Imagined Cities

Imagined Cities
Author: Robert Alter
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300127073

In Imagined Cities, Robert Alter traces the arc of literary development triggered by the runaway growth of urban centers from the early nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. As new technologies and arrangements of public and private space changed the ways people experienced time and space, the urban panorama became less coherent—a metropolis defying traditional representation and definition, a vast jumble of shifting fragments and glimpses—and writers were compelled to create new methods for conveying the experience of the city.In a series of subtle and convincing interpretations of novels by Flaubert, Dickens, Bely, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka, Alter reveals the ways the city entered the literary imagination. He shows how writers of diverse imaginative temperaments developed innovative techniques to represent shifts in modern consciousness. Writers sought more than a journalistic representation of city living, he argues, and to convey meaningfully the reality of the metropolis, the city had to be re-created or reimagined. His book probes the literary response to changing realities of the period and contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of the Western imagination.

Cities Imagined

Cities Imagined
Author: Walter Greason
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781524951092

Whose images are being juxtaposed? What information is being conveyed? Which aesthetics are being valued? - Frances Gateward and John Jennings, ""The Blacker the Ink"" ""Afrofuturism is moving [toward] a more applied, theoretical, critical, and transdisciplinary approach"" - Reynaldo Anderson, ""Afrofuturism 2.0"" ""What is dark matter?"" - Sheree R. Thomas, ""Dark Matter"" Cities Imagined symbolizes the dynamic relationship between real and imagined spaces, subjects, and objects across disciplines. Forged from lifetimes of academic work that balanced critical insight with constant creativity, Julian Chambliss and Walter Greason document, analyze, and synthesize multiple traditions of critical analysis and aesthetic performance. In tracing the history of culture, identity, and structures over the twentieth century, Cities Imagined provides a framework to rethink modern history. From the emergence of the Booker T. Washington's ""Tuskegee Universe"" in the late nineteenth century through the trans-dimensional character of the comic book city and transpatial power of the Black Lives Matter moment, Cities Imagined offers a sequence of templates that will guide scholars, activists, architects, and theorists through processes of metropolitan creation in pursuit of equal justice for all people. Chambliss and Greason move their readers from the dreams of Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, and Martin Luther King, Jr. through the recognition of Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, and Sonia Sotomayor as shapers of an uncharted future. How do dreams become real? The examination of spatial change though both literature and history provides a furnace and an anvil for the creation of Audre Lorde's new tools. Cities Imagined is the hammer we all need.

Imaginary Cities

Imaginary Cities
Author: Darran Anderson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 573
Release: 2017-04-06
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 022647030X

How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”

Atlas of Imagined Places

Atlas of Imagined Places
Author: Matt Brown
Publisher: Batsford Books
Total Pages: 507
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1849947422

WINNER, Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2022: Illustrated Travel Book of the Year. HIGHLY COMMENDED, British Cartographic Society Awards 2022. From Stephen King's Salem's Lot to the superhero land of Wakanda, from Lilliput of Gulliver's Travels to Springfield in The Simpsons, this is a wondrous atlas of imagined places around the world. Locations from film, tv, literature, myths, comics and video games are plotted in a series of beautiful vintage-looking maps. The maps feature fictional buildings, towns, cities and countries plus mountains and rivers, oceans and seas. Ever wondered where the Bates Motel was based? Or Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life? The authors have taken years to research the likely geography of thousands of popular culture locations that have become almost real to us. Sometimes these are easy to work out, but other times a bit of detective work is needed and the authors have been those detectives. By looking at the maps, you'll find that the revolution at Animal Farm happened next to Winnie the Pooh's home. Each location has an an extended index entry plus coordinates so you can find it on the maps. Illuminating essays accompanying the maps give a great insight into the stories behind the imaginary places, from Harry Potter's wizardry to Stone Age Bedrock in the Flintstones. A stunning map collection of invented geography and topography drawn from the world's imagination. Fascinating and beautiful, this is an essential book for any popular culture fan and map enthusiast.

