The City in Postmodern Fiction

Over the course of the 20th century, the city has changed almost beyond recognition: from a dense, central city into a sprawling realm restructured by escalating processes of delocalization, globalization, simulation, diversification, segregation,…. In fact, the city has changed so much that literary scholars seem at a loss to make sense of the omnipresent, but atypical urban images in postmodern fiction. Paradoxically, then, a once prolific literary category - the - is falling into disuse precisely when the process of urbanization is climaxing. This book aims to reconcile literary studies with the postmodern city by providing and updated strategies for reading urban images. Literary studies are brought into close dialogue with the richly interdisciplinary field of contemporary studies. Also, the spatial dimension of the urban novel is deepened by politically more savvy theories of space. This rejuvenated notion of the city in fiction is then applied to a corpus of new narrative novels, emerging largely from New York's redeveloping downtown area in the 1980s and ’90s. This study should be of interest to all students of the city image in fiction.