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Riard Lehan. e City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press,1998. xvi + 330 pp. $25.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-520-21256-5; $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-21042-4.

Reviewed bySarah S. Marcus (University of Wisconsin-Madison)Published onH-Urban (October, 1998)

e City in Literature

In e City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cul-tural History, Richard Lehan explores the dynamism ofurban imagery, examining links between literary expres-

sion and the history of the city. In a sweeping analysisof western literature from Greek mythology to omasPynchon and from St. Petersburg, Russia to Los Ange-les, California, Lehan persuasively argues that transfor-mations in the structure and function of cities influencedthe form of the urban novel. He links developments inurban literature with developments of the city, ascribingvarious narrative methods and trends to historical stagesof urbanization.

Lehan, a professor of English at UCLA, reaches acrossthe disciplinary divide and grounds his literary analy-sis in an historical context. Although historians mightwince at the lack of footnotes or historiographical analy-sis, Lehan successfully links the academic fields by weav-ing together a discussion of urban literature with an ex-ploration of the changes occurring within the city itself.As he explains in his preface, [A]s literature gave imag-inative reality to the city, urban changes in turn helpedtransform the literary text. is shared textualitythissymbiosis between literary and urban textbecame themethodological basis for this book (p. xv). Lehan thusrelies on literature to examine changes and constancies inthe function, physical structure, and conceptualization ofcities.

Historians who wish to explore divergences in how

people of varying socioeconomic backgrounds regardedthe city might be frustrated by Lehans evidentiary ba-sis, which is limited to a select collection of novels writ-ten about the urban experience in Europe and the UnitedStates. Readers who expect a discussion of the entire ur-ban scene will be disappointed, not only because of thebroad conclusions he reaches from this limited range ofsources, but also because he does not fully examine thesocio-economic factors that motivated the work of thenovelists. Nevertheless, historians will find great benefit

not only in the breadth of this workwhich sweeps acrosseras and two continents, if not across socio-economicgroupsbut also in its instructive demonstration of how

to read poetry and prose as evidence. By analyzing howthe forms and functions of the city shaped literary trends,Lehan demonstrates the interconnectedness of structuresand ideas. His methodological innovations offer histori-ans a strategy for exploring not just the themes and im-ages of urban literature, but also what the particular nar-rative methods can tell us about the history of the city.

Avoiding the jargon-laden analysis that makes non-academics (and even some of us within the academy)shudder and turn away, Lehan presents intricate argu-ments and complex concepts in clear, astute, if sometimesabstract, prose. rough an extensive, comparative ap-proach, Lehan explains the origins of several prominentrecurring themes that appear in both urban literature andhistory, including the threat of the other; the effectsof ethnic, racial, and economic diversity on communitywithin the city; the contrasts of individual opportunityand alienation; the difficulty of knowing or explaining acity; and the relationship between the city and the fron-tier, and between the metropolis and the hinterland. AsLehan argues, these themes continued to appear in urbanliterature, but the forms in which they were expressedand the meanings with which these concepts were in-fused hardly remained static. For example, beginning

with an analysis of ancient western cities and Dionysianimages of chaos, Lehan describes how images of orderand disorder repeatedly emerged as dualistic elements inurban portrayals. e theme of chaos appeared in dif-ferent narrative forms that reflected the historical stageof the city, from the Victorian-era tale of Bram StokersDraculato the postmodern imagery in Paul AustersNewYork Trilogy.

As the city grew and its social and economic func-tions became more complex, authors developed new

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methods with which to describe the metropolitan land-scape. Various stages of urban development thus gener-ated new ways of conceptualizing the city. As Lehan ex-

plains, Comic and romantic realism give us insights intothe commercial city; naturalism and modernism into theindustrial city; and postmodernism into the postindus-trial city. e city and the literary text have had insepara-ble histories (p. 289). With continued urban expansion,modernist conceptions of the city focused on the com-plexity of the metropolis as embodied by the image of thecrowd. e crowd, Lehan explains, became a metonymfor the city in modernist discourse (p. 71). Rather than agathering of individuals, modernists perceived the crowdas a potentially dangerous mob, whose alienated mem-bers had lost their individuality. With the increasing di-versity of the crowd, cities seemed to pose a challenge

not only to order, but also to the organic community.Looking backwards to an idealized past of cultural homo-geneity, poets like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot warned thata mechanized metropolis, driven by individualistic mate-rialistic desires and the power of money, would lead to-ward cultural entropy and a desolate urban wasteland.Authors of the modern metropolis depicted individualsas either alienated and alone amid the decadent crowdor searching for identity in a centralized power and em-bracing a totalitarian state. Here, Lehan might have dis-cussed more concretely the socioeconomic backgroundsof authors like Pound and Eliot, explicitly identifying thesources of their anxieties (and thus the motivations for

their narrative methods) in the historical conditions ofthe metropolis.

