The relentless pace of urbanization since the industrial revolution
has inspired a continuing effort to view, read, and name the modern
city. "We are now at a point of transition to a new kind of city,"
write William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, "and thus we are
experiencing the same crisis of language felt by observers of
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities." "Visions of the
Modern City" explores the ways in which artists and writers have
struggled to define the city during the past two centuries and
opens a new perspective on the urban vision of our time.
In their introduction, the editors outline three phases in the
evolution of the modern city-- each having its own distinctive
morphology and metaphor-- and argue that a new vocabulary is needed
to describe the sprawling "urban field" of today. Eric Lampard
draws a detailed demographic and geographic picture of urbanization
since the late eighteenth century, culminating with the
"decentered" city of the 1980s. Other contributors examine the
representation of cities from the London and Paris of 1850 to the
New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo of the present. Deborah Nord and
Philip Collins follow Henry Mayhew and Charles Dickens,
respectively, through the urban underworld of Victorian London.
Theodore Reff traces the double life of Paris expressed in the work
of Manet, while Michele Hannoosh shows bow Baudelaire influenced
the Impressionists by transferring the aesthetic implications of
the term nature to urban experience. Thomas Bender and William
Taylor focus on tensions between the horizontal and the vertical in
the architectural development of New York City, and Paul Anderer
investigates the private, domestic spaces that represent Tokyo in
postwar Japanese fiction. Steven Marcus analyzes the breakdown of
the city as signifying system in the novels of Saul Bellow and
Thomas Pynchon, writers who question whether the indecipherable
contemporary city has any meaning left at all.
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