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Women in the city
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Title
Women in the city
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female flânerie and the modern urban imagination
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ETD_1570
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http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.000051745
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eng
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theses
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Literatures in English
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(authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Flaneurs in literature
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(authority = ETD-LCSH)
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Women in literature
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(authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
City and town life in literature
Abstract
My dissertation follows the trajectory of female flânerie in women’s writing from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. I analyze the transformations of female urban subjectivity in the works of Charlotte Brontë, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf. These writers imagine female characters and narrators as urban subjects whose sense of self develops in the dangerous and attractive spaces of the modern city. I target those moments in which female flâneurs collapse the perceptual distance between themselves and the city so that their imagination fuses with urban space.
In my first chapter, I explain the concept of the flâneur as an urban walker and spectator, a central figure in urban modernity. I trace the transformations of the female flâneur in the urban culture of spectacle, and underscore the indispensible role of the flâneuse for modernist literary experimentation. In the second chapter on Brontë’s Villette (1853), I focus on the heroine’s struggle for independence and agency as an urban spectator. Next I treat Katherine Mansfield’s short story, “The Tiredness of Rosabel” (1918), and Jean Rhys’s novel, Good Morning, Midnight (1939), showing how these writers employ the flâneuse’s subjective fragmentation in order to imagine a new urban self that opens toward urban space. My study culminates with the analysis of Woolf’s writing, especially “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1923), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and A Room of One’s Own (1929), in which she moves beyond the conventions of realism to emphasize the contingency and mystery of city life. Her characters and narrators come to life only in urban exchanges. Drawing on this kind of reciprocity between the flâneuse and the city, I argue that Woolf breaks new ground in articulating a provisional kind of collectivity between urban dwellers that becomes a base for future women’s writing.
In my first chapter, I explain the concept of the flâneur as an urban walker and spectator, a central figure in urban modernity. I trace the transformations of the female flâneur in the urban culture of spectacle, and underscore the indispensible role of the flâneuse for modernist literary experimentation. In the second chapter on Brontë’s Villette (1853), I focus on the heroine’s struggle for independence and agency as an urban spectator. Next I treat Katherine Mansfield’s short story, “The Tiredness of Rosabel” (1918), and Jean Rhys’s novel, Good Morning, Midnight (1939), showing how these writers employ the flâneuse’s subjective fragmentation in order to imagine a new urban self that opens toward urban space. My study culminates with the analysis of Woolf’s writing, especially “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1923), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and A Room of One’s Own (1929), in which she moves beyond the conventions of realism to emphasize the contingency and mystery of city life. Her characters and narrators come to life only in urban exchanges. Drawing on this kind of reciprocity between the flâneuse and the city, I argue that Woolf breaks new ground in articulating a provisional kind of collectivity between urban dwellers that becomes a base for future women’s writing.
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electronic resource
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v, 169 p.
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Ph.D.
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Includes bibliographical references (p. 160-168)
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by Věra Eliášová
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Věra Eliášová
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Smith
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Carol
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Carol Smith
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Buckley
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Mathew
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Mathew Buckley
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Williams
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Carolyn
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Carolyn Williams
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Regulska
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Joanna
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Joanna Regulska
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Rutgers University
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Graduate School - New Brunswick
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2009
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2009-05
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xx
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Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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ETD
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Graduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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doi:10.7282/T30R9PK0
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ETD doctoral
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The author owns the copyright to this work.
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Open
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Eliasova
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Vera
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Vera Eliasova
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Rutgers University. Graduate School - New Brunswick
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Author Agreement License
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I hereby grant to the Rutgers University Libraries and to my school the non-exclusive right to archive, reproduce and distribute my thesis or dissertation, in whole or in part, and/or my abstract, in whole or in part, in and from an electronic format, subject to the release date subsequently stipulated in this submittal form and approved by my school. I represent and stipulate that the thesis or dissertation and its abstract are my original work, that they do not infringe or violate any rights of others, and that I make these grants as the sole owner of the rights to my thesis or dissertation and its abstract. I represent that I have obtained written permissions, when necessary, from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis or dissertation and will supply copies of such upon request by my school. I acknowledge that RU ETD and my school will not distribute my thesis or dissertation or its abstract if, in their reasonable judgment, they believe all such rights have not been secured. I acknowledge that I retain ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use all or part of this thesis or dissertation in future works, such as articles or books.
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