Streetwalking the Metropolis

Can there be a <em>flaneuse</em> and what form might she take? This is the central question of <em>Streetwalking the Metropolis</em> 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 <em>flaneur</em> the urban observer/writer traditionally gendered as masculine the author advances critical space for the discussion of a female '<em>flaneuse</em> ' 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.