Streetwalking the Metropolis

Can there be a flaneuse, and what form might she take? This is the central question of Streetwalking the Metropolis, an important contribution to ongoing debates on the city and modernity in which Deborah Parsons re-draws the gendered map of urban modernism. Assessing the cultural and literary history of the concept of the flaneur, the urban observer/writer traditionally gendered as masculine, the author advances critical space for thediscussion of a female 'flaneuse', focused around a range of women writers from the 1880s to World War Two. Cutting across period boundaries, this wide-ranging study offers stimulating accounts of works by writers including AmyLevy, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Rosamund Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, Anais Nin, Elizabeth Bowen and Doris Lessing, highlighting women's changing relationship with the social and psychic spaces of the city, and drawing attention to the ways in which the perceptions and experiences of the street are translated into the dynamics of literary texts.

Winner of Named as Outstanding Academic Book of 2001 by Choice.

“'This is a fascinating, meticulous, needling book ... Her view of thehistory of twentieth-century feminist writing is positive and forward-looking.... Deborah Parsons's compelling book.'Sue Roe, TLS”

carefully crafted, highly detailed, and interesting'J.A.Dompkowski, CHOICEThe book will find a readership not only among specialists across the relevant disciplines, but also among students and general readers eager to explore alternatives to the traditional Pound-Eliot-Joyce axis: that OUP has published both hard and paperback editions testifies to this broad appeal'Sean Matthews, Times Higher Education SupplementStreetwalking the Metropolis is a convincing and assured performance'Sean Matthews, Times Higher Education SupplementDeborah Parson's achievement is to draw from a range of critics, in a variety of disciplines, to produce a new perspective on the nature of literary modernism in the period 1880 to 1945.'Sean Matthews, THESelectic and insightful'Sean Matthews, THESThis is a fascinating, meticulous, needling book ... Her view of the history of twentieth-century feminist writing is positive and forward-looking. ... Deborah Parsons's compelling book.'Sue Roe, Times Literary Supplement

Lecturer in English Literature, University of Birmingham

Can there be a flaneuse, and what form might she take? This is the central question of Streetwalking the Metropolis, an important contribution to ongoing debates on the city and modernity in which Deborah Parsons re-draws the gendered map of urban modernism. Assessing the cultural and literary history of the concept of the flaneur, the urban observer/writer traditionally gendered as masculine, the author advances critical space for the discussion of a female 'flaneuse', focused around a range of women writers from the 1880s to World War Two. Cutting across period boundaries, this wide-ranging study offers stimulating accounts of works by writers including Amy Levy, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Rosamund Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, Anais Nin, Elizabeth Bowen and Doris Lessing, highlighting women's changing relationship with the social and psychic spaces of the city, and drawing attention to the ways in which the perceptions and experiences of the street are translated into the dynamics of literary texts.

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