Acknowledging the significance of national contextin these literary texts, Lehan describes how responses tothe modern city varied across space. While themes oforder and chaos continued across the Atlantic, Lehan ar-gues, differences in the historical contexts of the Old andNew Worlds shaped the ways in which the city was con-ceptualized; while feudalism, imperialism, and totalitari-anism informed European urban literature, American au-thors, artists, and architects reacted to and in turn shapedimages of the frontier (p. 167). Americans fascination

with their nations transition from rural to urban andwith the perceived democracy of the frontier informedmuch of their literature. For instance, in America, fearsof cultural degradation and community decay appearedless in espousals of dictatorial nationalism and more of-ten in the Jeffersonian ideals of republicanism and themyth of the yeoman farmer.

e term around which Lehan structures much ofhis analysis of American literaturefrontiercarries agreat deal of historiographical baggage as the continu-

ing center of a lively scholarly debate, lile of whichhe addresses. Neither the frontier nor images associ-ated with it have remained static throughout American

history, rather displaying diverse and variable meaningseven within a single era. Lehans analysis would havebeen strengthened by a fuller exploration of the multipleconceptualizations of the selement process. By conflat-ing the experiences of all selers, he ignores the workof numerous scholars who have described the diversityof experiences by Euroamerican, Indian, Mexican, andAsian migrants.

Despite the lack of a full discussion of the complex-ity of frontier imagery, Lehan adeptly and provocativelyintroduces the category of region into his analysis. Not-ing differences between depictions of the city in Europeand the United States, as well as differences between thenortheastern, southern, midwestern, and western U.S.,Lehan leaves liledoubt that the location of a city, as wellas regional characteristics in its development, shaped theways in which authors perceived and described cities.(Note especially his discussion on pages 186 and 191.)

Lehan concludes his book with an analysis of LosAngelesthe last major city to grow out of Enlight-enment notions of progress, property, and the conquer-able frontier (p. 257). Again linking conceptualizationand structure, Lehan demonstrates how the postmod-ern city influenced the literary style of omas Pynchon.As with the postmodern city itself, Lehan argues, Pyn-

chon creates a world in Gravitys Rainbowwhere thereis no center, no principle of unity, no way to connectparts to something greater (p. 276). Disjointedness, ab-straction, the lack of a core amid undefined sprawl givethe sense of Los Angelesthe quintessential postmodernmetropolisas an unknowable place. Having begun hisanalysis in the scriptable world of Enlightenment Lon-don, he concludes in the discontinuous, decentered, un-scriptable world of postmodern Los Angeles (p. 291).

Despite the extensive chronological and geographicscope of Lehans impressive undertaking, some voiceshave been lost. A range of literary works that both re-

flected developments in urban history and shaped futuredepictions of the metropolis are not discussed. For ex-ample, Lehan chooses not to include dime novels, boostertracts, or other popular literature in his analysis, thus ne-glecting the influence of these works on the major novelswrien by literary luminaries. In addition, the perspec-tives of women, the working class, and members of var-ious ethnic and racial groupstaken together, the major-ity of urban dwellersare not fully analyzed. eir por-trayals offer alternative conceptions of the commercial,

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industrial, and postindustrial city that would shed lightonto not only prevalent literary trends, but also the com-plex motivations behind the narrative methods which

artists employed in their depictions of the city. Signifi-cant authors who might have complicated this analysis ofAmerican literature include Toni Morrison, James Bald-win, Upton Sinclair, Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth, KateChopin, Claude McKay, Armistead Maupin, and HoratioAlger. Differences between Fitzgeralds and Yezierskasdepictions of New York, for example, belie assertions thattime and place alone differentiated conceptualizations ofthe city. A comparison of these works would add depthto the breath of Lehans analysis by exploring the socioe-conomic factors that caused two authors writing aboutthe same city at the same time to depict radically differ-ent urban scenes.

Although the task would require the further expan-sion ofe City in Literatures already broad focus, ananalysis of the rich diversity of literary voices and styleswithin a single era could only add to Lehans argument ofthe influence of city form in shaping literary form. Otherhistorians and literary scholars, including omas Ben-der, Andrew Lees, Adrienne Siegel, and Dana Brand havelinked class, race, ethnicity, gender, and occupation withaitudes towards cities, asserting that the social positionof authors and artists informed their conceptualizationof the city.[1] Lehan leaves relatively unanswered ques-tions of whether and why different authors writing at the

same moment in history saw and described different ur-

ban images.

When seeking to understand a particular metropoliswith its agglomeration of residents, physical structures,

and functions, we oen grasp for central themes or im-ages. Authors too shape their conceptualization of thecity by reducing a single place to a set of scenes and sto-ries. Many scholars have studied these complex imagesin order to examine our ambivalent aitudes toward themetropolis. Lehan ventures further, however, demon-strating how we can gain additional insights into the his-tory of a city by examining the narrative methods of itschroniclers. Expanding his focus only would add to thismethod of analysis and to its fascinating conclusions.

Notes

[1]. omas Bender,Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas

and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Balti-more, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); An-drew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in Americanand European ought, 1820-1940 (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1985); Adrienne Siegel, e Image ofthe American City in Popular Literature, 1820-1870(PortWashington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1981); Dana Brand,eSpectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century AmericanLiterature_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1991).

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Citation: Sarah S. Marcus. Review of Lehan, Richard,e City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History.H-Urban, H-Net Reviews. October, 1998.URL:hp://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2384

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