Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film and Urban Formations

A study of urban identity and community looks at selected twentieth century literary and film texts in the context of theorizations of modernism, postmodernism, postcoloniality and globalization. Brooker draws on Beck and Giddens to propose a 'reflexive modernism' which rewrites and re-imagines the urban scene. The principal cities considered are London and New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok. Writers considered include Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Hanif Kureishi, Iain Sinclair, Paul Auster, Sarah Schulman and William Gibson. Filmmakers include Patrick Keiller and Wong Kar-Wai.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Beginnings in Endings American Modernists in Modern London Modernism Deferred: Harlem Montage Inside Ethnicity: Suburban Outlooks Re-imagining London 'Hymn to the Great People's Republic of Brooklyn' Sarah Schulman and the Lower East Side In the Matrix: East West Encounters Postmetropolis and the Art of Fabrication Index

About the Author :
PETER BROOKER is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture and Head of the Centre for Criticism and Culture at University College Northampton. His previous publications have included Bertolt Brecht, Dialectics, Poetry, Politics, and New York Fictions: Modernity, Postmodernism, the New Modern. He is editor of Modernism/Postmodernism and A Glossary of Cultural Theory and has published widely on aspects of modernism, postmodernism and contemporary theory.

Review :
'In this ambitious book, Brooker not only re-examines the twentieth-century urban scene in the light of recent thinking in critical and cultural theory, but also takes the study of urban modernity in some exciting and surprising new directions. Modernity and Metropolis offers a far-reaching survey of urban space and representation that moves seamlessly from and between the modern and the postmodern in their many and diverse cultural formations. Metropolis and Modernity is...a must-read for anyone interesting in cities and the narratives that emerge from them...this book is lively, compelling, and makes an important and often original contribution to the study of urban modernity.' - Christoph Lindner, University of Aberystwith 'One of the many pleasures of this book is the way in which it both interrogates a modernism of the early twentieth century in new and invigorating ways, and stretches the concept of the modern across the history and geography of the twentieth century. Brooker's book is part of the current resurgence in modernist research and scholarship. Modernity and Metropolis should become a key text in this ongoing rethinking of modernism as it is both impressive in its range, style and clarity or argument, and offers many challenges to what we count as modernist. For its incisive contribution to research in modernism, as well as its challenge to contemporary debates around the city, community and modernity, this book deserves to be read widely.' - Andrew Thacker, University of Ulster at Jordanstown