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,...

In the early twentieth century the Modernist novel tested literary conventions and expectations, challenging representations of reality, consciousness and identity. These novels were not simply creative masterpieces, however, but also crucial articulations of revolutionary developments in critical thought.
Tracing the developing modernist aesthetic in the thought and writings of James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, Deborah Parsons considers the cultural, social and personal influences upon the three writers. Exploring the connections between their theories, Parsons pays...

In this illuminating and lucid study, Deborah Parsons examines the psychological and stylistic aspects of Djuna Barnes's work within the social, cultural and aesthetic context of the modernist period. Djuna Barnes once described herself as one of the most famous unknowns of the century. Revisionary accounts of female modernist writers have reawakened interest in her work, yet she remains a unique and idiosyncratic figure, unassimilated by models of American expatriate or Sapphic modernism. In this illuminating and lucid study, Deborah Parsons examines the range of Barnes's oeuvre; her early...