Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture

Description

From New Orleans to New York, from London to Paris to Venice, many of the world's great cities were built on wetlands and swamps. Cities and Wetlands is the first book to explore the literary and cultural histories of these cities and their relationships to their environments and buried histories. Developing a ground-breaking new mode of psychoanalytic ecology and surveying a wide range of major cities in North America and Europe, ecocritic and activist Rod Giblett shows how the wetland origins of these cities haunt their later literature and culture and might prompt us to reconsider the relationship between human culture and the environment. Cities covered include: Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Hamburg, London, New Orleans, New York, Paris, St. Petersburg, Toronto, Venice and Washington. Cover Half Title Environmental Cultures Series Title Copyright Contents Part 1 Beginnings 1 Introduction: Looking Back, Looking Forward 2 Aquaterrapolises: Swamp Cities and Marsh Metropolises Part 2 European Cities and Wetlands 3 Paris: Or, Lutetia, “The Filthy Marsh” Lutetia Haussmann: Boulevard blaster, modernity bludgeoner Paris, or Lutetia, as woman, as goddess, as Great Mother, and as dialectical image Tours of the sewers 4 London: The “Nether World” of “the City of Dreadful Night” Nether world City conditions London on London Slums Crystal Palace 5 Venice: “A Tropical Marshland, Steaming, Monstrous, Rank” 6 Berlin: “A Dingy City in a Marsh” 7 Hamburg: “This Marshy, Watery City” 8 St. Petersburg: “Marooned on the Neva’s Marsh Delta” The Bronze Horseman Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg Bely’s Petersburg Part 3 North American Cities and Wetlands 9 New York: A City Set in “a Mosquito-​Infested Swamp” 10 Boston: “Tidal Flats and Marshes Once Surrounded the City” 11 New Orleans: “The Swamp is No Place for a City” 12 Toronto: “Set in Malarial Lakeside Swamps” 13 Washington: “A Discouraging Site Bordered by a Swamp” 14 Chicago: “Built in the Midst of a Great Level Swamp” Sinclair’s Chicago Brecht’s Chicago Olmsted’s Chicago Part 4 More Beginnings 15 Conclusion: The City as Body, the Earth as Body, and the Body as Earth Acknowledgments Notes References Index