Reflecting on the City Through Literature - Urban Spaces, Differences and Embodiments

This book develops and demonstrates an interdisciplinary method that reads literary works as a way of thinking about the city. Literary works do not only provide reflections of the city - depictions of the city as an aesthetically compelling setting - but the literary reflection of the city also offers a critical reflection on the city.

List of contents

1. Introduction: Reflections of the city, reflections on the city
2. Spatialities, differences and practices: "The Balloon" and City of Glass
3. Beyond the Negative: Non-location and The Crying of Lot 49
4. Bodies in Urban Space: Cosmopolis
5. Conclusion: Narrativity and the City
Works cited

About the author

Daan Wesselman is a lecturer in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. As a researcher affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, his focus is on finding common ground between the humanities and urban studies. He writes about concepts such as heterotopia, nonplace, and the posthuman as a means of understanding postindustrial urban redevelopment and the material-discursive interfaces between the body, the city, and everyday life. He has recently co-edited the volume Heterotopia and Globalisation in the Twenty-First Century (2020), and his work appears in Space and Culture and several edited books.

Product details

• Authors: Daan (University of Amsterdam Wesselman, Wesselman Daan
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.01.2025
• EAN: 9781032527376
• ISBN: 978-1-0-3252737-6
• No. of pages: 154
• Series: Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Geosciences > Geography; Sociology, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Geography, SCIENCE / Earth Sciences / Geography, North America, The environment, United Kingdom, Great Britain, Philosophy: aesthetics, Interdisciplinary studies, Literary studies: general, Human Geography, Urban communities