Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Heise's illuminating history of the urban underworld in twentieth-century American literature makes excellent use of critical geography to show how urban planners, social reformers, and literary artists conceived the metropolis and its ostensibly dark nether depths." -- Sean McCann * author of A Pinnacle of Feeling *
"A timely and eloquent contribution to a growing body of critical work on the stratified meanings of the modern city. Heise convincingly weds textual and spatial analysis in a nuanced reading of the capitalist dialectic whereby uneven development produces urban underworlds and underworld contradictions spur uneven development." -- David Pike * author of Metropolis on the Styx *
"
Urban Underworlds offers sensitive, satisfying close readings of a vast body of urban literature to argue that these intimate portraits of America's ethnic, racial, and sexual underworlds expose the larger forces of uneven capitalist development. It also happens to be a beautifully written book."
* Modern Fiction Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements x
An Overview and an Underview: Uneven Development and the Social Production of American Underworlds 1
1. Going Down: Narratives of Slumming in the Ethnic Underworlds of Lower New York, 1890s-1910s 30
2. Degenerate Sex and the City: The Underworlds of New York and Paris in the Work of Djuna Barnes and Claude Mckay, 1910s-1930s 77
3. The Black Underground: Urban Riots, the Black Underclass, and the Work of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison 1940s-1950s 127
4. Wasted Dreams: John Rechy, Thomas Pynchon, and the Underworlds of Los Angeles, 1960s 169
5. White Spaces and Urban Ruins: Postmodern Geographies in Don DeLillo's Underworld, 1950s-1990s 213
Notes 255
Index 277
