The nostalgic landscape of Miami in Susanna Daniel’s Stiltsville

Abstract

The article examines the nostalgic landscape of Miami depicted in Susanna Daniel’s debut novel Stiltsville (2010). The setting of the novel is the actual community named in the title of the book and it refers to a group of houses built on pilings about a mile offshore in Biscayne Bay. The analysis proceeds according to methodology presented by the literary theorist Hana Wirth-Nesher in her article titled “Impartial Maps: Reading and Writing Cities”, published in Handbook of Urban Studies (2001), in which she identifies four aspects of cityscape in the representation of the city in narrative: the built, the ‘natural’, the human, and the verbal. The paper discusses the nostalgic construction of the past in the novel. Nostalgic notions of preserving the past have been linked with the concepts of cultural heritage and the preservation movement.