Los Angeles
A Literary History
Will be published approx. on 2. July 2026
Book
Hardback
432 pages
978-1-009-74571-0 (ISBN)
Description
No city occupies as many paradoxical positions in the popular imagination as Los Angeles. It is the new frontier and the end of the trail; it is American Eden and Babylon by the Pacific; it is by turns celebrated and condemned for its diversity; it is the city of perpetual renewal and the city of imminent apocalypse. This collection reveals LA in all its contradictions by documenting a literary tradition as kaleidoscopic and cacophonous as the city itself. The writings explored by Los Angeles: A Literary History record how a dusty cow town morphed into a global metropolis within a matter of decades, and how this unprecedented transformation came to define the experience of modernity. Los Angeles's literature has long gone underappreciated, the city's culture dismissed as flat and frivolous: this volume upturns that narrative, reshaping American literary history by resituating LA as its beating heart.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Weight
500 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-009-74571-0 (9781009745710)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Michael Docherty is an Assistant Professor of English at Appalachian State University. His first book is The Recursive Frontier: Race, Space and the Literary Imagination of Los Angeles (SUNY Press 2024). His other writing on LA literature, culture, and history has appeared in Crime Fiction Studies, Comparative American Studies, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at California State University, Long Beach, and formerly co-edited Post45: Contemporaries. Ignacio Lopez-Calvo is Presidential Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Literature at the University of California, Merced. He is the author of nine books, including Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety and Latinx Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial Rebellion (Co-edited with Victor Valle). His latest books are The Mexican Transpacific: Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, Performance (2022) and Saudades of Japan and Brazil: Contested Modernities in Lusophone Nikkei.
Content
Part I. Temporalities: 1. Birth of a city: The 'White Spot' at the western limit (1848-1929) Meagan Meylor; 2. Maturity and mythmaking: Golden age or lost years? (1930-1957) Thomas Gustafson; 3. Comedies physical and metaphysical: LA fiction across the long Sixties (1958-1978) Scott Saul; 4. Metamodern megalopolis: Neoliberalism, multiculturalism, and futurity (1979-2002) Casey Shoop; 5. 'In a desert of perception': Mental fog in Los Angeles fiction (2003-Present) Heather Hicks; Part II. Identity, Resistance, Representation: 6. Literature of south Los Angeles: Space, history, and belonging in black LA Stephanie Leigh Batiste; 7. From Boyle Heights to Westwood: Los Angeles Jewish writing Nicholas Birns; 8. Sensory landscapes of Los Angeles: Remembering and remaking home in Asian American writing Weisong Gao; 9. 'From the wrong side of the tracks': The spaces of LA Latinx writing Ignacio Lopez-Calvo and Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue; 10. Beyond English: Spanish and Japanese literatures of Los Angeles John Alba Cutler and Andrew Way Leong; 11. Participating in the paranoia of the time: Mapping the details of women's writing in/on Los Angeles Summer Kim Lee; 12. Liberating the land of Cooper do-nuts: Writing queer Los Angeles Eir-Anne Edgar; Part III. Identity, Resistance, Representation: 13. Theories of Los Angeles Edward Dimendberg; 14. Suburbs in search of a city? Separation and reconstruction in LA Julian Murphet; 15. Rebirth and renewal in the west: Migration and diasporic literature Suzanne Manizza Roszak; 16. Los Angeles literature as global literature Aparajita Nanda; 17. Wildfires, landslides, and earthquakes at the end of the world: Ecology, environment, and natural disaster in the Los Angeles imagination Nicole Seymour and Zia Salim; Part IV. Genre and Form: 18. The hard-boiled city Will Norman; 19. Tomorrowlands and new frontiers: Los Angeles in science fiction David Sandner; 20. A city (recorded) in verse: Los Angeles's renegade poetics William Mohr; 21. Stage and street in the situated theater of Los Angeles Guy Zimmerman; 22. LA confidentials: Truth and self-making in Los Angeles life writing Blake Allmendinger; 23. Looking for Los Angeles: Reportage and essayism Michelle Chihara; 24. Cultural desert to cultural capital: The critical history of Los Angeles literature Michael Docherty.