Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848-2001

Edward J. Ahearn shows that together works from literature and the social sciences can illuminate city life in ways that neither can accomplish separately. Whether viewing Charles Baudelaire alongside Emile Durkheim and Georg Semel or Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" as a challenge to James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy, Ahearn does justice to the complexity of his subject matter. Ultimately, Ahearn suggests, neither literature nor the social sciences can capture the experience of urban misery.