Author(s): Matthew Beaumont

Culture | Literature | History

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 Dickens'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?

As the author shows, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances and potential revolution, and explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life.

Review: "[The Walker] is an erudite book that moves at a pace alternating between brisk and leisurely ... Like his prose, Beaumont's mind is anything but pedestrian. He is as attuned to matters of medicine and science, anthropology, economics, philosophy and psychology as he is to literature and the visual arts ... Beaumont uses the language of contemporary literary theory, but with none of the rebarbative jargon-mongering of others in the professoriate. His references to the usual suspects-from Marx, Freud and Adorno through Lacan and Derrida, to Deleuze and Guattari, Zizek and Agamben-are never gratuitous, but always helpful in understanding the literary, historical, and psychological terrain he explores."
-Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal

"Matthew Beaumont's prose is the golden thread of elegance and erudition we need to guide us through the labyrinth of the modern city. These essays confirm him to be simultaneously the possessor of a coherent and convincing overview of emergent Modernist thought and creativity in the urban context, and the inheritor of all the radical subjectivities he engages with. This is a superb and always engrossing collection."
-Will Self, author of Psychogeography

"[The Walker] is absolutely fascinating and [Beaumont's] literary references are wonderful ... I absolutely loved it."
-Jo Good, BBC Radio London

"The Walker seeks to take its reader on an intriguing journey ... if you're looking for some escapism that goes beyond the cliches of repetitive travel literature, this could well be the book for you."
-Northern Soul

"[Beaumont's] style is a treat-elegant, intelligent and entertaining as he describes the ways we read a city with our feet and mind, and guides us through a history of walking writing from Dickens and Poe to Marx and Zizek."
-Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times

"An uncanny and haunting foreshadowing of our cities as they now appear to us ... familiar subjects are given revelatory new interpretations ... thought-provoking."
-Margaret Drabble, Times Literary Supplement

"Drawing on numerous literary sources, both familiar and obscure, Beaumont takes the reader on a labyrinthine journey into the literature of walking and thinking."
-Sean O'Hagan, Observer

"[A] heady blend of history and theory."
-New Yorker

"Fascinating ... those interested in how literature has explored urban modernity are sure to find ample food for thought."
-Publishers Weekly

"Dazzling."
-Eminetra

"Dazzlingly erudite."
-Chris Moss, Guardian

"Elegantly written and compellingly argued ... A highly commendable, engaging, and thoroughly researched study, The Walker infuses the poetics of walking with the politics of homing."
- Maxim Shadurski , English Studies

"Striking ... a poetic heft rings resoundingly throughout [Beaumont's] commentary, justly inviting a reader's own imagined extensions."
-Patrick James Dunagan, Rain Taxi Review of Books

"From start to finish a delight to read, The Walker is the beginning of wisdom in all things metro-pedestrian."
-Ian Thomson, New Statesman

"[The Walker] fascinates and informs from beginning to end ... Beaumont has positioned himself as the foremost theorist of walking working in English literary studies today."
-Jeremy Withers, The Wellsian

"Intriguing ... The Walker celebrates the secret, subversive life of cities and the people who pace their streets."
-Jane Shilling, Daily Mail

"[A] well-researched work of literary criticism."
-Hannah Beckerman, Observer

"Drawing on numerous literary sources, both familiar and obscure, Beaumont takes the reader on a labyrinthine journey into the literature of walking and thinking ... Baudelaire, the flaneur poet of the Parisian dispossessed of another time, would surely have approved."
-Sean O'Hagan, Guardian

Author Biography: Matthew Beaumont is a Professor in the Department of English at University College, London. He is the the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic, and co-editor of Restless Cities. He is the author of the highly acclaimed Nightwalking.