Walking and the Aesthetics of Modernity [electronic resource] : Pedestrian Mobility in Literature and the Arts / edited by Klaus Benesch, François Specq.

Klaus Benesch and François Specq, Modern(s) Walking: An Introduction -- Part I. Poetics -- Emmanuelle Peraldo, Walking the streets of London in the eighteenth century: a performative art? -- Juliette Fabre, Musing, Painting & Writing: Walking as an Art in Diderot's Promenade Vernet (Salon de 1767) -- Estelle Murail, "Du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports": Baudelaire and De Quincey's flâneurs -- Thomas Pughe, How Poetry Comes to Him: An Excursion to Gary Snyder's Wild Poetics -- Lacy Rumsey, Revisiting the American "walk poem": A.R. Ammons, Charles Olson, and Jonathan Williams -- Part II. Performance -- Isabelle Baudino, Marianne Colston's Art of Walking: Gendering the Picturesque in Journal of a Tour in France, Switzerland, and Italy -- Bridget Sheridan, Following Footprints: photography, writing and the artist's book in art walking -- Gabrielle Finnane, Wayfaring in the Megacity: Tsai Ming Liang's Walker and Lav Diaz's Melancholia -- Tatiana Pogossian, The Art of Walking in Space and Time: the Quest for London -- Andrew Goodman, Walking with the world: towards an ecological approach to performative art practice -- Part III. Pathology -- Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay, The Art of Walking and the Mindscapes of Trauma in Thomas De Quincey's Autobiographical Works: The Pains of Wandering, the Pains of Remembering -- Sarah Mombert, Writing Dromomania in the Romantic Era: Nerval, Collins and Charlotte Brontë -- Catherine M. Welter, A Juggernaut in the Streets of London: Walking as Destructive Force in R.L. Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde -- Amélie Moisy, Thomas Wolfe and the urban night prowl: walking, modernism and myth -- Sophie Walon, Existential wanderings in Gus Van Sant's "Walking Trilogy": Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days -- Part IV. Politics -- Julien Nègre, Perambulating the village: Henry David Thoreau and the politics of "Walking" -- Virginia Ricard, Walking in Wartime: Edith Wharton's "The Look of Paris" -- Andrew S. Gross, Pound, Peripatetic Verse, and the Postwar Liberal Aesthetic -- Marie Mianowski, The art of the 'good step' in Colm Tóibín's Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (1987) -- Andrew Estes, Walking and Technology in the Fiction of Jennifer Egan: Moving towards the Posthuman. .

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.