Chicago

A Literary History

Frederik Byrn Køhlert

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781108477512
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108800426
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Chicago occupies a central position in both the geography and literary history of the United States. From its founding in 1833 through to its modern incarnation, the city has served as both a thoroughfare for the nation's goods and a crossroads for its cultural energies. The idea of Chicago as a crossroads of modern America is what guides this literary history, which traces how writers have responded to a rapidly changing urban environment and labored to make sense of its place in - and implications for - the larger whole. In writing that engages with the world's first skyscrapers and elevated railroads, extreme economic and racial inequality, a growing middle class, ethnic and multiethnic neighborhoods, the Great Migration of African Americans, and the city's contemporary incarnation as a cosmopolitan urban center, Chicago has been home to a diverse literature that has both captured and guided the themes of modern America.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Literary History of Chicago
• Part I The Rise of Chicago and the Literary West
• Part II Business Unusual: A New Urban American Literature
• Part III Radicalism, Modernism, and the Chicago Renaissance
• Part IV A City of Neighborhoods: The Great Depression, Sociology, and the Black Chicago Renaissance
• Part V Traditions and Futures: Contemporary Chicago Literatures
• Selected Bibliography
• Index