Urban Undergrounds

Contemporary Literary and Cultural Perspectives

Patricia García, David Pike

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English

Routledge
20 May 2025

Literary studies: from c 1900 -; Urban communities

Research in urban development in the social sciences has increasingly emphasized the importance of underground infrastructure for envisaging sustainable cities and for critiquing the economies of extraction. Urban Undergrounds: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Perspectives demonstrates the urgency of integrating a below-ground perspective into the emerging field of the Urban Humanities.

The collection is divided into three thematic sections that cluster and revisit different sets of well-known motifs in Underground Studies: “Displaced”, “Buried” and “Wasted”. It showcases the intermedial nature of underground-focused analyses in literature, extending from literary texts to a wider range of cultural forms, including films, graphic novels and videogames. The contributors build on recent scholarship that has expanded the field into new interdisciplinary areas, including intersections with memory studies, ecocriticism and decolonial perspectives. Urban Undergrounds also explores lesser-studied subterranes, including those of Warsaw, Athens, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Santiago de Chile. The book’s substantial introduction offers a guiding theoretical and methodological framework for future scholars working with underground perspectives in literary and cultural studies.

This thought-provoking and illuminating collection is a valuable resource for students and scholars in the areas of Literary Urban Studies, Underground Studies and Geocriticism, and more broadly in the Urban Humanities and Spatial Humanities.

Edited by: Patricia García, David Pike
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 530g
ISBN: 9781032905549
ISBN 10: 1032905549
Pages: 194
Publication Date: 20 May 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

1. Introduction: Underground Studies in the Humanities Today; 2. Literary Hellscapes and Urban Ontologies; 3. Katabasis and Climate Change; 4. Platform Change: The Santiago Metro as an Underground Portal in Chilean Science Fiction; 5. Intersecting Modernity’s Underground Imaginaries in Paris and the RER; 6. Collectivity and Care in the Necropolis: Mexico City Underground in Gabriela Jauregui’s Feral; 7. Urban Undergrounds and ‘Deep’ Psychology in the Maximalist Novels of Ernesto Sabato and Mircea Cărtărescu; 8. A Psychogeographic Exploration of Johannesburg’s Literary Urban Underground; 9. Buried Chaos: Elden Ring’s Undergrounds and the Videoludic Palimpsest(s); 10. Myth no more? The Warsaw Sewers in Literature, Music and Film; 11. Into the Bowels of London: Underground as Margin of the Fantastic in Michael Moorcock’s Mother London and Peter Ackroyd’s London Under; 12. “Welcome to the realm of the homeless”. Athens’ Underworld in Contemporary City Literature; Index

Patricia García is Ramón y Cajal Senior Researcher in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. Her publications include the monographs The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature (2021) and Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature (2015). She is the Chair of the research network Fringe Urban Narratives. David Pike is Professor of Literature and Film at American University, USA. Among his monographs are Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (1997); Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London 1800–1945 (2005); Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001 (2007); Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades (2021); Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (with Malini Ranganathan and Sapana Doshi; 2023) and After the End: Cold War Culture and Apocalyptic Imaginations in the Twenty-First Century (2024).