Flanerie, gender, and the politics of marginality in representations of London, 1820--1940

Taking as its primary focus the historical and literary landscapes of London from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, this dissertation explores how various mappings of the city---corporeal, cartographic, literary, and journalistic---sought to comprehend the rapidly expanding and increasingly illegible metropolis. In particular, I trace how narratives of the city addressed physical and social changes via representational motifs of marginality, mobility, and gender.; In the urban narratives of this study, including writings by Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Blanchard Jerrold, Yoshio Markino, Charlotte Mew, Flora Tristan, Beatrice Webb, Olive Malvery, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf, the city's marginal subjects, spaces, and experiences dominate and enable urban representation. Such an approach is embodied in the figure of the flaneur, the urban wanderer generally associated with nineteenth-century French literature who, I argue, also had a thriving presence in the literature of London. I explore how representations of London---from the Regency rambles of Pierce Egan to the modernist city of Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf---have employed the trope of flanerie to represent the subjective urban experience.; My study of flanerie focuses on the role that gender, in its historical and metaphorical constructions, has played in fabricating the city. The first half of the dissertation analyzes intersections of gender and flanerie in genres such as the urban sketch, the slumming narrative, and the social investigative text. I argue that urban narratives of this period, in an effort to navigate shifting boundaries of class, gender, and nationality, pivot on female figures as objects of obsession, desire, or contempt. The second half of the dissertation explores women's historical experiences in spaces such as the Great Exhibition of 1851, the department store, and the streets and transports of London, and constructs a history of female flanerie by surveying women's urban representations throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.