ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that full range and diversity of modernist practice lies beyond the scope, but they may be sufficiently suggested by an examination of the modern metamorphoses of the flneur. It also describes that works as diverse as Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Dblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, and the first volume of Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, all open like Mrs. Dalloway on the streets of the metropolis; and there are obvious ways in which novels like Dblin's and Joyce's have been decisively shaped by the very rhythms of life in a modern, mechanized urban culture. As Hugh Kenner maintains, the practitioners of modernism encountered the modern big city as a sudden novelty'. Nevertheless the originality of that encounter can be overstated for, as we have seen, writers like Balzac and Dickens responded intensely to what was new and disturbing in the Paris and London of their day.
