This book is about the impact of literature upon cities world-wide, and cities upon literature. It examines why the city matters so much to contemporary critical theory, and why it has inspired so many forms of writing which have attempted to deal with its challenges to think about it and to represent it.

Table of Contents

• Volume Editor's Introduction and Acknowledgements
• Prologue: City-Theory and Writing, in Paris and Chicago: Space, Gender, Ethnicity - Jeremy Tambling
• The City in Theory
• Modern Urban Theory and the Study of Literature - Jason Finch
• Theorists of the Postmodern, Global, and Digital City - J. A. Smith
• Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project - Ben Moore
• ‘How Did the Everyday Manage to Become So Interesting?’ - Alfie Bown
•  European Cities
• Cartographing Dublin - Daniel Bristow
• Medieval and Early Modern Cities: London, Paris, Florence and Amsterdam - Jeremy Tambling
• Modern London: 1820–2020 - Jason Finch
• Balzac: A Socio-Material Archaeology of Paris - Jonathan White
• Berlin: Flesh and Stone, Space and Time - Ulrike Zitzlsperger
• Petersburg on the Threshold - Paul Fung
• St. Petersburg and Moscow in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature - Isobel Palmer
• Spain's Literature of the City - Aitor Bikandi-Meijas and Paul Vita
• Lisbon: What the Tourist Should Read - Daniel Bristow
• Vienna - Jeremy Tambling
• Venice: Impossible City - David Spurr
•  North American Cities
• Merging Naturalism and the Unreal: An Approach to America's Literary Cities - Markku Salmela
• ‘I Would Go to Toronto’: The City in Contemporary Writing - Tom Ue
• New York Fiction - Markku Salmela and Lieven Ameel
•  Latin American Cities
• The Repeating City: Urban Space in Hispanic Caribbean Literature - Elena Valdez
• Mexico City - David William Foster
• Cities, Territories and Conflict: Narrative and the Colombian City in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century - Andrés Mesa
• Peru: Words Under the Fog - Fernando Rivera
• Brasília's Literature - Sophia Beal
• Rio's Favelas: Mapping the Periphery - Leila Lehnen
• The Case of Rio de Janeiro: Exploring Geographies of Resistance and Domination - Kátia da Costa Bezerra
• São Paulo in Transit - Leila Lehnen
• Santiago, Chile, from the Mapocho River: Landscape, Border, and Waste - Claudia Darrigrandi Navarro
• Buenos Aires - David William Foster
• African Cities
• An Overview of African Cities and Writing - Alastair Niven
• Cairo and Alexandria - Ahmed Elbeshlawy
• Lagos - Louis James
• Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo: Cowboys, Cosmonauts and Capitalism - Kaspar Loftin
• What Is the City in Africa? - Patrick Williams
• South African Cities - Marita Wenzel
•  Asian Cities
• Istanbul - Valerie Kennedy
• Beirut - Ghenwa Hayek
• India and Its Cities through the Eyes of Its Writers - Alastair Niven
• Out of Place in Delhi: Some Vignettes of Loss - Stuti Khanna
• Fictional and Cinematic Representations of the Journey of Bombay to Mumbai - Nilufer E. Bharucha
• City and Country in Chinese Fiction: An Historical Survey - Leo Ou-fan Lee
• A Cinematic Guide to Asian Cities: Taipei, Seoul, and the Cinema of Destruction - Louis Lo
• A Megalopolis in Transit: Waterways as the Witness of Early Twentieth-Century Tokyo - Ikuho Amano
• Australasian City Writing - Michael Hollington
•  Urban Themes
• Realism and its Revelations: City Perspectives in London and Paris - Sara Thornton
• Conceptualising the Modernist City - Iain Bailey
• Travel Writing and the City - Paul Smethurst
• The Urban Connections of Crime Fiction - Stephen Knight
• Cities Utopian, Dystopian, and Apocalyptic - Lieven Ameel
• Further Reading