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My chapter focuses on the capitalist social spaces of the New York City tenement in Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives (1891), Stephen Crane’s Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893), and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925). Indebted to Henri Lefebvre’s theories on social space and spatial production, this chapter explores the tenement housing of New York as a social space depicted as a place latent with power dynamics and the opportunities for resistance to the larger social order.

A primary innovator of the modern novel, French writer Gustave Flaubert was one of the most influential literary artists of the nineteenth century. Primarily associated with Realism, Flaubert is best remembered for his magnum opusMadame Bovary (1857). A close friend of many of his contemporaries including Ivan Turgenev, Henry James, and Guy de Maupassant, Flaubert was one of the moving forces in the early stages of modern literature. He is widely acknowledged as one of the originators of the modern novel’s form, and his work has influenced such literary figures as Émile Zola, Franz Kafka and Jean-Paul Sartre. Perhaps his legacy is best understood through Marcel Proust, who referred to Flaubert as a ‘génie grammatical’ (grammatical genius). Born in the northern French city of Rouen in 1821, Flaubert was the second of three children. Flaubert’s father was a surgeon in Rouen. After attending secondary school at Collège Royal de Rouen, Flaubert enrolled in law school in Paris in 1842. He would spend almost two years living in Paris before suffering the first epileptic seizure of his life in January 1844. As a result, Flaubert’s career as a writer would begin as he moved to a family property in Croisset, outside Rouen. Here Flaubert would write his masterpieces.

One of the leading British novelists of the early decades of the twentieth century, Edward Morgan Forster is best known for his novels Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924). Forster attended Cambridge University from 1897 to 1901, where he became a member of the Cambridge Apostles secret society, which included philosophers Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Membership in this society brought him into contact with several members of the Bloomsbury Group, including economist James Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard Woolf, and biographer Lytton Strachey. His work is best remembered for its use of realism to denounce the repressiveness of Edwardian British culture and it is often infused with liberal humanism. Additionally, his use of third-person omniscient narrative and abundant dialogue gave Forster a unique narrative style that influenced a number of later authors. Throughout his career Forster associated with a host of writers and artists including Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Christopher Isherwood. Forster was highly influenced by his travels throughout the European continent and India. His works often illustrate this interest by focusing on settings outside of England. All of the novels published in Forster’s lifetime were published before 1925, after which Forster spent his life working on nonfiction, including biographies, travel narratives, and essays.

The Lost Generation is a group of expatriate American writers who came of age during World War I and who subsequently became prominent literary figures. The term can also be used to refer to the whole of the post-World War I generation. The term was coined by Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) in a comment to Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) in which she declared, ‘You are all a lost generation’. Hemingway subsequently used this phrase as an epigraph to his novel The Sun also Rises (1926), which is often seen as emblematic of the Lost Generation’s literary tradition.

A city is a multi-purpose, shifting organization, a tent for many functions, raised by many hands and with relative speed. Complete specialization, final meshing, is improbable and undesirable. The form must be somewhat noncommittal, plastic to the purposes and perceptions of its citizens.-Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, 91.I'm in process of writing a book, the book I have contemplated doing for many years-prose and verse mixed: "Paterson"-an account, a psychological-social panorama of a city treated as if it were a man, the man Paterson.-William Carlos Williams to Robert McAlmon, 8 August 1943. (SL 216).The idea behind the poem Paterson was something William Carlos Williams contemplated for almost twenty years during the prime of his poetic career. As noted in the 1943 letter to Robert McAlmon, Williams's poem would also become the primary literary output of the last twenty years of his life as it was published in five books from 1946 to 1958 (though the original plan was for four books only), and remaining unfinished at the time of his death in 1963 as indicated by the presence of notes for a sixth book. This magnum opus has drawn much critical attention, leading Paul Mariani to call the poem "the most radically experimental and successful long poem written in our time" (233). However, much of the critical attention paid to the text has underplayed or disregarded the central thematic characteristic of the text: how to best represent the form and image of the modern urban environment and its social spaces. The view of the urban form and the question of how best to represent not only the city, but the distinctively American city, becomes the central motive for Williams. Miguel Carrasquiera, borrowing from Peter Halter, notes that Williams "saw in the city 'the chaotic energies of the metropolis, its intoxicating promises and bitter disillusionments, its enchantments and sobering disenchantments'. In Williams's mind, the city provides endless possibilities of success to its inhabitants" (119) and that Williams saw the city as "a dynamo of blossoming strength and of fertile renewal" (119). William Sharpe finds parallels in the ability to capture the form of Paterson as city with the form of Paterson as poem, noting, "Williams then radically reassesses the nature of the city poem (and all poetry). Paterson shows that the goal of the city poet should not be to dominate the multiplicity of his unwieldy subject, to make order out of its confusion, but rather to liberate his urban materials from the imposition of form and language" (65).Due to the fact that each of the first four books of Paterson employs a major physical location of the city as its primary setting, this study will be limited to a discussion of these sections of the long poem. Additionally, it is apparent that the form Williams employs reflects the cacophonous and open nature of the city. What is less apparent is the manner in which these items work together with the text. William Sharpe refers to Paterson as "a writing whose energy resists domination" (80) and states that Williams's "city becomes a syntax, a way of mind, a disjointed and elliptical style" (83). Alba Newmann, drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome, finds Paterson as, "not only an invitation or guide, it is an enactment; it is a text that shifts, flows, and falls, that breaks off and starts again, that 'somersaults' and escapes" (54). Kevin McNamara argues that Williams "moved Paterson toward a representation of a city as an open nexus of overlapping communities with different histories, interests, and even languages" (147). William R. Klink, focusing on the geographical features of the poem, argues for a reading of the way in which Paterson has "affected the changes to the locale of Paterson itself" (173). These issues are all reflected in the way each book of Paterson takes a particular space as the central organizing feature, pulling together history, language, and geography to produce the seemingly chaotic form. …