Wanderlust : a history of walking
Rebecca Solnit (Author)
Author Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories -- of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores -- to create a portrait of the range of possibilities for this most basic act. Arguing that walking as history signifies walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit hones 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 the mountaineers
History
1 online resource (viii, 326 pages) : illustrations
9780786523924, 9781101199558, 0786523921, 1101199555
773693605
AcknowledgmentsI. The Pace of Thoughts1. Tracing a Headland: An Introduction3. The Mind at Three Miles an Hour3. Rising and Falling: The Theorists of Bipedalism4. The Uphill Road to Grace: Some Pilgrimages5. Labyrinths and Cadillacs: Walking into the Realm of the SymbolicII. From the Garden to the Wild6. The Path Out of the Garden7. The Legs of William Wordsworth8. A Thousand Miles of Conventional Sentiment: The Literature of Walking9. Mount Obscurity and Mount Arrival10. Of Walking Clubs and Land WarsIII. Lives of the Streets11. The Solitary Stroller and the City12. Paris, or Botanizing on the Asphalt13. Citizens of the Streets: Parties, Processions, and Revolutions14. Walking After Midnight: Women, Sex, and Public SpaceIV. Past the End of the Road15. Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanized Psyche16. The Shape of a Walk17. Las Vegas, or the Longest Distance Between Two PointsNotesIndexSources for Foot Quotations