Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction
by David M. Fine
25 Members (4.20)
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Description
The literary image of Los Angeles has evolved since the 1880s from promotional literature that hyped the region as a New Eden to contemporary visions of the city as a perplexing, sometimes corrupt, even apocalyptic place that reflects all that is wrong with America. In Imagining Los Angeles, the first literary history of the city in more than fifty years, critic David Fine traces the history and mood of the place through the work of writers as diverse as Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Austin, show more Norman Mailer, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Carolyn See, and many others. His lively and engaging text focuses on the way these writers saw Los Angeles and used the image of the city as an element in their work, and on how that image has changed as the city itself became ever larger, more complex, and more socially and ethnically diverse. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the literature and changing image of Southern California. show lessTags
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Author Information
2 Works 27 Members
David Fine is professor of English at California State University, Long Beach.
Common Knowledge
- First words
- Writing about San Francisco as a literary city more than a century ago (1897), Frank Norris had this to say.... (1, Starting Points, The Place and the Writers)
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)The city built by its founders on the promise of a utopian future took its essential literary identity in the decades since the 1930s -- in hard-boiled crime and tough-guy detective stories, Hollywood novels, and apocalyptic fictions -- as the place resting dangerously on the edge of the continent, the place that forces one to look back to sources and origins. (9, Endings and Beginnings, Surviving Apocalypse)
- Publisher's editor
- Elizabeth C. Hades
- Blurbers
- Houston, James D.; Starr, Dr. Kevin; Davis, Mike
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 813.0093279494
- Canonical LCC
- PS374.L57
Classifications
- Genres
- Literature Studies and Criticism, Nonfiction, Fiction and Literature, Science Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 813.0093279494 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English By type
- LCC
- PS374 .L57 — Language and Literature American literature American literature Prose Prose fiction
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 25
- Popularity
- 1,068,598
- Rating
- (4.20)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 3
