The City in Postmodern Fiction

Over the course of the 20th century, the city has
changed almost beyond recognition: from a dense,
central city into a sprawling urban realm
restructured by escalating processes of
delocalization, globalization, simulation,
diversification, segregation, . In fact, the city has
changed so much that literary scholars seem at a loss
to make sense of the omnipresent, but atypical urban
images in postmodern fiction. Paradoxically, then, a
once prolific literary category - the urban novel -
is falling into disuse precisely when the process of
urbanization is climaxing. This book aims to
reconcile literary studies with the postmodern city
by providing new and updated strategies for reading
urban images. Literary studies are brought into close
dialogue with the richly interdisciplinary field of
contemporary urban studies. Also, the spatial
dimension of the "urban novel" is deepened by
politically more savvy theories of space. This
rejuvenated notion of the city in fiction is then
applied to a corpus of "new narrative" novels,
emerging largely from New York''s redeveloping
downtown area in the 1980s and 90s. This study
should be of interest to all students of the city
image in fiction.

Autorentext

Jeroen Lievens, Dr., is a member of the Ghent Urban Studies Team
(Ghent University, Belgium). Currently, he also teaches at the
University College of Limburg.

Klappentext

Over the course of the 20th century, the city has
changed almost beyond recognition: from a dense,
central city into a sprawling urban realm
restructured by escalating processes of
delocalization, globalization, simulation,
diversification, segregation,.... In fact, the city has
changed so much that literary scholars seem at a loss
to make sense of the omnipresent, but atypical urban
images in postmodern fiction. Paradoxically, then, a
once prolific literary category - the urban novel -
is falling into disuse precisely when the process of
urbanization is climaxing. This book aims to
reconcile literary studies with the postmodern city
by providing new and updated strategies for reading
urban images. Literary studies are brought into close
dialogue with the richly interdisciplinary field of
contemporary urban studies. Also, the spatial
dimension of the "urban novel" is deepened by
politically more savvy theories of space. This
rejuvenated notion of the city in fiction is then
applied to a corpus of "new narrative" novels,
emerging largely from New York's redeveloping
downtown area in the 1980s and '90s. This study
should be of interest to all students of the city
image in fiction.