The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City

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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 There is no such thing as the wrong step; every time we walk we are going somewhere. 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 including Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury. 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.

Reviews

[The Walker] is an erudite book that moves at a pace alternating between brisk and leisurely Like his prose, Beaumonts 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 suspectsfrom Marx, Freud and Adorno through Lacan and Derrida, to Deleuze and Guattari, iek and Agambenare never gratuitous, but always helpful in understanding the literary, historical, and psychological terrain he explores.
Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal

Matthew Beaumonts 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 [Beaumonts] 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 youre looking for some escapism that goes beyond the clichs of repetitive travel literature, this could well be the book for you.
Northern Soul

[Beaumonts] style is a treatelegant, 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 iek.
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 OHagan, 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 [Beaumonts] commentary, justly inviting a readers 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 flneur poet of the Parisian dispossessed of another time, would surely have approved.
Sean OHagan, Guardian

Author Bio

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.