Urban Novel

The study of the urban novel is one of the key disciplines in the history of urban studies. To circumscribe their topic, the first urban sociologists and philosophers had to fall back on the literary reconstructions of what Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, called “lived space.” Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin studied urban fiction to get a purchase on the heterogeneous experiences produced by modern cities. In fictional texts, such experiences tend to assume a coherent, containable, somewhat simplified form. Literary representations of lived space also allow for the greatest possible nuance and individualiza-tion in joining empirical observation with abstracting representation. As a result, references to the urban novel have continued to play an important role in urban studies.

In current academic parlance, the urban novel or city novel holds the middle between a thematic category in literary criticism and a genre or sub-genre within fiction. Used most loosely, the term points to a thematic interest that is regarded as dominant in a particular work of fiction. This is the sense in which literary journalists, reviewers, and publishers have frequently used it and sometimes continue to do so. The term has acquired greater semantic density in an academic context, where it designates something close to a separate genre within fiction. As such, the designation is quite flexible: The genre conventions of the urban novel are not nearly as fixed as those of the fairy tale, detective, or western.

Because the object of analysis in the case of urban novels may not be determined with empirical objectivity, it is important to distinguish from the outset between two levels of intentionality that inform usage of the term: the writer's intention and the reader's interest. It will be clear that a work of fiction is most readily labeled an urban novel when it has been composed as such by a writer and is being read in this light by a reader. In the case of the most canonized urban novels from Western literary history, there tends to be widespread agreement between writers and academic readers about the aptness of the label. Such agreement, however, needs to be sufficiently historicized.