Utopia, Equity and Ideology in Urban Texts

“This collection maps the terrain of an ‘inter-discipline’ that cuts across and draws together literary studies, philosophy, architecture and visual culture, to name just some of the domains with which its contributors engage. Ranging in time from the nineteenth century into imagined futures, and across our world and others, the volume helps us reimagine and rethink questions of urban existence, coexistence and community, and shows how now more than ever, thinking through forms of urban utopia inevitably involves thinking in planetary terms.”—Edward Welch, Carnegie Professor of French University of Aberdeen, UK Utopia, Equity and Ideology in Urban Texts: Fair and Unfair Cities explores the complex interrelations of three key critical topics across a diverse range of urban writing. Interrogating the links and tensions between aesthetic and political priorities in the representation and imagining of urban life, the volume engages with work from a wide variety of linguistic and cultural origins and across a range of textual practices having the urban phenomenon as a common framing concern. Individual contributions discussing genre and literary fiction, poetic writing, documentary and essayistic texts, planning manifestos and municipal communications materials serve to demonstrate that the nuanced treatments of urban experience and potential which may be gleaned from across this textual spectrum act as a pragmatic corrective to purely conceptual approaches. As such, the volume consolidates the emerging dialogue between the fields of utopian studies and literary urban studies, understanding these as complementary approaches to the reading of the city and its textual prolongations. Michael G. Kelly is Senior Lecturer in French and Director of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies at the University of Limerick. Mariano Paz is Lecturer in Spanish and Associate Director of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies at the University of Limerick.