The Walker
On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From Charles Dickens’ London to today’s megacities, a fascinating exploration of what urban walking tells us about modern life—for fans of Rebecca Solnit, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, and literary history.
“A labyrinthine journey into the literature of walking and thinking,” as seen in the lives and works of Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Ray Bradbury, and other literary greats (Guardian).
There is no such thing as a false step. Every time we walk we are going somewhere. Especially if we are going nowhere. Moving around the modern city is not a way of getting from A to B, but of understanding who and where we are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont retraces episodes in the history of the walker since the mid-19th century.
From Dickens’s insomniac night rambles to restless excursions through the faceless monuments of today’s neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of self-discovery and self-escape, of disappearances and secret subversions. Pacing stride for stride alongside literary amblers and thinkers such as Edgar Allan Poe, André Breton, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life.
Through these writings, Beaumont asks: Can you get lost in a crowd? What are the consequences of using your smartphone in the street? What differentiates the nocturnal metropolis from the city of daylight? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? And can we save the city—or ourselves—by taking to the pavement?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beaumont (Nightwalking), lecturer in English Literature at University College London, explores literary depictions of walking in this fascinating, sometimes frustrating book. Drawing on Marxist theorist Raymond Williams's claim that literary depictions of the modern city have hinged on a "man walking, as if alone, in its streets," Beaumont discusses how numerous fiction writers have dealt with this "dominant metropolitan archetype." They include Edgar Allan Poe, with his short story "The Man of the Crowd"; G.K. Chesterton, who favored the "wandering champions" of medieval romance; and Ray Bradbury via his brief SF story "The Pedestrian." Beaumont also cites such thinkers as Slavoj Žižek on the architecture of the city and Sigmund Freud with his notion of the uncanny. The density of erudition keeps the book intriguing and provocative, but Beaumont wanders down some strange avenues, such as an essay arguing that "as a bipedal species, the human being begins with the big toe." Readers may also find that Williams's specifically male formulation of the walker isn't sufficiently challenged. Still, those interested in how literature has explored urban modernity are sure to find ample food for thought.
