Brooklyn Fictions The Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age

Vast and diverse, Brooklyn is often portrayed in literature as a place of traditional community values and face-to-face relations, distinct from anonymous, capital-driven Manhattan. Brooklyn Fictions discovers what such representations of the New York borough can teach us about diversity and the individual, the local and the global.

Combining analysis of popular texts such as Sister Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever with more canonical novels such as Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, this study draws on the work of a variety of theorists on community and globalization and uses Brooklyn as a case study for an exploration of the complex relationship between romantic ideals of community and global economic forces. With cites often depicted as sites of conflict and fear, this is a crucial contribution to our understanding of the contemporary urban community and the ethical issues involved in conceptualizing and portraying it in literature.

Introduction
Chapter 1: A Small Town in the World City
Chapter 2: How to Read Brooklyn: Leaving Brooklyn
Chapter 3: (Anti)Mythic Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Book of the Dead
Chapter 4 Divisions: Brooklyn Crime
Chapter 5: New Picturesques: Fictions of Brooklyn Gentrification
Chapter 6: “Brooklyn Style”: Race and Urban Space in The Fortress of Solitude, Man Gone Down and The Coldest Winter Ever
Chapter 7: Reaching Out, Reaching In: Transnational Brooklyn in Geographies of Home, Brooklyn and Girl in Landscape
Conclusions and Further Thoughts
Index

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