October Cities
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€33.99
A01=Carlo Rotella
Author_Carlo Rotella
black southerners arriving in chicago
Category=DS
Category=DSBH
Category=JBCC
Category=JBSD
chicago
chicago after world war ii
dramatic urban transformation
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
literary nonfiction
manhattan
metaphorical landscape of fall
narratives of decline
philadelphia
postindustrial urban literature
relationship between literature and cities
stories of neighborhoods and families
time of crisis
Product details
- ISBN 9780520211445
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 21 May 1998
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Returning to his native Chicago after World War II, Nelson Algren found a city transformed. The flourishing industry, culture, and literature that had placed prewar Chicago at center stage in American life were entering a time of crisis. The middle class and economic opportunity were leaving the inner city, and Black Southerners arriving in Chicago found themselves increasingly estranged from the nation's economic and cultural resources. For Algren, Chicago was becoming 'an October sort of city even in the spring', and as Carlo Rotella demonstrates, this metaphorical landscape of fall led Algren and others to forge a literary form that traced the American city's transformation. Narratives of decline, like the complementary narratives of black migration and inner-city life written by Claude Brown and Gwendolyn Brooks, became building blocks of the postindustrial urban literature. "October Cities" examines these narratives as they played out in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Manhattan. Through the work of Algren, Brown, Brooks, and other urban writers, Rotella explores the relationship of this new literature to the cities it draws upon for inspiration.
The stories told are of neighborhoods and families molded by dramatic urban transformation on a grand scale with vast movements of capital and people, racial succession, and an intensely changing urban landscape.
Carlo Rotella is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Lafayette College.
