Brooklyn Is Not Expanding is an examination of Woody Allen's comic universe: his stand-up routines, plays, and essays, as well as his films. Focusing on the comic persona that Allen invented in the late 1960s, Annette Wernblad analyzes his works chronologically, tracing the roots of the Allen persona in the Jewish literary tradition of Sholom Aleichem, Isaac Basheivs Singer and Philip Roth, and in the American comic tradition of Lenny Bruce, Charles Chaplin, and Groucho Marx.

This work follows the considerable development in Woody Allen's films over a twenty-year period from “take the money and run! (1969)” to "Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)". It contains detailed textual readings of Allen's mature and memorable films and discusses his idiosyncratic use of the cinematic medium. In addition, Ms. Wernbald offers contextual analyses, relating Allen's work to various tendencies in contemporary culture, such as the Hollywood genre film, the culture of narcissism, the "Superman Syndrome," the moral implications of the McCarthy era, and "the culture of celebrity".

Brooklyn Is Not Expanding examines the role that Allen played from the very beginning of his career in the general upheaval which occurred in American film and literature in the 1960s and 1970s. It shows how his debut as a film director, like much of his later work, reflects the undermining of the classic film genres so typical of that period. Likewise, many of his films flirt with the often elusive line (to be continued)