Deborah L. Parsons

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 particular attention to their work on: forms of realism characters and consciousness gender and the novel time and history. An understanding of these three thinkers is fundamental to a grasp on modernism, making this an indispensable guide for students of modernist thought. It is also essential reading for those who wish to understand debates about the genre of the novel or the nature of literary expression, which were given a new impetus by the pioneering figures of Joyce, Richardson and Woolf.

James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf

Theorists of the Modernist Novel

Steve Ellis

Kathryn Simpson

Anna Burrells

Woolfian Boundaries aims to explore Woolf's work from perspectives "beyond the boundary" of her own positions and attitudes, taking her coolness toward the provinces and "prejudice" against the regional novel (Letters 6: 381) as the starting-point for considering her writing in the light of its own "limits," self-declared and otherwise. Topics include Woolf's connections with the "Birmingham School" of novelists in the 1930s to her interests in environmentalism, portraiture, photography, and the media, and her endlessly fascinating relationship with the writings of her contemporaries and predecessors.

Selected Papers from the Sixteenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf

Woolfian Boundaries

"In this study, Deborah Parsons examines the range of Barnes's oeuvre: her early journalism, short stories and one act dramas, poetry, the family chronicle Ryder, the Ladies Almanack, and her late play The Antiphon, as well as her modernist classic Nightwood. She explores the psychological and stylistic aspects of Barnes's work through close analysis of the texts within their social, cultural and aesthetic context, and provides an indispensable and enriching guide to Barnes's artistic identity and poetic vision. Barnes's determined inversion, throughout her work, of social and sexual identities; her unusual childhood; her professional friendships with T. S. Eliot and James Joyce; and her controversial lesbianism are all highlighted and discussed in this introduction to a bold and enigmatic writer." --Book Jacket.

Djuna Barnes

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. Cutting across period boundaries, this wide-ranging study offers stimulating accounts of works by writers including Amy Levy, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Rosamund Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, Anais Nin, Elizabeth Bowen and Doris Lessing, highlighting women's changing relationship with the social and psychic spaces of the city, and drawing attention to the ways in which the perceptions and experiences of the street are translated into the dynamics of literary texts.

Deborah L. Parsons

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