1. Strong reading, or the literary conversion of the urban

This chapter examines the phenomenon of “Strong reading,” named after the nineteenth-century New York lawyer, bibliophile, and diarist George Templeton Strong. As evidenced by Strong’s own historical example, the Strong reader placed such great faith in his traditional standards of literary discrimination that he proceeded to read all of urban life as if it were a work of literature. The unstated aim of this manner of city reading was to remake the more troubling aspects of urban life into a more familiar form of “text.” In turn, the Strong reader might have managed to convert the modern city into a safer kind of aesthetic spectacle, but he often purchased his interpretive reassurance at the expense of a less mediated relation to urban life.