scholarly journals Town and Country in John Galt: A Literary Perspective

2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-22
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Waterston
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Random Form ◽  
John Galt ◽  
Contemporary Writers ◽  
Canada Company ◽  
Town Building

John Galt, town-planner and novelist, differed from contemporary writers such as William Wordsworth in his response to nature and to urban life. As agent for the Canada Company, he had the chance in 1827 to put some of his theories about town building into practice. Four years later, his novel Bogel Corbet presented a fictional version of that experiment in urbanism. All Galt's writings about the founding of a town emphasize community rituals and unity. His hope was that his settlement would move through an ascending order from village to town to garrison to city. The actual town of Guelph was of course unable to satisfy his ideal; in Bogle Corbet he adopts an ironic tone at the expense of the little town. But Bogle Corbet has another importance: in its random form as well as in its tone it emphasizes discontinuity. It foreshadows later treatments of small town life as well as has antecedents in English and Scottish literature. Since Galt's time, the ironic sequence sketch has proved a very appropriate literary genre for reflecting the disharmony of small Canadian towns.

Spanish Parishes in Colonial New Granada: Their Role in Town-Building on The Spanish-American Frontier

1976 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 336-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary W. Graff
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Colonial Latin America ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
City Life ◽  
New Granada ◽  
Town Building

The urban orientation of Spanish immigrants into the New World has been a well-argued thesis among historians of colonial Latin America. Reinforcing the settlers’ proclivities toward urban life was a concerted policy of the Spanish crown which encouraged the founding of towns and cities as part of the conquest and subsequent settlement. For the conquerors of the fifteenth century and for the settlers who followed them throughout the era of Spanish imperial domination, the cosmopolitan qualities of the Renaissance instilled the attitude that urbanidad (city life) meant organized living under established political, social and religious institutions. Towns and cities were centers of order and direction for civilized life in contrast to the presumed disorder and lack of style offered by rural life.

scholarly journals Changes in identity in Alice Munro’s stories: a sociopsychological analysis

Literatūra ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 57-77
Author(s):  
Milda Danytė
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Early 19Th Century

Alice Munro’s winning of the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature was a surprise only in the sense that no one who writes only short stories has ever won it before. Otherwise, among writers and literary specialists she has long been considered a leading candidate, as she is one of the masters of this complex literary genre, known especially for her probing into the small-town communities of the southern part of the province of Ontario. This is an Anglo-Celtic (English, Scottish, and Irish) society which formed through waves of immigration from the early 19th century as a farmland interspersed with small towns. These apparently dull communities are, as Munro reveals, rich in subtle class distinctions and spoken and unspoken social norms of behavior. Munro has explained how she only gradually understood the richness of the material that her home country had given her, “full of events and emotions and amazing things going on all the time”.

‘To Destroy a City so Great and Remarkable’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Oldfield
Keyword(s):  
Urban Life ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Crucial Point ◽  
Urban Living ◽  
Holistic Understanding

Medieval works of urban panegyric, some of which adhered to the so-called laus civitatis paradigm, ostensibly represented initiatives formed to praise and promote the profile of a given city. This literary genre flourished particularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and can be connected to fundamental transformations that were occurring in medieval urban life. Indeed, while in many cases these works served unexpressed agendas, they were not simple pieces of fiction and rhetoric. Their power lay in their reapplication of Classical and Christian traditions, in their reflection of some of the deep realities of urban living, and in their association with the heated conceptual debates surrounding the very idea of the medieval city. In this context, the inclusion of material which could lament or dishonour the name of a city, or which could imply a threat to its integrity may seem both incongruent and significant. Focusing primarily on Bonvesin della Riva’s celebrated De Magnalibus Mediolani (1288), this chapter thus explores the dissonant presence of lamentation and critique presented in works of urban panegyric in order to produce a more nuanced and holistic understanding of this literary genre as well as a new appreciation of the evidence it can offer for understanding medieval urban mentalities at a crucial point in the process of European urbanization.

