New York Literature and Social Space

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.