City Codes
Reading the Modern Urban Novel

$41.99 (C)

Author: Hana Wirth-Nesher, Tel-Aviv University

Date Published: February 2008
availability: Available
format: Paperback
isbn: 9780521060042

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Description

City Codes is a study of the representation of the city in the modern novel that takes difference as its point of departure, so that cities are read according to the cultural and social position of the urbanite. City Codes argues that the modern urban novel, in contrast to earlier novels, is characterized by an intersection of public and private space, but that this intersection is mapped differently according to the position of the city dweller in terms of history, politics, nationality, gender, class, and race.
- Challenges prevailing assumptions about modernism and urbanism
- Analysis the mapping of cities from the point of view of a variety of 'outsiders' by race, class, gender, immigration, tourism, nationality, ideology
- Foregrounds the study of setting in narrative, rather than character and plot
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Reviews & endorsements
"She provides an excellent comparative analysis of various cityscapes, showing how they vary as they are experienced by expatriates, tourists, provincials, immigrants, women, and African Americans. Moreover, the author makes good use of other disciplines, especially the visual arts, to illustrate key aspects of the fiction. Necessary reading for anyone interested in the modern novel." Choice
"Hana Wirth-Nesher's study of the modern urban novel is remarkable for its clairty of argument, its impressive structural and rhetorical qualities, and its wonderful appreciation of difference..." Brock Clarke, American Studies International
"Wirth-Nesher's roster is impressive and each author's contribution is distinctive." Jerome Klinkowitz, American Studies
"City Codes recuperates an earlier mode of literary discourse and redifines the modern urban novel. Neither the male nor female viewer is sufficient condition, Hana Wirth-Nesher's analysis implies, and in so doing she makes available for further study and exploration the riches of urban fiction. That is one of the most impressive achievements of this most important book." Comparative Literature
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Product details
- Date Published: February 2008
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9780521060042
- length: 260 pages
- dimensions: 228 x 152 x 18 mm
- weight: 0.422kg
- contains: 12 b/w illus.
- availability: Available
Table of Contents
Part I. Introduction: Reading Cities:
1. Cultural models of the city - whose city? 2. Narrative cartography, or the language of setting
3. The modern urban novel: new blueprint for self and place
4. The itinerary: Warsaw, Jerusalem, New York, Chicago, Paris, Dublin, and London
Part II. Partitioned Cities: Spatial and Temporal Walls:
5. Issac Bashevis Singer's The Family Moskat
6. Amos Oz's My Michael
Part III. Divided Cities: Social Walls
7. Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie
8. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
Part IV. Translated Cities: Domesticating the Foreign:
9. Henry James The Ambassadors
10. Henry Roth's Call It Sleep
Part V. Estranged Cities: Defamiliarizing Home:
11. James Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
12. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
Epilogue: Metropolitan musings
Works cited.
Author
Hana Wirth-Nesher, Tel-Aviv University