Introduction: “Urban Intersections: Class, Race, Gender and Gentrification”

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

ABSTRACT The contributors to this special issue share the understanding that literature has an important contribution to make to scholarly discussions of gentrification. Their articles on a wide variety of contemporary novelists and poets writing in English reflect the explosion of twenty-first-century literary production concerned with gentrifying neighbourhoods, and the ways in which different literary genres and formal approaches can elucidate the complex structures of feeling pertaining as urban spaces undergo gentrification. This special issue demonstrates how literary texts reveal complex patterns of settlement and displacement, and the perspectives and affective responses not only of those marginalized by gentrification - but also of gentrifiers. It takes an intersectional approach, exploring the importance of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality and their interrelations in representations of gentrification.