Urban Culture ― Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies

The first volume of this four-volume scholarly reference begins with a chronological table of reprinted articles and chapters, showing the earliest to be an extract from Friederich Engels' 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England and the most recent, a 2004 article, "Urban Cultures: Spatial Tactics" (Fran Tonkiss). "[A city] is a fragile massing of mosaic pluralisms and a temporarily grasped consensus..." writes editor Jenks (affiliation not stated) in his general introduction. He sets the context for theoretical investigation of urban culture, acknowledging the elusiveness of the subject and its complexity. Following are 62 selections arranged in sections on the urban question, urban modernity, walking the city, street lives, inclusion and exclusion, urban processes, urban pathology, and postmodern urbanism. The selections, which have been uniformly typeset (rather than reprinted in facsimile) and are indexed in the last volume, discuss a range of topics related to such themes as identity, behavior, consumption, politics and space/time, race, myth, and modernity; several articles are oriented toward the British experience (e.g. London luminaries and Cockney visionaries, racism in English suburbs), but other countries are also represented, and most of the articles are not country-specific. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)