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"Literary Urban Studies and How to Practice It is the first textbook in literary urban studies (LUS). It illuminates and investigates this exciting field, which has grown since the humanities' 'spatial turn' of the 1990s and 2000s. The book introduces city literature, urban methods of reading, classics in LUS, and new directions in the field. It outlines the located qualities of literary narratives, texts and events through three units. First, the concept of the city and the main methods and terms needed as tools for investigating city literatures are introduced. A second section, ordered historically, shows how notions like pre-modern, realist, modernist, postcolonial and planetary actually work in nuanced explorations of actual writers, texts and places. Thirdly, the volume covers literary urban modes: fictional and non-fictional prose in multiple genres; poetry and the idea of the city; dramatic city representation and the theatre as urban place. Key categories of place explored are multiple: the sacred spaces of religion; entry points such as railway stations and junctions; residential areas such as the 'slum', suburb and mass housing district; hubs of publishing and performance; categories of city such as the port and resort. Each chapter aids reference and learning via structured highlighting, reflection questions and tasks labelled 'Research It'. Some 'Research It' tasks enable readers to enter new areas of LUS including by engaging with neighbouring disciplines like human geography, cultural history, sociology, and urban studies. Others equip readers by sharpening particular skills of writing or documentation. A thorough glossary of key terms and concepts aids the reader. Literary Urban Studies and How to Practice It is designed for application to literatures and cities in any period and part of the world. Armed with it, humanities researchers at any career stage can develop their interdisciplinary skills and ability to participate in activism and public debates while becoming specialised in LUS. The book is a gateway to practicing LUS and spatial literary research"--

Abstract
The status as a dynamic urban frontier or periphery of areas ripe for gentrification or in the process of gentrification is illuminated by discursive representations of North Kensington, West London. As part of a specifically 1950s and 1960s localized urban imaginary this district was viewed as part of 'Grotland', a zone of transition containing much architectural and social decay but also new social housing and wealthier incomers in the same period. Recollections of one street, Portland Road, W11, mediated by a 2012 television documentary, emphasize frontiers within the street dividing it between a wealthier south and a poorer north. Historical accounts of the area make Portland Road itself into a frontier dividing a prosperous and respectable zone to the east from an extremely poor and unrespectable one to the west. Fiction written in the 1950s and 1960s highlights moments at which life in areas such as this, far from seeming to be in inexorable change towards gentrification, seemed to hold chaos and dereliction together with capitaldriven reformulations. Taking these materials into account, work on gentrification needs to be nuanced by an understanding of individual acts of gentrification in dialogue with structural and environmental change. More than has so far been recognized, urban imaginaries often focus on transitional and highly localized portions of imagined cities.

1. The Possible in Literature and Urban Life: Clearing the Field, Markku Salmela, Lieven Ameel, and Jason Finch -- 2. The Possibilities of Urban Informality: Two Views from Istanbul, Eric Prieto -- 3. Rising Towers, Rising Tides: Competing Visions of the Helsinki Waterfront in Planning and Fiction, Lieven Ameel -- 4. From Utopia to Retrotopia: The Cosmopolitan City in the Aftermath of Modernity, Chen Bar-Itzhak -- 5. Donald Barthelme's Impossible Cities, Markku Salmela -- 6. 'Cartographic Ecstasy': Mapping, Provinciality and Possible Spaces in Dmitrii Danilov's City Prose, Anni Lappela -- 7. Possibilities of Translocal Mapping in Tendai Huchu's The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician, Lena Mattheis -- 8. Tipping Points: Gentrification and Urban Possibility, Hanna Henryson -- 9. Concrete Possibilities: The High-Rise Suburb in Swedish Children's and Young Adult Literature, Lydia Wistisen -- 10. 'Double Vision': Viennese Refugees in New York and Back Home Again, Joshua Parker -- 11. Utopian Thinking and the (Im)Possible UK Council Estate: The Birmingham Region in Literature, Image and Experience, Jason Finch -- 12. Afterword: Urban Possibilities in Times of Crisis, David Pinder.

Cities have always been defined by their centrality. But literature demonstrates that their diverse peripheries define them, too: from suburbs to slums, rubbish dumps to nightclubs and entire failed cities. The contributors to this collection explore literary urban peripheries through readings of literature from four continents and numerous cities.