Framing suburbia: United States literature and the postwar suburban region, 1945--2002

The physical and conceptual production of the U.S. suburbs embodies a dual impulse: an isolationist strategy in an era of global expansion, and an expansionist strategy on the ground within America's metro-regions. Suburban development---aided by technologies such as the automobile, freeway construction, and television---enabled a pervasive private detachment after World War II. Framing Suburbia: U.S. Literature and the Postwar Suburban Region, 1945-2002 argues that the postwar literature of the U.S. suburbs attempts to disable that impulse, framing the suburban region and constructing readers to recognize the ways in which suburban neighborhoods and private homes are entangled in metro-regional, national, and even transnational geographies. Implicit in this line of argument is the contention that we should read suburban literature as a central voice in U.S. regional and environmental writing. Working within a tradition of scholarship that posits the region as a space in which national narratives are enacted and defamiliarized, I contend that postwar suburban literature continues this literary strategy within and against the increasingly homogenized environments of suburban sprawl. The visual and literary representations discussed in Framing Suburbia reveal the differential spaces paved over by the abstract geography of the suburban ideal.;At the same time my project offers a fresh perspective on the familiar suburban landscapes of "Cheever Country," I also articulate how film, TV, and photography provide a paradigm for reading suburbia's "repressive aesthetic"; how suburban images reshape Harlem's urban geography in Ann Petry's The Street; how segregated suburbs and Chicano barrios subtend Los Angeles' emergent global suburbia in Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt of the Cockroach People; and how St. Louis as a "postcolonial" region in Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City and Detroit as a suburban "scene of reading" in Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides recast the relationship between literary practices and the environment at the turn of the twenty-first century.