Untimely Ruins An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919

Name: Untimely Ruins An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919
Price: 12.44 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780226946641

ISBN-10: 0226946649

ISBN-13: 9780226946641

Edition: 2009

Authors: Nick Yablon

List price: $35.00

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Description:

American urban ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in debates about home foreclosures, images of 9/11, or post-apocalyptic movies. Nick Yablon argues that this association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation's history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolationfrom accounts of failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to popular fiction and cartoons that envisioned disintegrating skyscrapers and bridgesYablon challenges the myth that ruins were absent or at least insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America. Unlike classical and gothic ruins, which decayed over centuries and inspired philosophical…

Book details

List price: $35.00
Copyright year: 2009
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 2/1/2010
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 400
Size: 6.02" wide x 8.98" long x 0.94" tall
Weight: 1.232
Language: English



List of Illustrations


Acknowledgments


Abbreviations


Introduction: Of Light Bulbs and Bathtubs: Excavating the Modern City



Crumbling Columns and Day-Old Ruins: Specters of Antiquity on the American Grand Tour, 1819-1837



"Even Eden, you know, ain't all built": Paper Cities, British Investors, and the Ruins of Cairo, Illinois, 1837-1844



The Petrified City: Antiquity and Modernity in Melville's New York, 1835-1865



Relapsing into Barbarism: Labor, Ethnicity, and Ruin in Prospective Histories of Urban America, 1865-1906



"Plagued By Their Own Inventions": Reframing the Technological Ruins of San Francisco, 1906-1909



The Metropolitan Life in Ruins: Architectural and Fictional Speculations in New York, 1893-1919


Epilogue: Toward the Posthuman Ruin


Notes


Index