scholarly journals Between Village and Town: Small-Town Urbanism in Sub-Saharan Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 1417
Author(s):  
Jytte Agergaard ◽  
Susanne Kirkegaard ◽  
Torben Birch-Thomsen
Keyword(s):  
Small Town ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Transport Infrastructure ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Starting Point

In the next twenty years, urban populations in Africa are expected to double, while urban land cover could triple. An often-overlooked dimension of this urban transformation is the growth of small towns and medium-sized cities. In this paper, we explore the ways in which small towns are straddling rural and urban life, and consider how insights into this in-betweenness can contribute to our understanding of Africa’s urban transformation. In particular, we examine the ways in which urbanism is produced and expressed in places where urban living is emerging but the administrative label for such locations is still ‘village’. For this purpose, we draw on case-study material from two small towns in Tanzania, comprising both qualitative and quantitative data, including analyses of photographs and maps collected in 2010–2018. First, we explore the dwindling role of agriculture and the importance of farming, businesses and services for the diversification of livelihoods. However, income diversification varies substantially among population groups, depending on economic and migrant status, gender, and age. Second, we show the ways in which institutions, buildings, and transport infrastructure display the material dimensions of urbanism, and how urbanism is planned and aspired to. Third, we describe how well-established middle-aged households, independent women (some of whom are mothers), and young people, mostly living in single-person households, explain their visions and values of the ways in which urbanism is expressed in small towns. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of this urban life-in-becoming of small towns for urban planning, emphasizing the importance of the development of inclusive local governance. Ultimately, we argue that our study establishes an important starting point for further explorations of the role of the simultaneous production and expression of urbanism in small town urbanization.

Introduction

2003 ◽  
pp. 3-6
Author(s):  
Michael C. Steinlauf
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Vernacular Language ◽  
Polish Jews ◽  
Mass Circulation

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Jewish popular culture. The Jewish engagement with modernity in the Polish lands brought masses of Jews out of their small-town communities and into the tumult of urban life. A Jewish mass culture resulted that shaped Jewish life in Poland until its end. This culture was constructed above all around the possibilities of Yiddish, the vernacular language of Polish Jews. But the culture far transcended literature and included a diverse array of phenomena including mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, music, theatre, and material artefacts of various kinds. For several generations of Polish Jews, this culture defined the texture of everyday life. Yet the popular culture these Polish Jews created to serve their daily needs is largely unknown. This is a consequence of a well-known bias at the origin of modern Jewish scholarship.

The Persistence of Place

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Small Town ◽  
Contemporary Writers ◽  
First Time

Building on correspondence, essays, and public statements, the second chapter examines the ongoing significance of place to contemporary cycles. Although Winesburg, Ohio did not originate the genre, it has had the most enduring and wide influence on cycles in recent decades, a period which has seen the resurgence of the cycle because community itself is being reimagined in response to the volatility of the economy. This chapter focus on texts whose authors explicitly cite Anderson’s influence: Russell Banks’s Trailerpark (1981), Cathy Day’s The Circus in Winter (2004), and Rebecca Barry’s Later, at the Bar (2007). Anderson hails Winesburg as enabling “a new looseness” in fiction; that sense of novelty and innovation recurs in authors’ statements about reading Winesburg for the first time, citing its transformative and revelatory power. These contemporary writers narrow even within the small town settings to focus on a particular, marginalized population, thereby amplifying the pervasiveness of alienation in contemporary America.

The Fear of Crime in a Small Town

1972 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony G. Poveda
Keyword(s):  
Drug Use ◽  
American History ◽  
Fear Of Crime ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Industrial Town ◽  
Considerable Confusion

There has been in American history a myth that attributes virtue to small town life and evil and corruption to urban life. This myth has been on the decline in "Delta City,"* a small industrial town in California. The traditional myth allowed Delta City adults to perceive the source of deviance in their community in either external urban influences or in certain limited local groups ("hoods'). Their sudden realization that there was widespread drug use among youth constituted the first vital blow to this myth. This awareness opened a "Pandora's box," producing considerable confusion and anxiety over locat ing the sources of local deviance. The community's confusion and fear were reflected in its response to youthful drug use and crime.

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