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The Walker: On Losing and Finding Yourself in the Modern City
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About This Book
A literary history of walking from Dickens to Zizek There is no such thing as the wrong step; every time we walk we are going somewhere. Moving around the modern city becomes more than from getting from A to B, but a way of understanding who and where you are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont, retraces a history of the walker. From Charles Dicken's insomniac night rambles to wandering through the faceless, windswept monuments of the neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances and potential revolution. Pacing stride for stride alongside such literary amblers and thinkers as Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Matthew Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. He asks can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? Can we save the city - or ourselves - by taking the pavement?
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Reviews
"Beaumont's claim that 'walking became a self-conscious activity in the nineteenth century' is an exaggeration, but his writers all depict the existential angst created by drifting, vagrancy and getting lost in a modern urban labyrinth ..."
"The essays in this volume predate Covid-19, some by several years, yet they offer an uncanny and haunting foreshadowing of our cities as they now appear to us ..."
"Ray Bradbury is endowed with his own section while Walter Benjamin, as significant a figure imaginable where such subjects are concerned, hovers at the edges of scenes, solicitously holding up a tray of useful quotations ..."
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