Literary Second Cities

Jason Finch, Lieven Ameel, Markku Salmela, Jason Finch, Lieven Ameel, Markku Salmela

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319627182
• eBook ISBN: 9783319627199
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book brings together geographers and literary scholars in a series of engagements near the boundaries of their disciplines. In urban studies, disproportionate attention has been given to a small set of privileged 'first' cities. This volume problematizes the dominance of such alpha cities, offering a wide perspective on 'second cities' and their literature. The volume is divided into three themed sections. 'In the Shadow of the Alpha City' problematizes the image of cities defined by their function and size, bringing out the contradictions and contestations inherent in cultural productions of second cities, including Birmingham and Bristol in the UK, Las Vegas in the USA, and Tartu in Estonia. 'Frontier Second Cities' pays attention to the multiple and trans-national pasts of second cities which occupy border zones, with a focus on Narva, in Estonia, and Turkish/Kurdish Diyarbakir. The final section, 'The Diffuse Second City', examines networks the diffuse secondary city made up of interlinked small cities, suburban sprawl and urban overspill, with literary case studies from Italy, Sweden, and Finland.

Table of contents

• Literary Second Cities
• Part I Defining the Second City
• Chapter 1 The Second City in Literary Urban Studies: Methods, Approaches, Key Thematics
• Chapter 2 World Cities and Second Cities: Imagining Growth and Hybridity in Modern Literature
• Part II In the Shadow of the Alpha City
• Chapter 3 Comic Novel‚ City Novel: David Lodge and Jonathan Coe Reinterpreted by Birmingham
• Chapter 4 “A Sort of Second London in Every Thing but Vitiousness”: Bristol in Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 1700–1750
• Chapter 5 Cities Within a Second City: The Case of Literary Tartu
• Chapter 6 Still Learning from Las Vegas: Imagining America’s Urban Other
• Part III Frontier Second Cities
• Chapter 7 The Capital of Otherness: A Geocritical Exploration of Diyarbakır, Turkey
• Chapter 8 Narva: A Literary Border Town
• Part IV The Diffuse Second City
• Chapter 9 Riku Korhonen’s Kahden ja Yhden Yön Tarinoita as Reflection on the Suburban Fragmentation of Community
• Chapter 10 “Away from Here to Tjottahejti”: Spatial and Sexual (Re-)Orientation in Places of Secondariness in Contemporary Swedish Fiction
• Chapter 11 Moving Beyond Venice: Literary Landscapes of Movement in Northern Italy’s “Diffused City”
• Afterword
• Second to None: Literary Geographies of Second Cities
• Thinking of Second Cities as Literary Geographers
• Second Cities for Writers
• Works Cited
• Index