Los Angeles

No city occupies as many paradoxical positions in the popular imagination as Los Angeles. It is the new frontier and the end of the trail; it is American Eden and Babylon by the Pacific; it is by turns celebrated and condemned for its diversity; it is the city of perpetual renewal and the city of imminent apocalypse. This collection reveals LA in all its contradictions by documenting a literary tradition as kaleidoscopic and cacophonous as the city itself. The writings explored by Los Angeles: A Literary History record how a dusty cow town morphed into a global metropolis within a matter of decades, and how this unprecedented transformation came to define the experience of modernity. Los Angeles's literature has long gone underappreciated, the city's culture dismissed as flat and frivolous: this volume upturns that narrative, reshaping American literary history by resituating LA as its beating heart.

Michael Docherty is an Assistant Professor of English at Appalachian State University. His first book is The Recursive Frontier: Race, Space and the Literary Imagination of Los Angeles (SUNY Press 2024). His other writing on LA literature, culture, and history has appeared in Crime Fiction Studies, Comparative American Studies, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at California State University, Long Beach, and formerly co-edited Post45: Contemporaries. Ignacio López-Calvo is Presidential Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Literature at the University of California, Merced. He is the author of nine books, including Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety and Latinx Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial Rebellion (Co-edited with Victor Valle). His latest books are The Mexican Transpacific: Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, Performance (2022) and Saudades of Japan and Brazil: Contested Modernities in Lusophone Nikkei.