Overview
In the middle of the nineteenth century, urban families began to inhabit apartment houses, boarding houses, tenements, and hotels. These multi-unit residences began to define American city landscapes, a shift that had enormous interpersonal and cultural repercussions. These new forms of housing altered the ways in which Americans inhabited and understood urban space. Helping to create among city dwellers a distinctively modern subjectivity were a host of writers (among them, Hawthorne, James, and Nella Larsen) who experimented in prose with the possibilities and dangers of urban space. Reformers, planners, and engineers simultaneously helped to shape urban sensibilities by experimenting with architectural form in the city's physical landscape, often hoping to shape a particular type of citizen with their designs.Imaginatively juxtaposing literary criticism with a history of the built environment, Klimasmith examines urban domestic fiction alongside architectural, sociological, and photographic texts of the period, pairing important American novels with developments in urban domestic architecture. Arguing that nineteenth and early-twentieth-century residential spaces were always more fluid and dynamic than traditional scholarship holds, her study allows us to witness the unfolding of modernity and to view the modernist subject at its very inception.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Beautifully written and illustrated...this book is a fascinating read from a promising young scholar. Anyone interested in urban studies, American historical fiction, and architecture will be delighted." --ChoiceKlimasmith "brings new insights into the lived experiences of urban dwellers, challenging both contemporary accounts as well as more recent scholarship."--H-Urban
"Klimasmith successfully guides readers through a literary and artistic terrain that enables us all to become more At Home in the City"--Studies in American Naturalism
"Betsy Klimasmith's At Home in the City is a genuine pleasure to read. The narrative seamlessly moves from close readings of urban novels to discussions about architectural designs of tenements and boarding houses as well as of New York's Central Park. It analyzes the interiority of urban domestic fiction then literally and figuratively goes outside, to extra-literary sources. It is as if the very structure of the book confirms its central observation: the boundedness of the rural home gave way to an urban domesticity, where home is understood in terms of permeability, interconnectedness, and the fluidity of private and public spaces."--Journal of American History