URBAN NOVEL: FOR THE POETICS OF THE GENRE

Abstract

Social, political, and economic processes directly impact urban space, influencing its imagery and idiomatic expressions, which are subsequently reflected in the city's imagined image. In the analysis of the genre poetics of the urban novel, a decisive role is assigned to how the city functions within the narrative and its role in the artistic structure. The urban novel, as a rule, considers the city as an organic whole and develops a coherent vision of it. It is not interested only in local colourful details or anecdotal urban stories and incidents. It creates a unified impression and uses individual cases to convey the basic principles of city life. It offers an interpretation of the city as an ordered model of existence based on certain principles. This interpretation permeates the entire formal structure of the urban novel, while the description of individual urban experiences is episodic in nature.

The aim of this study is to determine the specificity of the urban novel, its genre, and poetics. The author of an urban novel, as a rule, offers us his or her own or the narrator/character's personal/subjective urban experiences and impressions and not solutions to problems. An urban novel is an organic whole, where material and form coalesce to create an aesthetic unity. Elements of the work's form, such as style, plot, tone, theme, and structure, express the writer's attitude towards the city as a physical place, as an atmosphere, and as a way of life. The urban novel is a complex entity, and therefore, its analysis requires a complex approach. A historical overview of the city as an intellectual-cultural reality and a diachronic analysis of the forms of artistic representation of urban experience helps us to outline the genre contours of the urban novel.

Keywords: Urban Experience; Novel; Representation; Genre; Interdisciplinary.