Literatures of Urban Possibility

This book demonstrates how city literature addresses questions of possibility. In city literature, ideas of possibility emerge primarily through two perspectives: texts may focus on what is possible for cities, and they may present the urban environment as a site of possibility for individuals or communities. The volume combines reflections on urban possibility from a range of geographical and cultural contextsin addition to the English-speaking world, individual chapters analyse possible cities and possible urban lives in Turkey, Israel, Finland, Germany, Russia and Sweden. Moreover, by engaging with issues such as city planning, mass housing, gentrification, informal settlements and translocal identities, the book shows imaginative literature at work outlining what possibility means in cities.

Appeals to an interdisciplinary range of areas including urban studies, cultural geography, and utopian studies Examines individual and collective perspectives on gentrification, urban informality, and city planning Frames future debates by problematizing the relationship between imagined cities and their real-life counterparts

Auteur
Markku Salmela is University Lecturer in English Literature at Tampere University, Finland. He is the author of Paul Auster s Spatial Imagination (2006) and the co-editor of several volumes, including Literature and the Peripheral City (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) and Literary Second Cities (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). His current research explores mediations of the Arctic underground. Lieven Ameel is University Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Tampere University, Finland. His books include Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature (2014) and The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning (2020) and the co-edited volumes Literature and the Peripheral City (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Literary Second Cities (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) and The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History (2019).

Jason Finch is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. He is the author of Deep Locational Criticism (2016) and co-editor of six books. From 2019-22 he is PI for Finland in the project `Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting (PUTSPACE), funded by the European Research Council and national funding agencies via the HERA programme.

With Eric Prieto, Salmela, Ameel and Finch are co-editors of the Palgrave series Literary Urban Studies.

Contenu

1. The Possible in Literature and Urban Life: Clearing the Field, Markku Salmela, Lieven Ameel, and Jason Finch .- 2. The Possibilities of Urban Informality: Two Views from Istanbul, Eric Prieto .- 3. Rising Towers, Rising Tides: Competing Visions of the Helsinki Waterfront in Planning and Fiction, Lieven Ameel .- 4. From Utopia to Retrotopia: The Cosmopolitan City in the Aftermath of Modernity, Chen Bar-Itzhak .- 5. Donald Barthelme's Impossible Cities, Markku Salmela .- 6. 'Cartographic Ecstasy': Mapping, Provinciality and Possible Spaces in Dmitrii Danilov's City Prose, Anni Lappela .- 7. Possibilities of Translocal Mapping in Tendai Huchu's The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician, Lena Mattheis .- 8. Tipping Points: Gentrification and Urban Possibility, Hanna Henryson .- 9. Concrete Possibilities: The High-Rise Suburb in Swedish Children's and Young Adult Literature, Lydia Wistisen .- 10. 'Double Vision': Viennese Refugees in New York and Back Home Again, Joshua Parker .- 11. Utopian Thinking and the (Im)Possible UK Council Estate: The Birmingham Region in Literature, Image and Experience, Jason Finch .- 12. Afterword: Urban Possibilities in Times of Crisis, David Pinder .