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"Through a series of chapters spanning a number of metropolises across the globe, this book addresses the way cities have given rise to key aesthetic dispositions, acts of linguistic and cultural translation, topographic and global imaginaries, and narratives of self-fashioning that are central to debates in World Literature"--
List of contents
1. Introduction: world literature, cities and urban imaginaries Jini Kim Watson and Ato Quayson; Part I. Critical Approaches: 2. Chicago schools: the skyscraper in translation Reinhold Martin; 3. Writing the Manichean city from colonial to global metropolis Jini Kim Watson; 4. The urban itinerary and the city map: the experience of metropolitan space Robert T. Tally, Jr; Part II. Spotlight Literary Cities: 5. The neighbourhood and the sweatshop: immigrant and diasporic rites-of-passage in the literature of New York Ato Quayson; 6. The whole World in little: London as the capital of world literature Rashmi Varma; 7. Unworlding Paris: Flânerie and epistemic encounters from Baudelaire to Gauz Ruth Bush; 8. Sketching the city with words: Istanbul through time in Turkish literary texts Hatice Aynur; 9. Romance and liminal space in the 20th Century Cairo Novel Noor Naga; 10. Bombay/Mumbai and its multilingual literary pathways to the world Anjali Nerleker; 11. At home in the world: Singapore's literary trans locality Philip Holden; 12. Imagining the migrant in 21st century Johannesburg Megan Jones; 13. Russia: borders and centers Anne Lounsbery; 14. Cityful passing away: resituating Dublin Christopher Morash; 15. From altepetl to megacity: narrating Mexico City as world literature María Moreno Carranco and José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra; 16. (In)Visible Beijing within and without world literature Weijie Song; 17. Worlding Lagos in the long 20th Century Madhu Krishnan; 18. Haunted vitality: Sydney, colonial modernity and world literature Brigid Rooney.
About the author
Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Chair of the Department of English at Stanford. He has published 6 monographs and 8 edited collections. His latest book is Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature (CUP, 2021). He is an elected member of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and of the British Academy.Jini Kim Watson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (Fordham UP, 2021) and The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (U Minnesota P, 2011). She has also co-edited, with Gary Wilder, The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (Fordham UP, 2018).
Summary
Through a series of chapters spanning a number of metropolises across the globe, this book addresses the way cities have given rise to key aesthetic dispositions, acts of linguistic and cultural translation, topographic and global imaginaries, and narratives of self-fashioning that are central to debates in World Literature.
