Lost in the American City

Dickens, James, and Kafka

J. Tambling

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780312238407
• eBook ISBN: 9780312292638
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In Lost in the American City, Jeremy Tambling looks at European reactions to America and American cities in the nineteenth-century. Dickens visited America in 1842 and his American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit set the agenda for future discussions of America. Lost in the American City looks at the Dickens legacy through Henry James in The American Scene, through H.G. Wells in The Future in America, and through Kafka, whose novel America (or The Man Who Was Never Heard of Again ) tried to re-write Dickens. Lost in the American City explores the changes in American nineteenth century urban culture which made America so different and so impossible to map for the European, and which made American modernity so unreadable and challenging.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Notes to Editions Used
• Preface: Lost in the American City
• Chapter 1 Dickens: Tales of Several Cities
• Chapter 2 After Dickens: American Notes For General Circulation
• Chapter 3 City Spaces: Martin Chuzzlewit
• Chapter 4 Writing in Reaction: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope
• Chapter 5 James, Trauma, and America
• Chapter 6 The American Scene—I: Building American Houses
• Chapter 7 The American Scene—II: James and New York
• Chapter 8 The American Scene—III: The Past and Future of American Cities
• Chapter 9 The States and the Statue: Kafka on America
• Notes
• Index