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At Home In The City: Urban Domesticity In American Literature And Culture, 1850-1930, Elizabeth Klima

University of New Hampshire Press: Open Access Books

An interdisciplinary study of urban literature and domestic architecture in the United States from 1850-1930. With chapters on the hotel, Central Park, tenement houses, and apartment buildings, At Home in the City juxtaposes literary criticism with a history of the built environment to show the inception of American modernity. Works treated include: The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ruth Hall by Fanny Fern, The Bostonians by Henry James, How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist urban utopias, and Nella Larsen's Quicksand.