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Ur III Texts in the Schøyen Collection (CUSAS)
by Jacob L. DahlJudging from the sheer amount of textual material left to us, the rulers of ancient Ur were above all else concerned with keeping track of their poorest subjects, who made up the majority of the population under their jurisdiction. Year after year, administrators recorded, in frightening detail, the whereabouts of the poorest individuals in monthly and yearly rosters, assigning tiny parcels of land to countless prebend holders and starvation rations to even more numerous estate slaves. The texts published in this volume—dating from the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur (ca. 2100–2000 BC)—attest to the immense investment of the ancient rulers in managing their subjects. This volume presents editions of two hundred and twenty-four cuneiform tablets selected from the Schøyen Collection, the vast majority of which have not been previously published. The ancient provenience for these texts is primarily Umma, with other core provinces represented in smaller numbers, such as notable contributions from ancient Adab, which is underrepresented in the published record. In order to provide a fuller picture of the administration of the Ur III state, a number of texts from other collections, both published and unpublished, have been integrated into this volume. Accompanied by Jacob L. Dahl’s precise translations, extensive commentary, and exhaustive indexes, this volume presents extensive new data on prosopography, economy, accounting procedures, letters, contracts, technical terminology, and agriculture that adds significantly to our knowledge of society and the economy during the Third Dynasty of Ur.An important contribution to the study of the Ur III period, in particular for Assyriology, this volume will serve as a useful handbook for scholars and students alike.
Ur III Texts in the Schøyen Collection (CUSAS: Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology #39)
by Jacob L. DahlJudging from the sheer amount of textual material left to us, the rulers of ancient Ur were above all else concerned with keeping track of their poorest subjects, who made up the majority of the population under their jurisdiction. Year after year, administrators recorded, in frightening detail, the whereabouts of the poorest individuals in monthly and yearly rosters, assigning tiny parcels of land to countless prebend holders and starvation rations to even more numerous estate slaves. The texts published in this volume—dating from the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur (ca. 2100–2000 BC)—attest to the immense investment of the ancient rulers in managing their subjects. This volume presents editions of two hundred and twenty-four cuneiform tablets selected from the Schøyen Collection, the vast majority of which have not been previously published. The ancient provenience for these texts is primarily Umma, with other core provinces represented in smaller numbers, such as notable contributions from ancient Adab, which is underrepresented in the published record. In order to provide a fuller picture of the administration of the Ur III state, a number of texts from other collections, both published and unpublished, have been integrated into this volume. Accompanied by Jacob L. Dahl’s precise translations, extensive commentary, and exhaustive indexes, this volume presents extensive new data on prosopography, economy, accounting procedures, letters, contracts, technical terminology, and agriculture that adds significantly to our knowledge of society and the economy during the Third Dynasty of Ur.An important contribution to the study of the Ur III period, in particular for Assyriology, this volume will serve as a useful handbook for scholars and students alike.
Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern London: The Invention of the Metaphysical
by Christopher D'AddarioTracing the demonstrative aesthetic shift in literary writings of fashionable London during the late 1590s, this book argues that the new forms which emerged during this period were intimately linked, arising out of a particular set of geographic, intellectual, and social circumstances that existed in these urban environs. In providing a cohesive view of these disparate generic interventions, Christopher D'Addario breaks new ground in significant ways. By paying attention to the relationship between environment and individual imagination, he provides a fresh and detailed sense of the spaces and social worlds in which the writings of prominent authors, including Thomas Nashe and John Donne, were produced and experienced. In arguing that the rise of the metaphysical aesthetic occurred across a number of urban genres throughout the 1590s, not just in lyric, but also earlier in Nashe's prose, as well as in the verse satire, he rewrites English Renaissance literary history itself.
Urban Captivity Narratives: Women’s Writing After 9/11 (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature)
by Heather HillsburgEvolving from a rigorous study of post-9/11 women's writing, Dr. Heather Hillsburg's new monograph identifies an emerging genre, which she names Urban Captivity Narratives. Using examples ranging from memoir to young adult fiction, each of the texts examined in the study follows a female protagonist who has survived abduction, been held captive for months or even years, and subjected to sexual, emotional, and physical abuse by their captor. Hillsburg contextualizes these narratives, and takes into consideration our current political atmosphere, the role of patriarchy, and various social anxieties that come into play when discussing the kind of oppression seen in these narratives.
Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life
by Viviane MahieuxAn unstructured genre that blends high aesthetic standards with nonfiction commentary, the journalistic crónica, or chronicle, has played a vital role in Latin American urban life since the nineteenth century. <P><P>Drawing on extensive archival research, Viviane Mahieux delivers new testimony on how chroniclers engaged with modernity in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo during the 1920s and 1930s, a time when avant-garde movements transformed writers' and readers' conceptions of literature. Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life examines the work of extraordinary raconteurs Salvador Novo, Cube Bonifant, Roberto Arlt, Alfonsina Storni, and Mário de Andrade, restoring the original newspaper contexts in which their articles first emerged.
Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848-2001: European Contexts, American Evolutions
by Edward J. AhearnIn an innovative contribution to the challenging of disciplinary boundaries, Edward J. Ahearn juxtaposes works of literature with the writings of social scientists to discover how together they illuminate city life in ways that neither can accomplish separately. Ahearn's argument spans from the second half of the nineteenth century in Western Europe to the present-day United States and encompasses a wide range of literary genres and sociological schools. For example, Charles Baudelaire's essays on the city are viewed alongside the work of Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel; Bertolt Brecht's Jungle of Cities heightens the arguments of Louis Wirth and Robert Park; Richard Wright's Native Son and Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March are re-visioned in tandem with works by William Julius Wilson and others; Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" poses a challenge to James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy; Toni Morrison's historical novel Jazz is buttressed by the career of Robert Moses and the revisionist work of historians Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson; and Don DeLillos's Cosmopolis comes into brilliant focus in the light of arguments on world cybercities by David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, and Manuel Cassels. Resisting the temptation to ignore contradictions for the sake of interpretation, Ahearn instead offers the reader a view of the modern city as complex as his subject matter. Here the methodologies and knowledge generated by the social sciences are both complemented and subverted by the experience of city life as portrayed in literature. With its diverse narrative tactics and shifting points of view, which can be as disorienting to the reader as a foreign city is to an arriving immigrant, literature reinforces the importance of method and outlook in the social sciences. Ultimately, Ahearn suggests, neither literature nor the social sciences can capture the experience of urban misery.
Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change: Insights from the Global North and South (Routledge Studies in Language Change)
by Paul Kerswill Heike WieseThis volume provides a systematic comparative treatment of urban contact dialects in the Global North and South, examining the emergence and development of these dialects in major cities in sub-Saharan Africa and North-Western Europe. The book’s focus on contemporary urban settings sheds light on the new language practices and mixed ways of speaking resulting from large-scale migration and the intense contact that occurs between new and existing languages and dialects in these contexts. In comparing these new patterns of language variation and change between cities in both Africa and Europe, the volume affords us a unique opportunity to examine commonalities in linguistic phenomena as well as sociolinguistic differences in societally multilingual settings and settings dominated by a strong monolingual habitus. These comparisons are reinforced by a consistent chapter structure, with each chapter presenting the linguistic and social context of the region, information on available data (including corpora), sociolinguistic and structural findings, a discussion of the status of the urban contact dialect, and its stability over time. The discussion in the book is further enriched by short commentaries from researchers contributing different theoretical and geographical perspectives. Taken as a whole, the book offers new insights into migration-based linguistic diversity and patterns of language variation and change, making this ideal reading for students and scholars in general linguistics and language structure, sociolinguistics, creole studies, diachronic linguistics, language acquisition, anthropological linguistics, language education and discourse analysis.
Urban Drama
by J. Chris WestgateIdentifying an apprehension about the nature and constitution of urbanism in North American plays, Westgate examines how cities like New York City and Los Angeles became focal points for identity politics and social justice at the end of the twentieth century, and how urban crises inform the dramaturgy of contemporary playwrights.
