Urban Undergrounds

Patricia García is Ramón y Cajal Senior Researcher in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. Her publications include the monographs The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature (2021) and Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature (2015). She is the Chair of the research network Fringe Urban Narratives. David Pike is Professor of Literature and Film at American University, USA. Among his monographs are Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (1997); Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London 1800–1945 (2005); Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001 (2007); Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades (2021); Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (with Malini Ranganathan and Sapana Doshi; 2023) and After the End: Cold War Culture and Apocalyptic Imaginations in the Twenty-First Century (2024).

• 1. Introduction: Underground Studies in the Humanities Today; 2. Literary Hellscapes and Urban Ontologies; 3. Katabasis and Climate Change; 4. Platform Change: The Santiago Metro as an Underground Portal in Chilean Science Fiction; 5. Intersecting Modernity’s Underground Imaginaries in Paris and the RER; 6. Collectivity and Care in the Necropolis: Mexico City Underground in Gabriela Jauregui’s Feral; 7. Urban Undergrounds and ‘Deep’ Psychology in the Maximalist Novels of Ernesto Sabato and Mircea Cărtărescu; 8. A Psychogeographic Exploration of Johannesburg’s Literary Urban Underground; 9. Buried Chaos: Elden Ring’s Undergrounds and the Videoludic Palimpsest(s); 10. Myth no more? The Warsaw Sewers in Literature, Music and Film; 11. Into the Bowels of London: Underground as Margin of the Fantastic in Michael Moorcock’s Mother London and Peter Ackroyd’s London Under; 12. “Welcome to the realm of the homeless”. Athens’ Underworld in Contemporary City Literature; Index