New York and Toronto Novels after Postmodernism: Explorations of the Urban (European Studies in North American Literature and Culture)

Cities are material and symbolic spaces through which nations define their cultural identities. The great cities that have arisen in the US and Canada, however, play very different roles in the imaginations of their nations. In American literature the city has always played a central role, glorified as a 'city upon the hill' yet demonized as the locus of sin and degradation. Canadian literature, in contrast, until recently largely ignored the city in favor of the small town or the Far North. This first comparative study of urban fiction in the two countries takes New York and Toronto as exemplary, investigating representations of the urban after postmodernism. Following an overview of the city's roles in the US and Canadian literary canons, it analyzes two twenty-first-century novels set in New York - Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved and Paule Marshall's The Fisher King - and two set in Toronto - Carol Shields's Unless and Dionne Brand's What We All Long For. All four represent urban space in new ways: rather than representing the metropolis as technocratic, cold, and anonymous, they show the affective forces of urban life and how intercultural encounters challenge personal and national identities.