Walking and the Aesthetics of Modernity: Pedestrian Mobility in Literature and the Arts

This book gathers together an array of international scholars, critics, and artists concerned with the issue of walking as a theme in modern literature, philosophy, and the arts. Covering a wide array of authors and media from eighteenth-century fiction writers and travelers to contemporary film, digital art, and artists’ books, the essays collected here take a broad literary and cultural approach to the art of walking, which has received considerable interest due to the burgeoning field of mobility studies. Contributors demonstrate how walking, far from constituting a simplistic, naïve, or transparent cultural script, allows for complex visions and reinterpretations of a human’s relation to modernity, introducing us to a world of many different and changing realities.

Klaus Benesch is Professor of English and American Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. He is the author of Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance.

François Specq is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, France.