Urban Exploration
摘要
This chapter shows how the works of the New Humourists bring the mechanism of their imperial parodies to bear on domestic urban explorers, revealing them to be comic in their imitation of colonial language. New Humour, associating itself with and using the parodic forms of the Music Hall, parodies and rejects urban reformers, casting them as ridiculous and moralising. A particular suspicion of women reformers is tied to concomitant masculine anxieties of shifting roles for and images of women impacting on the stability of masculinity. The city, its people, their roles, and their categorisation, refuses to be mapped, and the resulting lack of certainty about manliness is as much a threat as it is an opportunity for masculine redefinition.