connection from kin and community, or create new connections.
Author: Desmond Harding Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135947465 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 236
Book Description
Writing the City examines and challenges the traditional transatlantic axis of urban modernism, London-Paris-New York, an axis that has often elided the historical importance of other centers that have shaped metropolitan identities and discourses. According to Desmond Harding, James Joyce's internationalist vision of Dublin generates powerful epistemic and cultural tropes that reconceive the idea of the modern city as a moral phenomenon in transcultural and transhistorical terms. Taking up the works of both Joyce and John Dos Passos, Harding investigates the lasting contributions these author's made to transatlantic intellectual thought in their efforts to envisage the city.
Author: Peter Preston
Author: Desmond Harding
Author: James S. Amelang
Author: Judith Freeman
Author: Lindsay Bremner
Author: Peter Preston
Author: Martin Zerlang
Author: Sean McLoughlin
Author: Anthony D King
Author: Carol Bailey
Author: Desmond Harding