Foot Notes

Lively, adventurous and comprehensive, this book offers a fascinating account of the contemporary culture of pedestrianism and walking literature.

Walking now organizes writing in a beguiling variety of ways, by writers not merely thinking on their feet but with their feet.
Among them are Seamus Heaney, Annie Dillard, W.G. Sebald, Annie Ernaux, Peter Handke, Jamaica Kincaid, Bruce Chatwin, James Baldwin, Alice Oswald, Robert Macfarlane, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Teju Cole, Iain Sinclair, Anne Carson and Werner Herzog. They exploit the complementarity between walking, thinking and creation to devise eclectic, exploratory and meandering works that transgress generic boundaries and extend the range of literature. Foot Notes characterizes in literary, cultural and historical detail this burgeoning field of previously unclassified writing that reorients the literary from the ground up, one step at a time.

Contemporary walking texts have contributed to the revival of flânerie, hiking and pilgrimage, and to the transformation of the very category of the pedestrian. In the footsteps of Rousseau, the Wordsworths, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Woolf, the Surrealists, Benjamin and the Situationists, walking becomes not simply a theme but a means of treating themes; not only a vehicle for knowledge but an embodied form of thinking that can modify conceptions of public space, the environment and cognition itself. For marginalized groups whose mobility has historically been circumscribed, the walk entails a dissenting politics that has impelled gendered, racialized and indigenous writing.

Foot Notes considers the scale, diversity and impact of the growing contemporary walking literature in the context of the social forces, artistic practices and politics that this resurgence enables. The book shows that, far from exercises in retreat from the social, walking texts have been consequential for urbanism, conservation, sustainability, accessibility, equality and public health, while blazing new trails for literature.