Threshold Modernism

About this book

"Modern urban women and their associated spaces are central to British literature and culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a remarkably wide range of London narratives dating from the 1880s through the 1930s, we may trace a shared, multi-faceted preoccupation with middle-class women's new participation in the urban scene. From naturalist fiction to canonical high modernism, from middlebrow novels to lowbrow musicals, from sociological journalism to fine art, in an astonishing range of genres and venues, the modern woman and her sites take center stage. It's a preoccupation that runs through narratives authored by both men and women, who are of origins rural and urban, English and colonial. That this resounding presence hasn't been adequately noticed or accounted for in modernist literary studies suggests a resemblance to Poe's purloined letter, hiding in plain sight. This book examines how and why these women and spaces attracted so much interest and registers their impact in both thematic content and narrative form. It orients the era's literary production at the intersection of gendered and raced identities, urban space, and narrative, encompassing diverse writers and texts often left out of even broad conceptions of British modernism. Attending to the role of women and to colonial residents of color (both male and female) in shaping the city and its literature, it argues that the recurrent trope of the modern woman in liminal urban spaces provides a method for bridging modernism's formal experiments and its social investments"--