UID:
edocfu_9959156146502883
Format:
1 online resource :
,
11 illustrations.
ISBN:
9780813549811
Series Statement:
The American Literatures Initiative
Content:
Urban Underworlds is an exploration of city spaces, pathologized identities, lurid fears, and American literature. Surveying the 1890s to the 1990s, Thomas Heise chronicles how and why marginalized populations immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities have been selectively targeted as "urban underworlds" and their neighborhoods characterized as miasmas of disease and moral ruin. The quarantining of minority cultures helped to promote white, middle-class privilege. Following a diverse array of literary figures who differ with the assessment of the underworld as the space of the monstrous Other, Heise contends that it is a place where besieged and neglected communities are actively trying to take possession of their own neighborhoods.
Note:
Frontmatter --
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Contents --
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Acknowledgments --
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An Overview and an Underview: Uneven Development and the Social Production of American Underworlds --
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1. Going Down: Narratives of Slumming in the Ethnic Underworlds of Lower New York, 1890s-1910s --
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2. Degenerate Sex and the City: The Underworlds of New York and Paris in the Work of Djuna Barnes and Claude McKay, 1910s-1930s --
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3. The Black Underground: Urban Riots, the Black Underclass, and the Work of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, 1940s-1950s --
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4. Wasted Dreams: John Rechy, Thomas Pynchon, and the Underworlds of Los Angeles, 1960s --
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5. White Spaces and Urban Ruins: Postmodern Geographies in Don DeLillo's Underworld, 1950s -1990s --
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Notes --
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Index
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In English.
Language:
English
DOI:
10.36019/9780813549811
URL:
https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780813549811
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