LITERATURE AND THE CITY

Baudelaire’s Dressing of the Dandy and the Prostitute in Erotic and Exotic Fashion

Cinzia Lau

Abstract:

The essay will be an in-depth exploration of the dandy and the prostitute in The Painter of Modern Lifewritten by Charles Baudelaire in 1863. It will focus on how the two can be seen as a double of each other and how they manifest as spectacles and spectators, thereby performing the role of art and artist to illuminate Baudelaire’s idea of aestheticism and modernity. Using Deborah Epstein Nord’s doubling theory of the dandy and the prostitute in Walking the Victorian Street, this essay will show how these modern figures contribute to Baudelaire’s social critique and a general reflection of Paris in the 19th century.

A City of her own: Conquering Private and Public Spheres
Rachel Yeung

Abstract:

This paper questions and challenges the oversimplified categorisation of Virginia Woolf’s The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life as a mere tourist handbook. It aims to demonstrate the complexities in Woolf’s feminist adoption of the genre, how she appropriates the male guidebook tradition as a flaneuse, and turns the genre to her use through the analysis of “Oxford Street Tide”, “Abbeys and Cathedrals” and “Portrait of a Londoner”. The essay contends that Woolf reworks the patriarchal tradition by bringing women and trivial elements into the centre of her work; in doing so, Woolf creates of a city of her own – Woolf’s feminist London.

A City of Conflicts and Struggle of Self-Identity

Ruby So

Abstract:

The essay will be an inquiry into the inner struggle of the narrator of Street Haunting’ s modern life (specifically an experience from the women perspective), into the conflict between the individual and the metropolis during her pursuit of identity. Such an inquiry will answer the question of “Does the 20th Century London depicted in Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting perform the roles of the metropolis stated by Simmel in The Metropolis and Mental Life?” through illustrating how the narrator’s self accommodates itself in the adjustments to the external world; how the narrator struggles in her search of identity in the city and how she resolves the conflict in the end.