Description
Book SynopsisHow marginalized literary voices changed from moral threats into cultural treasures
Trade Review"Augmented by rare period photographs, Dowling's study is a valuable addition to a now-sizable body of scholarship on literature and the city. . . . Highly recommended."--
Choice"Dowling offers an image of a city divided by urban landscapes and social strictures, but more importantly by a sense of moral difference often manifesting itself through progressivism. . . . Dowling's premises are compelling . . . the text inspire[s] further questioning of the interactions between the center and the periphery, the city and the writer, the scholar and the discourse."--Studies in American Naturalism
"Robustly written and thoroughly researched, Dowling's methods invigorate the literary history of New York City narratives."--
American Literary Realism"
Slumming in New York gracefully weaves together reformist tracts, sociological studies, and realist and naturalist fiction at the turn of the last century. It is rigorously interdisciplinary in its literary, historical, and sociological approach to novels, social tracts, ragtime and jazz, minstrel shows, vaudeville and Yiddish theater, and the 'slumming' that took place across the boundaries of race and class in New York City."--Katherine Joslin, author of
Jane Addams, a Writer's Life"
Slumming in New York surveys late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American realist and naturalist texts that focus on various New York City slums and ghettoes. In this fascinating study of an important genre of American literature, Dowling is especially sophisticated in his reversal of the usual concepts of 'outsider' and 'insider' narratives. His treatment of the concept of space(s) is innovative and insightful and will be useful to those interested in urban studies and the literature of New York City."--James R. Giles, author of
The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in AmericaTable of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. "Under the Bridge and Beyond": Helen Campbell, Jerry McAuley, and Ernest Poole on the East Side Waterfront 19
2. A Culture of Contradictions: Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, and the Transformation of the Bowery 48
3. Marginal Men in Black Bohemia: Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson in the Tenderloin 79
4. Realism in the Ghetto: Jacob Riis, Hutchins Hapgood, and Abraham Cahan on the Lower East Side 110
5. "Nigger Heaven": Carl Van Vechten, Claude McKay, and the Construction of Mythic Harlem 139
Epilogue: The City Turned Inside Out 171
Notes 177
Bibliography 181
Index 191
Illustrations follow page 78
