No city occupies as many paradoxical positions in the popular imagination as Los Angeles. It is the new frontier and the end of the trail; it is American Eden and Babylon by the Pacific; it is by turns celebrated and condemned for its diversity; it is the city of perpetual renewal and the city of imminent apocalypse. This collection reveals LA in all its contradictions by documenting a literary tradition as kaleidoscopic and cacophonous as the city itself. The writings explored by Los Angeles: A Literary History record how a dusty cow town morphed into a global metropolis within a matter of decades, and how this unprecedented transformation came to define the experience of modernity. Los Angeles's literature has long gone underappreciated, the city's culture dismissed as flat and frivolous: this volume upturns that narrative, reshaping American literary history by resituating LA as its beating heart.
Muu info
A comprehensive account of literature produced in and about one of the world's most culturally influential but misunderstood cities.
Part I. Temporalities:
1. Birth of a city: The 'White Spot' at the
western limit (18481929) Meagan Meylor;
2. Maturity and mythmaking: Golden
age or lost years? (19301957) Thomas Gustafson;
3. Comedies physical and
metaphysical: LA fiction across the long Sixties (19581978) Scott Saul;
4.
Metamodern megalopolis: Neoliberalism, multiculturalism, and futurity
(19792002) Casey Shoop;
5. 'In a desert of perception': Mental fog in Los
Angeles fiction (2003Present) Heather Hicks; Part II. Identity, Resistance,
Representation:
6. Literature of south Los Angeles: Space, history, and
belonging in black LA Stephanie Leigh Batiste;
7. From Boyle Heights to
Westwood: Los Angeles Jewish writing Nicholas Birns;
8. Sensory landscapes of
Los Angeles: Remembering and remaking home in Asian American writing Weisong
Gao;
9. 'From the wrong side of the tracks': The spaces of LA Latinx writing
Ignacio López-Calvo and Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue;
10. Beyond English: Spanish
and Japanese literatures of Los Angeles John Alba Cutler and Andrew Way
Leong;
11. Participating in the paranoia of the time: Mapping the details of
women's writing in/on Los Angeles Summer Kim Lee;
12. Liberating the land of
Cooper do-nuts: Writing queer Los Angeles Eir-Anne Edgar; Part III. Identity,
Resistance, Representation:
13. Theories of Los Angeles Edward Dimendberg;
14. Suburbs in search of a city? Separation and reconstruction in LA Julian
Murphet;
15. Rebirth and renewal in the west: Migration and diasporic
literature Suzanne Manizza Roszak;
16. Los Angeles literature as global
literature Aparajita Nanda;
17. Wildfires, landslides, and earthquakes at the
end of the world: Ecology, environment, and natural disaster in the Los
Angeles imagination Nicole Seymour and Zia Salim; Part IV. Genre and Form:
18. The hard-boiled city Will Norman;
19. Tomorrowlands and new frontiers:
Los Angeles in science fiction David Sandner;
20. A city (recorded) in verse:
Los Angeles's renegade poetics William Mohr;
21. Stage and street in the
situated theater of Los Angeles Guy Zimmerman;
22. LA confidentials: Truth
and self-making in Los Angeles life writing Blake Allmendinger;
23. Looking
for Los Angeles: Reportage and essayism Michelle Chihara;
24. Cultural desert
to cultural capital: The critical history of Los Angeles literature Michael
Docherty.
Michael Docherty is an Assistant Professor of English at Appalachian State University. His first book is The Recursive Frontier: Race, Space and the Literary Imagination of Los Angeles (SUNY Press 2024). His other writing on LA literature, culture, and history has appeared in Crime Fiction Studies, Comparative American Studies, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at California State University, Long Beach, and formerly co-edited Post45: Contemporaries. Ignacio López-Calvo is Presidential Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Literature at the University of California, Merced. He is the author of nine books, including Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety and Latinx Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial Rebellion (Co-edited with Victor Valle). His latest books are The Mexican Transpacific: Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, Performance (2022) and Saudades of Japan and Brazil: Contested Modernities in Lusophone Nikkei.
