Wanderlust : a history of walking / Rebecca Solnit.
Publication details: London : Granta Books, 2014.Description: xv, 326 pages ; 20 cmISBN:- 9781783780396 (pbk.)
- 1783780398 (pbk.)
- 796.5109 23
- GV199.5 .S65 2014
- 76.12
| Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item reserves | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Melbourne Athenaeum Library | Non-Fiction | 796.51 SOL | Available | 070553 |
Originally published: New York: Viking, 2000.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Machine generated contents note: I.The Pace of Thoughts -- 1.Tracing a Headland: An Introduction -- 2.The Mind at Three Miles an Hour -- 3.Rising and Falling: The Theorists of Bipedalism -- 4.The Uphill Road to Grace: Some Pilgrimages -- 5.Labyrinths and Cadillacs: Walking into the Realm of the Symbolic -- II.From the Garden to the Wild -- 6.The Path Out of the Garden -- 7.The Legs of William Wordsworth -- 8.A Thousand Miles of Conventional Sentiment: The Literature of Walking -- 9.Mount Obscurity and Mount Arrival -- 10.Of Walking Clubs and Land Wars -- III.Lives of the Streets -- 11.The Solitary Stroller and the City -- 12.Paris, or Botanizing on the Asphalt -- 13.Citizens of the Streets: Parties, Processions and Revolutions -- 14.Walking After Midnight: Women, Sex and Public Space -- IV.Past the End of the Road -- 15.Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanized Psyche -- 16.The Shape of a Walk -- 17.Las Vegas, or the Longest Distance Between Two Points.
What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? In this first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories to create a range of possibilities for this most basic act. Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the poets of the Romantic Age, from the perambulations of the Surrealists to the ascents of mountaineers. With profiles of some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction - from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Rousseau to Argentina's Mother of the Plaza de Mayo, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja - Wanderlust offers a provocative and profound examination of the interplay between the body, the imagination, and the world around the walker.
