Women Poets, Urban Aestheticism & Modernity

ELT 49 : 4 2006 however, it seems safe to assume that, in addition to producing some of the kinds of studies included here, scholars will continue to investigate not only the homophobic, homoerotic, and homosocial elements of Joyce's texts but also the varied constructions in his work of femininity and masculinity in general. They also will weigh in on the unresolved question of whether Joyce was an irredeemable misogynist or evolved into a specie of quasi-feminist and will contribute to the ongoing dialogue about both his treatment of colonialism and his concepts of and attitudes toward Irish nationalism. Finally, twenty-first-century Joyce scholars, like many others, will undoubtedly further explore the possibilities afforded by electronic media, including hypertext and whatever else the digital future holds in store for us. E. P. WALKIEWICZ --------------------------- Oklahoma State University Women Poets, Urban Aestheticism Si Modernity Ana Parejo Vadillo. Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity. New York: Palgrave, 2005. xi + 266 pp. $69.95 CRITICS have long been interested in how travel affects literature. They have explored the poetry of the "Grand Tour" and that of the middle -class Victorian tourist. They have looked at how train travel transformed both space and time for inhabitants of the nineteenth century, altering their sense of the landscape. And they have discussed pedestrianism —from the hikes and rambles of the Romantic poets through the countryside to the city strolls of fin-de-siècle flâneurs. Similarly, at least since the days of Raymond Williams, academic readers have been interested in the phenomenon of life in the city. In her ambitious book, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity, Ana Parejo Vadillo seeks to combine these areas of concern by examining how the rise of urban transportation—and by this she means the omnibus, the underground, and the urban train—transformed the poetics of women writers towards the turn of the century. Vadillo notes that "current scholarship is based upon an urban epistemology that gives primacy to walking over any other form of urban mobility" (3). But surely, she points out, the ability to move rapidly through London on public transportation will also have affected the poet's sense of the city, of what she calls the "urbanscape." And the change should be especially great for middle-class women poets, for whom (Vadillo argues) the new modes of transportation offered an easy and (usually) respectable escape from the confines of the Victorian home. 468 BOOK REVIEWS These were not Poems on the Underground, but rather poets on the underground. It is a promising premise; I am particularly intrigued by the possible implications of tube travel, which so radically alters both the view from the window and one's sense of the geography of a city (many of us now see London not through the lens of traditional cartography , or even of the A to Z, but via its iconic underground map, designed in 1933). And Vadillo's four primary targets of investigation— the growing mechanisation of urban mobility, the epistemology of travelling , the passenger's relation to consumer culture, and the changes in perception brought about by acceleration" (16)—seem, well-chosen to demonstrate the impact of the new technologies on verse (although the fourth strikes me as a subset of the second). Vadillo grounds her argument by organizing it not only around her chosen authors—Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, Graham R. Tomson (Rosamund Marriott Watson), and Michael Field (the literary and personal partnership of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper)—but also by situating these writers very precisely in specific London neighborhoods: Bloomsbury, Kensington, St. John's Wood, and the suburb of Reigate, respectively. Each chapter uses location (fortified by images of maps and other illustrations) to help focus on an aspect of the poetry in relation to urban transport. So Levy is read as possessing a "mobile lyric self" (41) characteristic of the "nomadic" (50) Bloomsbury in which she lived, while Meynell's "impressionism" is seen as the product of her position at the head of the procession of the Kensington elite, from which she was able to view the rapid passing of the spectacle (especially that of shoppers) below her...