New York in Literature and Film

The essays offer a captivating account of NY's portrayal in literature and film. They provide an insight into the cultural conflicts that do not need a solution, but living them out in everyday life, tensions between assimilation and diversity, public and private, crowd and individual, reality and imagined, freedom and change vs. despair and filth, past and present, etc. The result is a dynamic, always becoming NY. There is always something exciting happening in NY. NY has always been a verbal city and meant many things to many people. Book writers and film directors have created and recreated the city, each time more complex, and more distinctive. From myths and legends that fashioned the identity of NY to the diversity of literary and cinematic performances in and about NY - explored in connection with the interplay of urban environments and human behavior, the presence or absence of strain for documentary fidelity, the patterning out of which the city is constituted or experiencing the city life and making sense of it and many other themes, that, despite their diversity, all converge towards the idea that NY is seen as a structural and functional totality. (Lucia Stueven, USA)