Urban Ecology and Intervention in the 21st Century Americas: Verticality, Catastrophe, and the Mediated City (Routledge Environmental Humanities)
by Allison M. SchifaniThis book takes a hemispheric approach to contemporary urban intervention, examining urban ecologies, communication technologies, and cultural practices in the twenty-first century. It argues that governmental and social regimes of control and forms of political resistance converge in speculation on disaster and that this convergence has formed a vision of urban environments in the Americas in which forms of play and imaginations of catastrophe intersect in the vertical field. Schifani explores a diverse range of resistant urban interventions, imagining the city as on the verge of or enmeshed in catastrophe. She also presents a model of ecocriticism that addresses aesthetic practices and forms of play in the urban environment. Tracing the historical roots of such tactics as well as mapping their hopes for the future will help the reader to locate the impacts of climate change not only on the physical space of the city, but also on the epistemological and aesthetic strategies that cities can help to engender. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Urban Studies, Media Studies, American Studies, Global Studies, and the broad and interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities.
Urban Enlightenment and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay
by Richard SquibbsUrban Enlightenment offers the first literary history of the British periodical essay spanning the entire eighteenth century, and the first to study the genre's development and cultural impact in a transatlantic context.
Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic
by Stefan EkmanUrban fantasy, the genre of fantastic literature in which magic and monsters meet modern society, is fairly young but has old roots. Stefan Ekman’s book, Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic, examines the genre in depth, including its inherent social commentary, its historical development, and its interplay between modernity and the fantastic. The author draws on a wide range of urban fantasy texts from five decades, combining detailed analysis of dozens of novels and other media with broad discussions to provide a comprehensive understanding of the genre across three sections. The first section presents an overview of what the genre looks like today—both in terms of its common traits and its variety of settings—and how it has developed over time, including the history of urban fantasy scholarship. The second section examines urban fantasy’s core concern with the unseen, for example through a focus on unseen individuals overlooked by society or hiding within it, and on ignored urban spaces or labyrinthine undergrounds. The third section addresses how urban fantasy explores the relationship between the supernatural and modernity. Ekman offers readings of fiction by Ben Aaronovitch, Lauren Beukes, P. Djelí Clark, Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Max Gladstone, Kim Harrison, N.K. Jemisin, and Megan Lindholm, among others. Urban Fantasy will appeal to teachers and students of the fantastic as well as to urban fantasy enthusiasts and literary scholars. Ekman illuminates the genre’s evolution and defining traits, inviting readers to rethink urban fantasy as a creative tool for using magic to explore modernity.
Urban Formalism: The Work of City Reading (Polis: Fordham Series in Urban Studies)
by David FaflikUrban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity.This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprising the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.
Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility (Sinotheory)
by Erin Y. HuangIn Urban Horror Erin Y. Huang theorizes the economic, cultural, and political conditions of neoliberal post-socialist China. Drawing on Marxist phenomenology, geography, and aesthetics from Engels and Merleau-Ponty to Lefebvre and Rancière, Huang traces the emergence and mediation of what she calls urban horror—a sociopolitical public affect that exceeds comprehension and provides the grounds for possible future revolutionary dissent. She shows how documentaries, blockbuster feature films, and video art from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan made between the 1990s and the present rehearse and communicate urban horror. In these films urban horror circulates through myriad urban spaces characterized by the creation of speculative crises, shifting temporalities, and dystopic environments inhospitable to the human body. The cinematic image and the aesthetics of urban horror in neoliberal post-socialist China lay the groundwork for the future to such an extent, Huang contends, that the seeds of dissent at the heart of urban horror make it possible to imagine new forms of resistance.
Urban Identity and the Atlantic World (The New Urban Atlantic)
by Elizabeth A. Fay Leonard Von MorzéThe constant flow of people, ideas, and commodities across the Atlantic propelled the development of a public sphere. Chapters explore the multiple ways in which a growing urban consciousness influenced national and international cultural and political intersections.
Urban Life in Nordic Countries (Routledge Advances in Urban History)
by Heiko DrosteBased on empirical studies, this book investigates the particular urban history of the North from the 17th century until today in a comparative, Northern perspective. Urban Life in Nordic Countries is the result of a conference on "Urbanity in the Periphery" held in Stockholm on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Institute of Urban History at Stockholm University, aimed at establishing the field of the urban history of the North and creating a network of urban historians of the North. With a broad range of contributions from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Estonia, the volume seeks to further discourse on the region within national and transnational lenses, and to highlight possibilities for new cooperation among researchers. Urban history is a transdisciplinary subject, engaging not only historians but also ethnologists, sociologists, urban planners, and cultural geographers, and this book targets all scholars whose work requires a historical understanding of the Northern town. European urban historians outside the region will also find this text valuable as one of the few studies to consider the urban history of the continent from a North-centered viewpoint.
Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism (Literary Urban Studies)
by Patricia García Anna-Leena ToivanenUrban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism explores the entwinement of mobility and immobility in urban spaces by focusing on their representation in literary narratives but also in visual and performing arts. Across a range of geographical contexts, this volume builds on the new mobilities paradigm developed by literary scholars, sociologists and human geographers. The different chapters employ a cohesive framework that is sensitive to the intersecting dimensions of power and discrimination that shape urban kinetic features. The contributions are divided into three sections, each of which places the focus on a different aspect of urban mobility: Itinerant Subjects, Modes of Transport and Places of Transit, and Urban Liminalities.Chapter 7, "Alienation, Abjection and the Mobile Postcolonial City: Public Transport in Ousmane Sembène’s “Niiwam” and Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Urban Poetics in the French Renaissance
by Elisabeth HodgesThe 'city view' forms the jumping off point for this innovative study, which explores how the concept of the city relates to the idea of the self in early modern French narratives. At a time when print culture, cartography and literature emerged and developed together, the 'city view', a picture or topographic image of a city, became one of the most distinctive and popular products of the early modern period. Through a construct she calls 'urban poetics', Elisabeth Hodges draws out the relationship between the city and the self, showing the impact of the city in cultural production to be so profound that it cannot be extricated from what we know by the name of 'subjectivity'. Each chapter of the book brings focus to a crucial text that features descriptions of the self in the city (by the writers Villon, Corrozet, Scève, and Montaigne) and investigate how representations of urban experience prepared the way for the emergence of the autonomous subject. Charting a course between cartography, literary studies, and cultural history, this study opens new vistas on some of the period's defining problems: the book, the subject, the city.
Urban Schools and English Language Education in Late Modern China: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography (Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism)
by Miguel Perez-MilansShortlisted for the 2014 BAAL Book Prize This book explores the meaning of modernization in contemporary Chinese education. It examines the implications of the implementation of reforms in English language education for experimental-urban schools in the People’s Republic of China. Pérez-Milans sheds light on how national, linguistic, and cultural ideologies linked to modernization are being institutionally (re)produced, legitimated, and inter-personally negotiated through everyday practice in the current context of Chinese educational reforms. He places special emphasis on those reforms regarding English language education, with respect to the economic processes of globalization that are shaping (and being shaped by) the contemporary Chinese nation-state. In particular, the book analyzes the processes of institutional categorization of the "good experimental school", the "good student", and the "appropriate knowledge" that emerge from the daily discursive organization of those schools, with special attention to the related contradictions, uncertainties and dilemmas. Thus, it provides an account of the on-going cultural processes of change faced by contemporary Chinese educational institutions under conditions of late modernity. Winner of The University of Hong Kong's Faculty Early Career Research Output Award for outstanding book publication, by the Faculty of Education
Urban Sociolinguistics: The City as a Linguistic Process and Experience
by Dick Smakman Patrick HeinrichFrom Los Angeles to Tokyo, Urban Sociolinguistics is a sociolinguistic study of twelve urban settings around the world. Building on William Labov’s famous New York Study, the authors demonstrate how language use in these areas is changing based on belief systems, behavioural norms, day-to-day rituals and linguistic practices. All chapters are written by key figures in sociolinguistics and presents the personal stories of individuals using linguistic means to go about their daily communications, in diverse sociolinguistic systems such as: extremely large urban conurbations like Cairo, Tokyo, and Mexico City smaller settings like Paris and Sydney less urbanised places such as the Western Netherlands Randstad area and Kohima in India. Providing new perspectives on crucial themes such as language choice and language contact, code-switching and mixing, language and identity, language policy and planning and social networks, this is key reading for students and researchers in the areas of multilingualism and super-diversity within sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and urban studies.
Urban Space And Late Twentieth-century New York Literature
by Catalina NeculaiInterdisciplinary in nature, this project draws on fiction, non-fiction and archival material to theorize urban space and literary/cultural production in the context of the United States and New York City. Spanning from the mid-1970s fiscal crisis to the 1987 Market Crash, New York writing becomes akin to geographical fieldwork in this rich study.
Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature
by Mara NaamanThis book is an examination of how the space of the downtown served dual purposes as both a symbol of colonial influence and capital in Egypt, as well as a staging ground for the demonstrations of the Egyptian nationalist movement. It is through the lens of literature, in this case a body of texts that form an archive on the downtown, that one is able to understand the layered significance of this space for multiple generations of Egyptians.
Urban Space, Identity and Postmodernity in 1980s Spain: Rethinking the Movida
by MariteUsozdela FuenteDuring the 1980s, the urban youth movement known as la movida transformed the Spanish cultural landscape, particularly in the country's capital, Madrid. After a four-decade long dictatorship, artists and thinkers sought to make the most of their newly found freedoms. The vibrancy, optimism and aesthetic heterogeneity of the period are best captured in contemporary ephemera - in the fanzines and magazines that provided movida participants with an immediate and largely unmediated outlet for their creative experiments. Among them, monthly arts magazine La Luna de Madrid is arguably the most iconic, and its preoccupation with urban space, identity, and postmodernity suggests that la movida was indeed more than 'just a teardrop in the rain', as some of its critics have suggested.
Urban Spaces in Contemporary Latin American Literature (Hispanic Urban Studies)
by Timothy R. Robbins José Eduardo GonzálezThis collection of essays studies the depiction of contemporary urban space in twenty-first century Latin American fiction. The contributors to this volume seek to understand the characteristics that make the representation of the postmodern city in a Latin American context unique. The chapters focus on cities from a wide variety of countries in the region, highlighting the cultural and political effects of neoliberalism and globalization in the contemporary urban scene. Twenty-first century authors share an interest for images of ruins and dystopian landscapes and their view of the damaging effects of the global market in Latin America tends to be pessimistic. As the book demonstrates, however, utopian elements or “spaces of hope” can also be found in these narrations, which suggest the possibility of transforming a capitalist-dominated living space.
Urban Terrorism in Contemporary Europe: Remembering, Imagining and Anticipating Violence
by Katharina Karcher Yordanka Dimcheva Mireya Toribio Medina Mia ParkesThis open access book sheds light on collective practices of remembering, imagining and anticipating in relation to recent acts of urban terrorism in Europe. Analysing a range of personal and collective responses to urban terrorism in contemporary Europe, this book shows that current debates on this issue are shaped by multiple co-existing and intersecting memories of political violence in the past. Moreover, despite public declarations of unity and solidarity, collective memories of urban terror in contemporary Europe are far from consensual - memory can be both a catalyst for and an impediment to social and political change. Drawing on case studies from a range of European countries and creative responses by survivors, artists, and poets, this interdisciplinary volume introduces readers to key methods (e.g. discourse analysis and (auto-)ethnography) and concepts (e.g. Lieux de Mémoire and ‘grassroots memorials’) for the study of the memoralization of terror attacks.
Urban Undergrounds: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Perspectives
by David Pike Rachel Falconer Jobst Welge Patricia García Madeleine Scherer C. Bruna Mancini Liesbeth François Anna Seidel Guillermo González Hernández Sophie U. Kriegel Irène Langlet Riikka P. Pulkkinen Loris RimazResearch in urban development in the social sciences has increasingly emphasized the importance of underground infrastructure for envisaging sustainable cities and for critiquing the economies of extraction. Urban Undergrounds: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Perspectives demonstrates the urgency of integrating a below-ground perspective into the emerging field of the Urban Humanities.The collection is divided into three thematic sections that cluster and revisit different sets of well-known motifs in Underground Studies: “Displaced”, “Buried” and “Wasted”. It showcases the intermedial nature of underground-focused analyses in literature, extending from literary texts to a wider range of cultural forms, including films, graphic novels and videogames. The contributors build on recent scholarship that has expanded the field into new interdisciplinary areas, including intersections with memory studies, ecocriticism and decolonial perspectives. Urban Undergrounds also explores lesser-studied subterranes, including those of Warsaw, Athens, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Santiago de Chile. The book’s substantial introduction offers a guiding theoretical and methodological framework for future scholars working with underground perspectives in literary and cultural studies.This thought-provoking and illuminating collection is a valuable resource for students and scholars in the areas of Literary Urban Studies, Underground Studies and Geocriticism, and more broadly in the Urban Humanities and Spatial Humanities.