The Suburbs

New Literary Perspectives

Marie Bouchet, Nathalie Cochoy, Isabelle Keller-Privat, Mathilde Rogez

• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781683933038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

While suburbs provide a rich field of research for sociologists, architects, urbanists and anthropologists, they have not been given much attention in literary and cultural studies. The Suburbs: New Literary Perspectives sets out to enrich the limited existing body of critical analysis on the subject with a landmark collection of essays offering a far larger perspective than the books or collections published so far on the topic. This interdisciplinary and wide-ranging approach includes literary and art studies, philosophy, and cultural comment. It examines the suburbs across cultural differences, contrasting British, South African and North American suburbs. The specificity of this book therefore lies in a cross-national and cross-continental exploration of these unchartered territories. The suburbs are redefined as those rebellious margins whose geographical borders are necessarily fuzzy and sketch out a common place where cultural frontiers can be transcended. They are, to use Sarah Nuttall's terminology, places of "entanglement" where contraries meet and where new ways of being in the world is reborn. Seen through the prism of art and literature, the suburbs may then be recognized, as philosopher Bruce Bégout argues, as a "new way of thinking and making urban space."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part I: Challenging the Visible
• Chapter 2: Translating the Edgelands
• Chapter 3: Attention and the Ethics of Perception: Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital
• Chapter 4: (Sub)Urban Space and the Contemporary American Novel
• Chapter 5: The Suburbs according to John Cheever: From Distinction to Indistinctness
• Chapter 6: Re-membering Suburbia: Tears, Cracks and Shards in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides
• Part II: Nowhere Land?
• Chapter 7: “Those Who Prefer the Human Tragedy to the Human Comedy”: Humor in London Suburban Fiction
• Chapter 8: Suburbia, or Para-urbia: Rachel Cusk’s Gendered Readings of Suburban Spaces and the Role of the Writer in Arlington Park
• Chapter 9: Intermediate Spaces in Amy Hempel’s Short Stories
• Chapter 10: “She Had Only to Drift Tonight”: Drifting as Dissent in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot
• Part III: Gardens of Earthly Delights
• Chapter 11: Chicago 1900, Between Urban Hell and Paradise Lost: Suburbia versus City?
• Chapter 12: Who Am I to Where Is Here?: Identity and the Liminal Suburb in Canadian Poetry
• Chapter 13: Subversive Suburbs in Dickens’s Fiction: Arcadian Archives Made Mobile
• Part IV: From Exclusion to Resistance
• Chapter 14: From Villa Toscana to Main Reef Road: Two Versions of South African Suburbia: An Interview of Ivan Vladislavić, Writer
• Chapter 15: South African Suburbs in Fiction: Deciphering the Hidden Agenda of Global City-Making and Urban Governance
• Chapter 16: Paying the Mortgage in Contemporary Suburban Fiction: From Revolutionary Road to Hoving Road
• Chapter 17: “No Poet Has Come”: Paterson, or the Poem in Prosaic Zone
• About the Editors and Contributors