"The Mighty Heart" or "The Desert in Disguise"?

This collection of essays brings together a plurality of approaches to the Metropolis, bearing witness to its multifaceted appearance from the 18th century to the present, from realistic descriptions to fantastic inventions, from factual accounts of historical and recent projects to the counterfactual imagery of magic realism or graphic novels. Contents: Christoph Houswitschka: ‘‘London defies the imagination and breaks the heart’’: The Metropolis and the Materiality of Urban Biographies; Jürgen Klein: Albertopolis; Wolfgang Wicht: Metropolis and Nation, Dublin and Trieste; Stefan Plasa: The metropolitan labyrinth and the path towards the self: The theme of the individual quest in T. S. Eliot’s poetry; Gesa Mackenthun: The Mighty Heart Is Lying Still: Philadelphia and the Specters of New World Colonialism; Kevin L. Cope: Augusta and Columbia, Or, Cherry Trees in Green Belts: Urban and Urbane Conceptions of the Frontier from Dryden and George Washington to Twain, NASCAR, and Beyond; Neal Chandler: In the Heart of the Heart of the City: Urban Silence in Contemporary American Writing; Anne Hegerfeldt: ‘‘A Living City’’: Venice in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion; Dirk Vanderbeke (with Christoph Gossel): The City as a Superorganism; Laurenz Volkmann: Urban/Human Bodies: Destructive Analogies in Ian McEwan’s Berlin Novels; Bruno Arich-Gerz: Empty spaces and the virtual reconstruction of a traumatic past. The case of the synagogues of Germany.