The nostalgic landscape of Miami in Susanna Daniel’s Stiltsville
Małgorzata Martynuska
University of Rzeszow, PolandMałgorzata Martynuska is an Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Rzeszow, Poland. She is a graduate of American Studies Center at University of Warsaw (MA) and the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora at Jagiellonian University in Cracow (PhD). She completed her habilitation at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. Her scholarly interests focus on cultural hybridity of US Latinx, acculturation patterns, transculturation and ethnic representations in American popular culture.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5028-5046
Abstract
The article examines the nostalgic landscape of Miami depicted in Susanna Daniel’s debut novel Stiltsville (2010). The setting of the novel is the actual community named in the title of the book and it refers to a group of houses built on pilings about a mile offshore in Biscayne Bay. The analysis proceeds according to methodology presented by the literary theorist Hana Wirth-Nesher in her article titled “Impartial Maps: Reading and Writing Cities”, published in Handbook of Urban Studies (2001), in which she identifies four aspects of cityscape in the representation of the city in narrative: the built, the ‘natural’, the human, and the verbal. The paper discusses the nostalgic construction of the past in the novel. Nostalgic notions of preserving the past have been linked with the concepts of cultural heritage and the preservation movement.
Keywords:
Stiltsville, Florida, marine environment, Hurricane Andrew, landscape, nostalgiaReferences
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University of Rzeszow, Poland
Małgorzata Martynuska is an Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Rzeszow, Poland. She is a graduate of American Studies Center at University of Warsaw (MA) and the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora at Jagiellonian University in Cracow (PhD). She completed her habilitation at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. Her scholarly interests focus on cultural hybridity of US Latinx, acculturation patterns, transculturation and ethnic representations in American popular culture.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5028-5046
