American urban ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in debates about home foreclosures, images of 9/11, or postapocalyptic movies. Nick Yablon argues that this association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation's history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation - from accounts of failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to popular fiction and cartoons that envisioned disintegrating skyscrapers and bridges - Yablon challenges the myth that ruins ...
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American urban ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in debates about home foreclosures, images of 9/11, or postapocalyptic movies. Nick Yablon argues that this association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation's history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation - from accounts of failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to popular fiction and cartoons that envisioned disintegrating skyscrapers and bridges - Yablon challenges the myth that ruins were absent or at least insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the past, American ruins often appeared unpredictably and disappeared before they could accrue an aura of age. In doing so, they generated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the new kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative depictions of these untimely ruins everywhere from the archives of photography clubs to the pages of pulp magazines, Yablon reconstructs crucial debates about America's economic, technological, and cultural transformation in an age of urban modernity.
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Add this copy of Untimely Ruins: an Archaeology of American Urban to cart. $94.02, very good condition, Sold by Book Alley rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Pasadena, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2009 by University of Chicago Press.
Add this copy of Untimely Ruins: an Archaeology of American Urban to cart. $100.38, good condition, Sold by Midtown Scholar Bookstore rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Harrisburg, PA, UNITED STATES, published 2009 by University of Chicago Press.
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Seller's Description:
Good-Bumped and creased book with tears to the extremities, but not affecting the text block, may have remainder mark or previous owner's name-GOOD Standard-sized.
