Wanderlust A History of Walking

by Solnit, Rebecca

• ISBN13: 9780140286014
• ISBN10: 0140286012
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-06-01
• Publisher: Penguin Books

Summary

Drawing together many histories-of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores-Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction-from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja-finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.

Author Biography

Rebecca Solnit is the author of numerous books, including Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2003, she received the prestigious Lannan Literary Award.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
I. The Pace of Thoughts	1	(78)
Tracing a Headland: An Introduction	3	(11)
The Mind at Three Miles an Hour	14	(16)
Rising and Falling: The Theorists of Bipedalism	30	(15)
The Uphill Road to Grace: Some Pilgrimages	45	(19)
Labyrinths and Cadillacs: Walking into the Realm of the Symbolic	64	(15)
II. From the Garden to the Wild	79	(90)
The Path Out of the Garden	81	(23)
The Legs of William Wordsworth	104	(14)
A Thousand Miles of Conventional Sentiment: The Literature of Walking	118	(15)
Mount Obscurity and Mount Arrival	133	(15)
Of Walking Clubs and Land Wars	148	(21)
III. Lives of the Streets	169	(78)
The Solitary Stroller and the City	171	(25)
Paris, or Botanizing on the Asphalt	196	(18)
Citizens of the Streets: Parties, Processions, and Revolutions	214	(18)
Walking After Midnight: Women, Sex, and Public Space	232	(15)
IV. Past the End of the Road	247	(46)
Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanized Psyche	249	(18)
The Shape of a Walk	267	(10)
Las Vegas, or the Longest Distance Between Two Points	277	(16)
Notes	293	(26)
Index	319	(6)
Sources for Foot Quotations	325