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Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (The American Literatures Initiative) Paperback – Illustrated, November 22, 2010
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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.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRutgers University Press
- Publication dateNovember 22, 2010
- Dimensions6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100813547857
- ISBN-13978-0813547855
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"A timely and eloquent contribution to a growing body of critical work on the stratified meanings of the modern city. Heise convincingly weds textual and spatial analysis in a nuanced reading of the capitalist dialectic whereby uneven development produces urban underworlds and underworld contradictions spur uneven development." -- David Pike ― author of Metropolis on the Styx Published On: 2010-07-13
"Urban Underworlds offers sensitive, satisfying close readings of a vast body of urban literature to argue that these intimate portraits of America's ethnic, racial, and sexual underworlds expose the larger forces of uneven capitalist development. It also happens to be a beautifully written book."
― Modern Fiction Studies Published On: 2012-08-29
About the Author
THOMAS HEISE is an assistant professor of English at McGill University and the author of Horror Vacui: Poems.
Product details
- Publisher : Rutgers University Press; Illustrated edition (November 22, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0813547857
- ISBN-13 : 978-0813547855
- Item Weight : 15.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #5,221,516 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #280 in Regional American Literature Criticism
- #808 in LGBTQ+ Literary Criticism (Books)
- #1,446 in Comparative Literature
About the authors
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Thomas Heise is the author of four books: "The Gentrification Plot: New York and the Postindustrial Crime Novel" (2022), which is part of Columbia University Press's highly regarded "Literature Now" series; the experimental novel "Moth" (2013), which was nominated for the Foreword Book of the Year; the interdisciplinary literary study "Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture" (2011), which is part of the Mellon-funded American Literatures Initiative; and Horror Vacui: Poems (2006), whose title poem won the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth Century Literature, Arizona Quarterly, The Journal of Popular Culture, Gulf Coast, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Ploughshares, and others. He's a faculty member at Penn State (Abington) and lives in Manhattan.
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