The Crowded Vacuum: Cities and Urban Isolation in Dubliners, Manhattan Transfer, and Mrs Dalloway

Shikha Chahal

The Crowded Vacuum: Cities and Urban Isolation in Dubliners, Manhattan Transfer, and Mrs Dalloway

Author(s)	Ms. Shikha Chahal
Country	India
Abstract	The modern metropolis was metamorphosed into a paradoxical theater of dense connectivity and profound alienation by the early twentieth century’s rapid industrialization and geopolitical upheaval. This paper contends that the modernist city functions not merely as a spatial backdrop, but as a primary agent of psychological fragmentation. Through a comparative analysis of James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners, John Dos Passos’s panoramic novel Manhattan Transfer, and Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway, this study demonstrates how these authors radically reconfigured literary form to articulate the isolating pressures of urban existence. By evaluating the interplay between Joyce's "scrupulous meanness," Dos Passos's cinematic montage, and Woolf's fluid interiority, the paper argues that these writers expose how specific socio-political landscapes—ranging from Dublin’s colonial paralysis to New York’s capitalist commodification and London’s post-war trauma—necessitated a departure from traditional realist narrative structures. This research posits that urban isolation in modernist literature constitutes a foundational aesthetic and existential condition, one that compelled a fundamental transformation in the formal architecture of the twentieth-century novel.
Keywords	Modernism, Urban Isolation, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, Literary Form, Stream-of-Consciousness, Cinematic Montage, Spatial Topography.
Field	Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 3, May-June 2026
Published On	2026-06-08

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The Crowded Vacuum: Cities and Urban Isolation in Dubliners, Manhattan Transfer, and Mrs Dalloway

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