Imagine a City

Imagine a City
Author: Elise Hurst
Publisher: Doubleday Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 19
Release: 2016-10-11
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1101934581

You are invited into a stunning and dreamlike voyage into the imagination—ideal for fans of Chris Van Allsburg and the Caldecott Honor Book Journey by Aaron Becker. Imagine a world without edges . . . where bunnies and bears ride bicycles, lions read books, and buses are fish that fly through the clouds. In the city of imagination, anything is possible, and an outing with their mother brings a world of adventure to two lucky children. With simple, evocative, rhyming text and page after page of unusual and mystical details to explore, this is a story that encourages readers to open their minds and dream of magical places filled with the unexpected. Enter a world of the past, present, and future, where wonders exist that we never thought possible. . . . "Who could resist hanging out with gargoyles while sipping tea?"—Kirkus "Hurst’s sweeping pen-and-ink illustrations suggest a combination of midtown Manhattan and Hogwarts. . . . [Her] engrossing mashups of the urban and the fantastical present no shortage of fuel for readers’ own imaginations."—Publishers Weekly "Imagination reigns in this flight of fantasy . . . Rabbits read newspapers, fish fly, and trees grow out of pictures. Readers will have tea with gargoyles and float on lily pad rafts, see books and umbrellas float by, walk among lions and bears, or ride on a fish bus with a bear conductor."—Booklist

Imagined London

Imagined London
Author: Anna Quindlen
Publisher: Disney Electronic Content
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2006-11-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1426201826

Anna Quindlen first visited London from a chair in her suburban Philadelphia home—in one of her beloved childhood mystery novels. She has been back to London countless times since, through the pages of books and in person, and now, in Imagined London, she takes her own readers on a tour of this greatest of literary cities. While New York, Paris, and Dublin are also vividly portrayed in fiction, it is London, Quindlen argues, that has always been the star, both because of the primacy of English literature and the specificity of city descriptions. She bases her view of the city on her own detailed literary map, tracking the footsteps of her favorite characters: the places where Evelyn Waugh's bright young things danced until dawn, or where Lydia Bennett eloped with the dastardly Wickham. In Imagined London, Quindlen walks through the city, moving within blocks from the great books of the 19th century to the detective novels of the 20th to the new modernist tradition of the 21st. With wit and charm, Imagined London gives this splendid city its full due in the landscape of the literary imagination. Praise for Imagined London: "Shows just how much a reading experience can enrich a physical journey." —New York Times Book Review "An elegant new work of nonfiction... People will be inspired by this book." —Ann Curry, Today "An affectionate, richly allusive tribute to the city." —Kirkus Reviews

Imagining Cities

Imagining Cities
Author: Sallie Westwood
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1997
Genre: Cities and towns
ISBN: 9780415144292

Twenty-nine collected essays represent a critical history of Shakespeare's play as text and as theater, beginning with Samuel Johnson in 1765, and ending with a review of the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1991. The criticism centers on three aspects of the play: the love/friendship debate.

Imagining Urban Futures

Imagining Urban Futures
Author: Carl Abbott
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2016-09-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0819576727

What science fiction can teach us about urban planning Carl Abbott, who has taught urban studies and urban planning in five decades, brings together urban studies and literary studies to examine how fictional cities in work by authors as different as E. M. Forster, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville might help us to envision an urban future that is viable and resilient. Imagining Urban Futures is a remarkable treatise on what is best and strongest in urban theory and practice today, as refracted and intensely imagined in science fiction. As the human population grows, we can envision an increasingly urban society. Shifting weather patterns, rising sea levels, reduced access to resources, and a host of other issues will radically impact urban environments, while technology holds out the dream of cities beyond Earth. Abbott delivers a compelling critical discussion of science fiction cities found in literary works, television programs, and films of many eras from Metropolis to Blade Runner and Soylent Green to The Hunger Games, among many others.

Imagined Communities

Imagined Communities
Author: Benedict Anderson
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2006-11-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 178168359X

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.

Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2013-08-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 054413320X

Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.