Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity [Hardcover]

Deborah L. Parsons (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0198186827 | ISBN-13: 978-0198186823 | Publication Date: April 20, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

`The 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 Supplement

`Streetwalking the Metropolis is a convincing and assured performance' Sean Matthews, Times Higher Education Supplement

`Deborah 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, Times Higher Education Supplement

`Electic and insightful' Sean Matthews, Times Higher Education Supplement

`This is a fascinating, meticulous, needling book ... Her view of the history of twentieth-century feminist writing is positive and forward-looking ... compelling book' Sue Roe, Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Lecturer in English Literature, University of Birmingham

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (April 20, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198186827
• ISBN-13: 978-0198186823
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,433,558 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars inspiring, April 6, 2001

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Paperback)

modernity is an idea that has been defined elsewhere as the revolution that began when the first rioter pried a cobblestone up out of the street and threw it at the bastille in 1789. it's the history of the "rights" of man.

many of the 19th century writers -- starting with gogol (prequel: pushkin, sequel: dostoevsky) -- and emphatically including baudelaire and dickens -- wrote of what has come to be known as the revolutionary encounter. this happened beginning in czar peter's st. petersburg, where the wide sidewalks along the nevsky prospect (designed by a frenchman, leblond) let russia's "new men" -- drawn to the new capital by the new bureaucratic jobs -- mix on the sidewalks with soldiers, aristocrats, formerly cloistered women. the different classes mixed for the first time in history, and *saw* one another.

manet and the french impressionists took up the idea from their friend the poet baudelaire, that there was a "new man" called a flaneur. he *saw* modernity (and streetwalking "new" women) on the new sidewalks of haussman's paris...dickens, who walked at least six miles a day, much of the time at night, through london, transformed what he saw as a "flaneur" -- including, for the first time, the use of a child as a hero/narrator -- into revolutionary "modern" art.

this book argues, and proves that there were women walking the streets and observing modernity in our own way. among the forgotten woman writers parsons writes of is amy levy, a "flaneuse" of london, who argued among other things that jews' identities first formed in modernity, in the revolutionary encounters on the sidewalks.

other women who wrote of the revolutionary encounter on the sidewalk with whom parsons deals are woolf, lessing, and dorothy richardson. the best achievement of this book -- aside from the fact that something you always thought but never quite put your finger on is elucidated on every page -- is to show how women's identity was formed in the streets, and how the 19th century (piggy) social scientists who invented crowd psychology conflated women with rioters...no doubt giving rise to the rivetting art nouveau image of woman as dragonfly.

fabulous, touches on all the art and books you ever saw.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars inspiring, April 6, 2001

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Paperback)

modernity is an idea that has been defined elsewhere as the revolution that began when the first rioter pried a cobblestone up out of the street and threw it at the bastille in 1789. it's the history of the "rights" of man.

many of the 19th century writers -- starting with gogol (prequel: pushkin, sequel: dostoevsky) -- and emphatically including baudelaire and dickens -- wrote of what has come to be known as the revolutionary encounter. this happened beginning in czar peter's st. petersburg, where the wide sidewalks along the nevsky prospect (designed by a frenchman, leblond) let russia's "new men" -- drawn to the new capital by the new bureaucratic jobs -- mix on the sidewalks with soldiers, aristocrats, formerly cloistered women. the different classes mixed for the first time in history, and *saw* one another.

manet and the french impressionists took up the idea from their friend the poet baudelaire, that there was a "new man" called a flaneur. he *saw* modernity (and streetwalking "new" women) on the new sidewalks of haussman's paris...dickens, who walked at least six miles a day, much of the time at night, through london, transformed what he saw as a "flaneur" -- including, for the first time, the use of a child as a hero/narrator -- into revolutionary "modern" art.

this book argues, and proves that there were women walking the streets and observing modernity in our own way. among the forgotten woman writers parsons writes of is amy levy, a "flaneuse" of london, who argued among other things that jews' identities first formed in modernity, in the revolutionary encounters on the sidewalks.

other women who wrote of the revolutionary encounter on the sidewalk with whom parsons deals are woolf, lessing, and dorothy richardson. the best achievement of this book -- aside from the fact that something you always thought but never quite put your finger on is elucidated on every page -- is to show how women's identity were formed in the streets, and how the 19th century social scientists who invented crowd psychology conflated women with rioters...no doubt giving rise to the rivetting art nouveau image of woman as dragonfly.

fabulous, touches on all the art and books you ever saw.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars inspiring, April 6, 2001

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Paperback)

modernity is an idea that has been defined elsewhere as the revolution that began when the first rioter pried a cobblestone up out of the street and threw it at the bastille in 1789. it's the history of the "rights" of man.

many of the 19th century writers -- starting with gogol (prequel: pushkin, sequel: dostoevsky) -- and emphatically including baudelaire and dickens -- wrote of what has come to be known as the revolutionary encounter. this happened beginning in czar peter's st. petersburg, where the wide sidewalks along the nevsky prospect (designed by a frenchman, leblond) let russia's "new men" -- drawn to the new capital by the new bureaucratic jobs -- mix on the sidewalks with soldiers, aristocrats, formerly cloistered women. the different classes mixed for the first time in history, and *saw* one another.

manet and the french impressionists took up the idea from their friend the poet baudelaire, that there was a "new man" called a flaneur. he *saw* modernity (and streetwalking "new" women) on the new sidewalks of haussman's paris...dickens, who walked at least six miles a day, much of the time at night, through london, transformed what he saw as a "flaneur" -- including, for the first time, the use of a child as a hero/narrator -- into revolutionary "modern" art.

this book argues, and proves that there were women walking the streets and observing modernity in our own way. among the forgotten woman writers parsons writes of is amy levy, a "flaneuse" of london, who argued among other things that jews' identities first formed in modernity, in the revolutionary encounters on the sidewalks.

other women who wrote of the revolutionary encounter on the sidewalk with whom parsons deals are woolf, lessing, and dorothy richardson. the best achievement of this book -- aside from the fact that something you always thought but never quite put your finger on is elucidated on every page -- is to show how women's identity was formed in the streets, and how the 19th century (piggy) social scientists who invented crowd psychology conflated women with rioters...no doubt giving rise to the rivetting art nouveau image of woman as dragonfly.

fabulous, touches on all the art and books you ever saw.