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.

Discusses the topic of walking through a range of interdisciplinary material including literature, visual art, philosophy, and film

Brings together an impressive array of international scholars, critics, and artists

Offers complex visions and reinterpretations of a human's relation to modernity.

Table of contents

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.

(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

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

Notes on Contributors

Bibliography

Index