New York
A Literary History

New York City's streets, parks, museums, architecture, and its people appear in an array of literary works published from New York's earliest settlement to the present day. The exploration of the city as both a symbol and as a reality has formed the basis of New York's literature. Using the themes of adaptation, innovation, identity, and hope, this history explores novels, poetry, periodicals, and newspapers to examine how New York's literature can be understood through the notion of movement. From the periodicals of the nineteenth century, the Arabic writers of the city in the early twentieth century, the literature of homelessness, childhood, and the spaces of tragedy and resilience within the metropolis, this diverse assessment opens up new areas of research within urban literature. It provides an innovative examination of how writing has shaped the lives of New Yorkers and how writing about the city has shaped the modern world.

Introduction; 1. Introduction: a history of New York literature Ross Wilson; Part I. Adaptation and Adjustment: 2. Changing culture: the contribution of European immigrants to New York City literature, 1870–1940 Martino Marazzi; 3. Agitators and intellectuals: radical Jewish storytellers Catherine Morley; 4. The mirror of the West: Arab-American literature in early twentieth century New York City Raphael Cormack; 5. Writing the Big Apple in Chinese and Chinese American literature Pin-chia Feng; Part II. Innovation and Inspiration: 6. Sharing social space: New York as a city of the housed and unhoused Dorothea Löbbermann; 7. Health reform in the mid-nineteenth-century New York periodical press David Dowling; 8. Neoliberal New York: contemporary literature and the politics of urban redevelopment Catalina Neculai; 9. The marvellous and the mundane: ekphrastic New York novels Monika Gehlawat; Part III. Identity and Place: 10. Growing up in Manhattan: children's literature and New York City Pádraic Whyte; 11. Wartime reading in the city, 1914–1918 Ross Wilson; 12. The periodical and the flâneur in early New York writing Peter Ferry; 13. Multiple voices: New York City poetry Rona Cran; 14. The New York School: toward a definition Yasmine Shamma; Part IV. Tragedy and Hope: 15. The spatial drama of hope and desire in contemporary New York City literature Bart Eeckhout; 16. New and Old Amsterdam in twenty-first century fiction Maria Lauret; 17. Beats, black culture and bohemianism in mid-twentieth century New York City Douglas Field; 18. 'The sixth borough': imagining New York after 9/11 Birgit Däwes; 19. Walking the modern city: emotion and space in New York Nathalie Cochoy; 20. Afterword Lisa Keller.

Ross Wilson is Director of Liberal Arts at the University of Nottingham. He studies the modern history, heritage and memory of New York with a specific concern for how people form a sense of place within the city in the past and in the present. His work includes New York and the First World War: Shaping an American City (2015).