In A Gendered Collision, Rhonda Pettit challenges the assumption that Parker is a humorist or marginal modernist at best, a sentimentalist at worst. To do this, she examines Parker's career in light of feminist scholarship that has forced a reevaluation of the American canon in general, and of modernism in particular. As documented in her poetry and fiction, Parker's modernism moves beyond a narrow set of aesthetic principles; it carries the remnants from a collision of competing values, those of nineteenth-century sentimentalism, and twentieth-century decadence and modernism. Her works display the intense dynamic in which early twentieth-century literature and art were created.