Bloomsbury Academic Memory and the Built Environment in 20th-Century American Literature: A Reading and Analysis of Spatial Forms

From the creation of the G.I. Bill in 1944 to President Nixons 1973 announcement that direct federal support for building public housing was over, the postwar era in the United States saw a wave of changes that had an enduring impact on the development of cities. Focusing on the relationship between processes of demolition and restoration as they have shaped the modern built environment, and the processes by which memory is constructed, hidden, or remade in the literary text, this book explores the ways in which history becomes entangled with the urban space in which it plays out. Alice Levick takes stock of this history, both in the form of its externalised, concretised manifestation and its more symbolic representation, as depicted in the work of of post-war writers. Calling upon privileged access to archival material and interviews with New York academics, city historians and urban planners, this book locates Freuds Uncanny in the cracks between the absent and present, invisible and the visible, memory and history as they are presented in city narratives, demonstrating both the passage of time and the imposition of 20th-century modernism. With reference to the works of D.J. Waldie, Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler, Marshall Berman, L. J. Davis and Paula Fox, Memory and Built Environment in 20th-Century American Literature unpacks how time becomes visible in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Lakewood and New York in the decades just before and after the Second World War, questioning how they provide access, in narrative and spatial forms, to the past, and how, at times, that access is blocked. Review "Drawing on a creative and impressively constructed archive of interviews, novels, stories, and essays, Levick offers an illuminating meditation on the persistence of collective memory and history embedded within urban landscapes, art, and community. The book powerfully argues for how these accreted forms become a resource of resistance against urban modernity's creative destruction" --Myka Tucker-Abramson, Assistant Professor in American Literature, University of Warwick, UK About the Author Alice Levick works in the Department of Education office following the completion of her Doctoral thesis at the University of Exeter, UK. She was an Editor at Risk Books and has presented academic papers at the Humanities Postgraduate Research Conference at the University of Exeter and the British Association for American Studies Conference. Her papers have been published in journals, essay collections, and online, including The Big Sleep, Uncanny Spaces, and Memory, in HARTS & Minds (2015); Looking for Moses in NYC, in US Studies Online (2016). She contributed the chapter Marshall Berman and DJ Waldie: Memory and Grief in Urban and Suburban Spaces in The City and Time Collection, edited by Dr Anne-Marie Evans and Dr Kaley Kramer (2020). She was Assistant Editor for English at Exeter s postgraduate research journal, Exclamat! from 2018 - 2019.