At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850-1930University Press of New England, 2005 - 293 pages A lucidly written analysis of urban literature and evolving residential architecture In the middle of the nineteenth century, urban families began to inhabit apartment houses, boarding houses, tenements, and hotels. These multi-unit residences began to define American city landscapes, a shift that had enormous interpersonal and cultural repercussions. These new forms of housing altered the ways in which Americans inhabited and understood urban space. Helping to create among city dwellers a distinctively modern subjectivity were a host of writers (among them, Hawthorne, James, and Nella Larsen) who experimented in prose with the possibilities and dangers of urban space. Reformers, planners, and engineers simultaneously helped to shape urban sensibilities by experimenting with architectural form in the city's physical landscape, often hoping to shape a particular type of citizen with their designs. Imaginatively juxtaposing literary criticism with a history of the built environment, Klimasmith examines urban domestic fiction alongside architectural, sociological, and photographic texts of the period, pairing important American novels with developments in urban domestic architecture. always more fluid and dynamic than traditional scholarship holds, her study allows us to witness the unfolding of modernity and to view the modernist subject at its very inception. |
Contents
Architectural Determinism and the Industrial City | 16 |
CHAPTER 2 | 51 |
CHAPTER 3 | 90 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic American apartment Basil beauty becomes Beecher Blithedale Romance boarding house Bostonians buildings Calvert Vaux Carrie's Catharine Beecher Central Park Charlotte Perkins Gilman city's connections construct cottage Coverdale Coverdale's cultural desire domestic spaces Dreiser dwellers economic Edith Wharton emphasizes environment experience fiction FIGURE gender Gilman Groth Harlem Harlem Renaissance Hawthorne Helga Henry James Ibid identity influence inhabitants interior Jacob Riis Larsen living luxury marginal marriage ment middle-class mobility modern Moffatt moral narrative narrator neighbors networks nineteenth-century notes notion offers Olive Olive's Olmsted Park's Paul Groth physical Priscilla private space public space Quicksand reformers relationships reprint Riis Riis's rural Ruth Hall Ruth's setting Sister Carrie social spatial street structures Tarrant tenement Theodore Dreiser transformed Undine Undine's University Press urban domestic urban homes urban landscape urban novels urban space urban subjectivity utopian Vaux Verena Wharton woman women York Zenobia
References to this book
Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-century ... Monika Maria Elbert No preview available - 2008 |