Approaching the Features of Urbanization in 21st-Century American Fiction

Abstract

Approaching the Features of Urbanization in 21st-Century American Fiction (2025) by Professor Jincai Yang et al. demonstrates the vitality of interdisciplinary approaches in contemporary urban literary studies. Moving beyond a merely mimetic understanding of the city’s material transformation, the book argues that 21st-century American fiction actively mediates the cultural, ethical, and ideological tensions embedded in the process of urbanization. Through its sustained engagement with a broad range of novels, the study advances urbanization as a productive critical paradigm through which literature interrogates globalization, consumerism, migration, ecological crisis and other current issues. It thus illuminates a mutually constitutive relation between narrative and urban modernity, enriching our understanding of how 21st-century American fiction imagines the city as both a lived environment and a contested cultural text.