Streetwalking the Metropolis Women, the City, and Modernity

by Parsons, Deborah L.

• ISBN13: 9780198186823
• ISBN10: 0198186827
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-04-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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 1880's to World War Two, including Amy Levy, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, Anais Nin, Elizabeth Bowen and Doris Lessing.

Author Biography

Deborah Parsons is Lecturer in English Literature, University of Birmingham.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	x
Introduction: Gendered Cartographies of Viewing	1	(16)
Mythologies of Modernity	17	(26)
The Woman of the Crowd	43	(39)
The New Woman and the Wandering Jew	82	(41)
On the Margins of the City	123	(26)
The Cosmopolitan and the Rag-Picker in Expatriate Paris	149	(39)
Wandering the London Wasteland	188	(26)
Epilogue: Re-envisioning the Urban Walker	214	(16)
Bibliography	230	(9)
Index	239