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  • The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles
  • Jaquelin Pelzer
The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles. Edited by Kevin R. McNamara. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 248 pages, $85.00/$24.99.

As the essays in this special issue of Western American Literature attest, Los Angeles has provided writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers with an abundance of material for their art over the years. Yet the city, whose most prevalent international identity—as Hollywood—remains tied to artistic endeavors, gets consistently maligned as a place without culture. The sixteen critical essays in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles showcase the myriad reasons why LA has been a source of such artistic fecundity and how it proves to be an immensely rich site for literary scholarship as well. Edited by Kevin R. McNamara, the volume's essays trace literary LA from the earliest documents of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles, founded in 1781, to the contemporary work of novelists, poets, nature writers, and more. Topics range from historic categories in the first half of the collection to the more in-depth surveys of specific genres [End Page 331] in the second half; this arrangement provides the reader with a base knowledge before delving into specifics.

Beginning with McNamara's sweeping overview of the work in the collection and the literary geography of LA, the essays in the first half cover literature of the Californios whose letters and testimonios tell the stories of the city surrounding the US takeover in 1848; the influential work of early Anglo writers, such as Helen Hunt Jackson and Charles F. Lummis; the growth of the city through the population booms of the 1920s and '40s and the effect of this tremendous influx of people on representations of LA in the literature of the time; and the emergence of the suburbs in World War II, followed by the explosion of suburban culture in the 1950s, discussing (as do several other essays) D. J. Waldie's The Holy Land (1996). This first section of the book also gives attention to the importance of non-Anglo-American literature, especially in twentieth-century Los Angeles, with chapters devoted to literature by African American Angelenos and British and German expatriates; an intriguing essay by James Kyung-Jin Lee looks at the relationship between Asian American and Latino literature of the last century and the first decade of this century. (Herein lies one of the few criticisms of the collection: although Latino literature receives significant treatment in Lee's essay and is discussed in a majority of the other essays, the magnitude of Latino contributions to literary Los Angeles seems to merit a separate essay of its own. Also missing is an essay specifically dedicated to the contributions of LA's women writers, as well as more essays written by female scholars.)

In its second half, the collection moves toward the examination of specific genres, such as science fiction, nature writing, detective novels, the Hollywood novel, and poetry, as well as the treatment of LA on the silver screen. Of particular interest to WAL readers may be Julian Murphet's essay on "The Literature of Urban Rebellion," which looks at three significant moments of urban rebellion in the city's history—the 1943 Pachuco Riots, the 1965 Watts Rebellion, and the 1992 Justice Riots—and the powerful literature that resulted from these events, including the dramatization of the Pachuco Riots by 2010 WLA Distinguished Achievement Award recipient Luis Valdez.

Furthering the work of previous scholarship on literary LA, such as David Fine's Los Angeles in Fiction (1984) and Imagining Los Angeles (2000), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles focuses on the writers and writing produced in LA and on the appearance of the city itself in literature, with the bulk of the essays narrowing in on literature written and set in Los Angeles. The essay collection also features a bibliography for further reading and an extremely useful timeline that includes a dozen pages of significant events in the city's history and literary development. With a goal to introduce students of...

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