Introduction: Peripherality and Literary Urban Studies

Abstract

The city has always occupied a special position amongst literary spaces. From the very earliest surviving literary texts, city images appear in all their contradictory complexity: as nodes of creative and destructive energy; as beacons of utopian possibility and of moral warning. In their literary emanations, cities tend to be understood through the notions of centrality and density, in implicit contrast to a (suburban, rural, colonial) hinterland or periphery. As urban sprawl and the implosion of post-industrial cities have shown, a sense of peripheral urbanity may, however, be as essential to contemporary urban centres. At the same time, some of the most interesting urban phenomena are being acted out in what was formerly considered the periphery: in Europe, redeveloping harbour areas; in China and in developing countries, megacities arising in regions that until recently were barely urbanized. Literary urban studies, with its traditional focus on the imposing capitals of modernity and postmodernity, has so far remained underdeveloped in its engagement with these new developments. In much of the scholarly research on city literature, cities that are below the radar of Western metropolises and their canonized literature have remained largely out of sight. So has the extent to which all cities are also defined by a profound sense of peripherality. The present volume aims to fill the gap.