Expanding Suburbia: Reviewing Suburban Narratives

Front Cover
Roger Webster
Berghahn Books, 2000 - 200 pages

During the last few decades suburbia has grown enormously and become a phenomenon attracting the attention of scholars as well as practitioners by whom it is seen as an increasingly significant and complex area of modern life. The essays in this volume consider a range of representations of suburban life from the late nineteenth century to the present day, including fiction, film, and popular music, drawn from America and Australia as well as Britain. They explore and challenge traditional views of suburbia so that, rather than a location of conformity and stereotypicality, it can be viewed as a site of social conflict, division, and ambiguity as well as a source of significant creativity across a range of cultural texts. The volume takes a thematic approach, considering the rise of suburbia, imagined and real suburbias, alternative suburbias: all of the essays have a strong historical dimension and the overall approach is characterized by interdisciplinarity.

 

Contents

The New Suburbanites and Contested Class Identities
31
Suburban Fictions at the fin
51
Suburbanites in Postwar British Fiction
71
Suburban Values and EthniCities in IndoAnglian
91
Crime
109
Signifying
125
Renegotiating the Suburban Self in
141
the Idea of the Suburb in
161
Notes on Contributors
187
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2000)

Roger Webster is Professor of Literary Studies and Director of the School of Media, Critical & Creative Arts, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool.

Bibliographic information