From New York to Chicago and Los Angeles, in 20 stories edited by an award-winning author, "The Urban Muse" pays tribute to the magnificence of the American city by capturing the full range of voices and cultures that have taken part in its drama.

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.

This work examines and challenges the traditional transatlantic axis, London-Paris-New York, that marks the intersection between western thinking about the City and the advent of literary modernism.

Driven by intensive industrialization and urbanization, the nineteenth century saw radical transformations in every facet of life in the United States. Immigrants and rural Americans poured into the nation’s cities, often ahead of or without their families. As city dwellers adapted to the new metropolis, boarding out became, for a few short decades, the most popular form of urban domesticity in the United States.While boarding’s historical importance is indisputable, its role in the period’s literary production has been overlooked. In Boarding Out, David Faflik argues that the urban American boardinghouse exerted a decisive shaping power on the period’s writers and writings. Addressing the works of canonical authors such as Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as neglected popular writers of the era such as Fanny Fern and George Lippard, Faflik demonstrates that boarding was at once psychically, artistically, and materially central in the making of our shared American culture.