Urban green space and gender in Anglophone Modernist fiction

Drawing upon the concept of Green Cultural Studies, this dissertation examines the way urban green spaces, such as parks and public gardens, function as heterotopic sites within Anglophone Modernist literature. The dissertation offers, like modern fiction itself, glimpses or snapshots of urban green spaces in their various incarnations and applications, hence presenting a collection of various encounters with and representations of urban green space. It focuses on authors who find themselves outside of the traditional white, Anglo, heterosexual male circle of writers and the dissertation investigates how they use green urban spaces within their fiction--to write against hierarchical social structures, to create heterotopic "other" spaces, or to interrogate ideas regarding normalcy and the concept of a "natural" order. These authors (including Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Djuna Barnes, and E.M. Forster) use individual green places--be they parks, public gardens, suburbs, or urban wastelands--to imagine and create new urban spaces. Chapter one examines Virgina Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, locating her portrayal of shell shock in reference to the green space of Regent's Park. In the following chapter, the discussion focuses on public gardens both in Great Britain and the European Continent, and unearths the way women authors utilize these spaces to articulate their (sexual) autonomous identities. Short stories by Djuna Barnes and Katherine Mansfield form the focus for the chapter. Then, chapter three extends the analysis to suburban spaces at the beginning of the twentieth century; specifically, three texts by E.M. Forster provide a panoramic view of how suburban green space provides an entry into the imagined national community for the "Other" woman. Finally, Chapter Four formulates a theory of unplanned/spontaneous urban green space that provides the possibility for heterotopic spaces to occur. It examines Woolf's Between the Acts as well as Jean Rhys's Quartet and Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. By combining cultural and historical readings with literary analysis, I demonstrate how literary representations of urban green space open up a discussion about gender in conjunction with sexuality, nationality, and discourses of psychology and mental healt