ABSTRACT
The expansiveness of Macaulay's paratactic style opens her texts to foreignness in a way that it will characterize as geographic and temporal cosmopolitanism, a spirit that links her to the avant-garde writers despite her reception as a 'middlebrow' author. The motive for her elision of teleological progression and hierarchically ordered narration or analysis lies in the position that she encodes into the text but rarely refers to directly. It is the perspective of a writer confronted with the catastrophic ruins of her own city, ruins all the difficult to acknowledge because they were suffered by the victorious nation. Yet an enumerative style is not the only feature of parataxis present in Macaulay's work. She has what Auerbach calls a 'multilayered' style, suited to the 'fearful and fragmented' present moment that forms her perspective. Macaulay is sympathetic to this view in her description of an overgrown London as 'jungle', as well as her tendency to treasure ruins forgotten by recorded history.
