Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France applies a sociolinguistic approach to the representation of slang in French literature and dictionaries to reveal the ways in which upper-class writers, lexicographers, literary critics, and bourgeois readers participated in a sociolinguistic concept the author refers to as “literary slumming”, or the appropriation of lower-class and criminal language and culture. Through an analysis of spoken and embodied manifestations of the anti-language of slang in the works of Eugène François Vidocq, Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, the Goncourt Brothers, and Émile Zola, Literary Slumming argues that the nineteenth-century French literary discourse on slang led to the emergence of this sociolinguistic phenomenon that prioritized lower-class and criminal life and culture in a way that ultimately expanded class boundaries and increased visibility and agency for minorities within the public sphere.

Everybody has two eyes and a nose and a mouth. What makes some people beautiful and some people not? Nikki never imagined that this offhand thought would change the course of her senior year forever. But when she poses the question to her best friends, Alicia and Sam, Alicia is suddenly inspired, and the three unexpectedly find themselves launching a "human experiment." It seems like the perfect way to make a difference in their last few weeks of high school: they will each pick a student who needs a little improving and take that person to the prom. Harmless, right? When Nikki, Alicia, and Sam quickly become entrenched in their projects, each has to face difficult realizations about the people they have chosen -- and themselves. Before long their own close friendship feels fragile. Will they make it to graduation without hurting one another -- or anybody else? Acclaimed author Kristen D. Randle has woven an intriguing, insightful, and suspenseful story about three friends who set out to transform others, with unforeseen consequences.

At the start of the twentieth century, tales of “how the other half lives” experienced a surge in popularity. People looking to go slumming without leaving home turned to these narratives for spectacular revelations of the underworld and sordid details about the deviants who populated it. In this major rethinking of American literature and culture, Scott Herring explores how a key group of authors manipulated this genre to paradoxically evade the confines of sexual identification. Queering the Underworld examines a range of writers, from Jane Addams and Willa Cather to Carl Van Vechten and Djuna Barnes, revealing how they fulfilled the conventions of slumming literature but undermined its goals, and in the process, queered the genre itself. Their work frustrated the reader’s desire for sexual knowledge, restored the inscrutability of sexual identity, and cast doubt on the value of a homosexual subculture made visible and therefore subject to official control. Herring is persuasive and polemical in connecting these writers to ongoing debates about lesbian and gay history and politics, and Queering the Underworld will be widely read by students and scholars of literature, history, and sexuality.

This remarkable exploration of the underbelly of New York City life from 1880 to 1930 takes readers through the city's inexhaustible variety of distinctive neighborhood cultures. Slumming in New York shows how the city's rich and poor, foreign-born and native-born, competed for a voice from such diverse vantage points as the East Side waterfront, the Bowery, the Tenderloin's "black bohemia," the Jewish Lower East Side, and mythic Harlem. Investigating a wide range of New York "slumming" narratives in which mainstream outsiders write about marginalized urban insiders, Robert M. Dowling shows how literary works transformed moral threats into cultural treasures.

In the 1880s, fashionable Londoners left their elegant homes and clubs in Mayfair and Belgravia and crowded into omnibuses bound for midnight tours of the slums of East London. A new word burst into popular usage to describe these descents into the precincts of poverty to see how the poor lived: slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their world: who they were, why they went, what they claimed to have found, how it changed them, and how slumming, in turn, powerfully shaped both Victorian and twentieth-century understandings of poverty and social welfare, gender relations, and sexuality. The slums of late-Victorian London became synonymous with all that was wrong with industrial capitalist society. But for philanthropic men and women eager to free themselves from the starched conventions of bourgeois respectability and domesticity, slums were also places of personal liberation and experimentation. Slumming allowed them to act on their irresistible "attraction of repulsion" for the poor and permitted them, with society's approval, to get dirty and express their own "dirty" desires for intimacy with slum dwellers and, sometimes, with one another. Slumming elucidates the histories of a wide range of preoccupations about poverty and urban life, altruism and sexuality that remain central in Anglo-American culture, including the ethics of undercover investigative reporting, the connections between cross-class sympathy and same-sex desire, and the intermingling of the wish to rescue the poor with the impulse to eroticize and sexually exploit them. By revealing the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories overflowed their boundaries and transformed one another, Koven recaptures the ethical dilemmas that men and women confronted--and continue to confront--in trying to "love thy neighbor as thyself."

Have slums become 'cool'? More and more tourists from across the globe seem to think so as they discover favelas, ghettos, townships and barrios on leisurely visits. But while slum tourism often evokes moral outrage, critics rarely ask about what motivates this tourism, or what wider consequences and effects it initiates. In this provocative book, Fabian Frenzel investigates the lure that slums exert on their better-off visitors, looking at the many ways in which this curious form of attraction ignites changes both in the slums themselves and on the world stage. Covering slums in Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok and multiple cities in South Africa, Kenya and India, Slumming It examines the roots and consequences of a growing phenomenon whose effects have ranged from gentrification and urban policy reform to the organization of international development and poverty alleviation. Controversially, Frenzel argues that the rise of slum tourism has drawn attention to important global justice issues, and is far more complex than we initially acknowledged.

Literary texts are artifacts of their time and ideologies. This book collection explores the working class in American literature from the colonial to the contemporary period through a critical lens which addresses the real problems of approaching class through economics. Significantly, this book moves the analysis of working-class literature away from the Marxist focus on the relationship between class and the means of production and applies an innovative concept of class based on the sociological studies of humans and society first championed by Max Weber. Of primary concern is the construction of class separation through the concept of in-grouping/out grouping. This book builds upon the theories established in John F. Lavelle's Blue Collar, Theoretically: A Post-Marxist Approach to Working Class Literature (McFarland, 2011) and puts them into practice by examining a diverse set of texts that reveal the complexity of class relations in American society.

This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.

Essays exploring contemporary black fiction and examining important issues in current African American literary studies. In this volume, Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody-Turner have compiled a collection of essays that offer access to some of the most innovative contemporary black fiction while addressing important issues in current African American literary studies. Distinguished scholars Houston Baker, Trudier Harris, Darryl Dickson-Carr, and Maryemma Graham join writers and younger scholars to explore the work of Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, Trey Ellis, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, Kyle Baker, Danzy Senna, Nikki Turner, and many others. The collection is bracketed by a foreword by novelist and graphic artist Mat Johnson, one of the most exciting and innovative contemporary African American writers, and an afterword by Alice Randall, author of the controversial parody The Wind Done Gone. Together, King and Moody-Turner make the case that diversity, innovation, and canon expansion are essential to maintaining the vitality of African American literary studies. “A compelling collection of essays on the ongoing relevance of African American literature to our collective understanding of American history, society, and culture. Featuring a wide array of writers from all corners of the literary academy, the book will have national appeal and offer strategies for teaching African American literature in colleges and universities across the country.” —Gene Jarrett, Boston University “[This book describes] a fruitful tension that brings scholars of major reputation together with newly emerging critics to explore the full range of literary activities that have flourished in the post-Civil Rights era. Notable are such popular influences as hip-hop music and Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.” —American Literary Scholarship, 2013

The debut novella from one of contemporary fiction's most exciting young voices, now in a new edition. Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of name or situation or orientation--he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection. They said I've done something wrong? . . . And they've just left me down here to starve. They'll see this inanition and be so damned they'll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them . . . : the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I'll pat their heads and nod. I'll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.