|
CCSU Professor Robert M. Dowling is author of acclaimed new
book “Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic
Harlem”
NEW BRITAIN –
(September 7, 2007) – Dr. Robert M. Dowling, associate
professor of English at Central Connecticut State
University, is the author of the new book “Slumming in New
York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem.”
Published by the University of Illinois Press, the book is
characterized as a “remarkable exploration of the underbelly
of New York City life from 1880 to 1930. It 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, Professor Dowling shows how literary works
transformed moral threats into cultural treasures. At a
time when Manhattan boasted a far greater population than it
does today, outsider authors helped alleviate New York's
mounting social anxieties by popularizing insider voices
from fringe districts.
Helping readers understand the relationship between New York
writing and the city’s cultural environment from the 1880s
through the Roaring Twenties, Dowling samples both fictional
and non-fictional “slumming” narratives and employs methods
of ethnicity theory, black studies, regional studies,
literary studies, and popular culture.
According to
Katherine Joslin, author of “Jane Addams, a Writer's Life,”
Dowling’s new book “gracefully weaves together reformist
tracts, sociological studies, and realist and naturalist
fiction at the turn of the last century. It is rigorously
interdisciplinary in its literary, historical, and
sociological approach to novels, social tracts, ragtime and
jazz, minstrel shows, vaudeville and Yiddish theater, and
the ‘slumming’ that took place across the boundaries of race
and class in New York City.”
James R. Giles,
author of “The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America,”
hailed the book as a “fascinating study of an important
genre of American literature. Dowling is especially
sophisticated in his reversal of the usual concepts of
‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ narratives. His treatment of the
concept of space(s) is innovative and insightful and will be
useful to those interested in urban studies and the
literature of New York City."
Robert M.
Dowling has authored numerous articles in scholarly journals
and critical anthologies on late 19th and early 20th-century
American literature and cultural history. His next book
project is on the playwright Eugene O’Neill.
# # #
|
