New York: Cradle of America’s Cultural Plurality offers a variety of perspectives on New York City literature, art, and music by a team of European American Studies scholars. Beginning with the myths of New York, it continues to explore New York’s topos from the point of displaced southerners, ethnic minorities (Jewish, Afro-American, Czech), gender (feminist, gay), avant-garde artists, and its indigenous music (jazz, vaudeville, the musical). New York’s hodgepodge of material and cultural wealth, the accumulation of peoples from all over the globe, has created fascinating patterns of democratic cooperation, exchange, and tolerance—well as friction and conflict. Its dramatic metropolitan structure and cosmopolitan diversity provoke a wide range of responses in newcomers (exiles and immigrants) and native New Yorkers alike, first challenging one’s provincialism and then marking one for life. New York City continues to enthrall, enchant and appall. It has always been a testing ground for architectural, cultural, financial, political and social experiments which have affected not only the city, but the nation and the whole wide world.
Contents
Preface
“New York, New York”: A Magic Incantation
Josef Jařab
Introduction
Matthew Sweney
Gotham: The Founding Myths of New York
Michal Peprník
A Place of Growing Up, or Getting Lost: New York and Southern Writers
Marcel Arbeit
The Lower East Side: Literary Topos of Jewish American Immigrant Fiction
Stanislav Kolář
Greenwich Village–Harlem: A Round Trip
Josef Jařab
Haunted Harlem: The Urban Uncanny in Toni Morrison’s Jazz
Petra Eckhard
Eastern European or Extra Terrestrial: Post-Socialist Topics in New York
Sladja Blazan
Escape from New York in Post-Stonewall Gay Fiction
Roman Trušník
“This is the Song of the Vertical Field”: New York City as an Abstraction of the Body
Julia Meier
New York Vaudeville: Celebrating the City in the Musicals of Comden and Green
Robert Lewis
September 11 and the Other: Novelists Respond
Kristiaan Versluys
New York in Czech Literature
Jaroslav Peprník
Palacký University Olomouc
1st ed., 2007, paperback
ISBN 978-80-244-1843-8.