Book Review

The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. By Richard Lehan. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xvi, 330 pp. Cloth, $45.00, isbn 0-520-21042-5. Paper, $17.95, isbn 0-520-21256-8.)

These otherwise quite different books are both concerned with the dynamic relationship between urban history in general and expressive forms in particular. The cultural geographer Mona Domosh sets out to explain "how people create the worlds they live in and, in so doing, produce visible representations of their individual and group beliefs, values, tensions, and fears." The literary critic Richard Lehan, contending that literature has given "imaginative reality to the city" while "urban changes in turn helped transform the literary text," examines "[t]his shared textuality—this symbiosis between literary and urban text." Domosh and Lehan offer intelligent and clearly written works that provide much interesting information, though they are less persuasively innovative than they promise to be.

1

In her exploration of how the elites of socially fluid New York and relatively staid Boston expressed themselves through certain characteristic built forms in their respective cities, Monosh employs two conceptual frameworks. The first is "the interplay between socioeconomic structures and individual actions and intentions," the second "the processes that produce built form," which includes architecture, planning, politics, and "the general aesthetic and cultural environment." The built forms she finds most expressive of New York's evolving elite are those that emphasized wealth and display, notably the city's commercial landscape of retail and financial buildings that progressed up Manhattan through the nineteenth century. In regard to Boston, she deems the governing attitudes toward the Common, as well as the creation of the late-nineteenth-century park system known as the Emerald Necklace, and the disciplined architecture of the newly filled-in Back Bay, as the features most saliently reflecting the values of Boston's more reserved upper classes.

. . .