Urban Discourses of Crisis, Resilience, and Resistance

This volume seeks to address questions of urban crisis from an interdisciplinary perspective that foregrounds the particular roles that literature and the creative arts play in both conceptualizing and addressing the multiple challenges facing cities. Noting that the successive crises of recent years (from the 2008 recession to COVID-19) seem to have put an end to the triumphalist tone of much urban writing in the 1990s, this book argues that the current historical moment calls for a different kind of urban discourse, focused on reassessment and regrouping. This edited collection features a variety of different approaches, including close readings of literary works, interviews, essays in cultural and architectural history, and sociological, ethnographic, and urban planning studies. These chapters explore a range of challenges currently faced by cities, and foreground the search for solutions.

Eric Prieto is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He is also the author of Literature, Geography, and the Poetics of Place (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and co-editor of the Literary Urban Studies list at Palgrave Macmillan.

Liam Lanigan is Associate Professor of British and European Literature at Governors State University, USA. He was an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork (2013), and an NEH Keough Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute of Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame (2015). He is the author of James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Anni Lappela is a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is finishing her doctoral dissertation on non-metropolitan cities in Russian contemporary literature. She has a special interest in the Arctic cities. She also previously acted as a Secretary for the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS).