wanderlust

A History of Walking.

With profiles of some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction,
‹Wanderlust› offers a provocative and profound examination of the interplay
between the body, the imagination and the world around the walker.

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 Mothers of the
Plaza de Mayo, from Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet to André Breton’s Nadja –
Wanderlust offers a provocative and profound examination of the interplay
between the body, the imagination, and the world around the walker.