In this dissertation, I wrestle with how literature has helped frame how modern cities have been understood, and how neighborhood change within them has been interpreted, since the dawn of the modern city in the early twentieth century U.S. Moving from Chicago at the time of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to 1920s Harlem, to postwar Chicago, then back again to 1960s-era Harlem before focusing on the first “brownstoning” era in Brooklyn, I analyze how literature has shaped and contested the terms through which urban neighborhood change was and still is understood—terms like “community,” “integration,” “segregation,” and, on a more housing-specific note, “tenements” and “slums.” Its aim is to demonstrate the necessity of applying close reading to cities in order to understand and address urban problems appropriately in light of their context(s). It also seeks to illustrate how literature can be and has been used as a tool for imagining more equal and more just forms of cities, forms occasionally reached for but never fully attained.

Early modern neighbours were ubiquitous audiences to — and performers in — each other’s lives. Social historians have suggested that neighbours tended to possess surprisingly intimate information about each other, and they could use these insights to invade, encroach upon, and undermine those around them. To date, however, the relationships between neighbours (which are here termed ‘neighbourship’) have been narrowly located in the interactions between people living near to each other in domestic contexts. This dissertation proposes a significantly more capacious understanding of neighbourly dynamics by turning to a different archive: early modern plays that use particular theatrical devices — spectatorship, clothing, dialect, and stage properties — to work out the threats, obligations, and opportunities that come with sharing space and neighbourly knowledge. This dissertation draws on canonical and non-canonical plays from a range of genres and playwrights between the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Coriolanus, Jonson’s The Alchemist, Heywood’s little-known Jupiter and Io, Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday, and George Peele’s Edward I. Neighbourship was not defined by its domestic context, but by dynamics and internal structures, such as interchangeability and temporal iteration, that shaped early modern expectations about how this relationship manifested. The approaches in this dissertation build on social historical work by Lena Orlin, Catherine Richardson, B.S. Capp, and others, as well as theatre scholarship from Peter Womack, Jeremy Lopez, and Jennifer A. Low. There are two major interventions here: first, in the idea that the dynamics of neighbourship do not apply only between proximate humans, but also between ‘atypical’ neighbours — fairies, animals, languages, and nations — who offer focal points in respective chapters. These atypical entities challenge the normative understanding of neighbourship by taking its dynamics to an extreme, pushing theatrical audiences to the limits of their sympathetic identifications. The second intervention is in the argument that theatrical devices uniquely express and amplify the stakes of neighbourly dynamics. The temporal and spatial compression of the stage pushes unusual neighbours into greater proximity with each other, and the stage made manifest the complicated negotiations of similarity and difference that neighbourship entailed. Overall, this dissertation highlights the capacity of the early modern stage to transpose the dynamics of neighbourship across apparently disparate realms, drawing attention to theatrical manifestations of similarity and difference, belonging and alienation, and the transgression of borders.