This book offers a critical introduction to the relation between cities and fiction, poetry and literary criticism from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It examines examples of writing from Europe, North America and post-colonial countries.

Malcolm Miles is a researcher and writer on critical theories of culture and society, urbanism and contemporary art. Among his publications are Cities and Culture (2007), Limits to Culture (2015), Eco-Aesthetics: art, literature and architecture in a period of climate change (2014) and Herbert Marcuse: an aesthetics of liberation (2011). He retired as Professor of Cultural Theory in the Architecture School, University of Plymouth, UK, in 2016.

1. The City and the Countryside 2. Utopias 3. Dystopias 4. Metropolis 5. Bohemians and Avant-Gardes 6. Ruins 7. Exile 8. Post-War 9. Alterities 10. Cosmopolitanisms