Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London: Chaucer to Dickens - Brossura

Beaumont, Matthew

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1784783781 ISBN 13: 9781784783785

Casa editrice: Verso Books, 2016

Riassunto

""Nightwalking is, in both the physical and the moral meanings of the term, deviant. At night, in other words, the idea of wandering cannot be dissociated from the idea of erring - wanderring. This elision or semantic slurring is present in the final lines of John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), where the poet offers a glimpse, for perpetuity, of Adam and Eve, after their expulsion from Paradise, entering the post-lapsarian world on foot: 'They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.' Wandering steps. In a double sense, Adam and Eve are errant: at once itinerant and aberrant. They are condemned to a life of ceaseless, restless sinfulness. ""--

Su questo libro

Recensione:

“A wonderful book, that has many fascinating things to say about the night-time life of our capital down the ages. Rarely has a book on the subject of darkness been so illuminating; all insomniacs should read it.”
—Ian Thomson, Evening Standard

“An enthralling study of city life and creativity ... impressive, magisterial ... A copy of Nightwalking should be the indispensable handbook for creative writing classes from Ayrshire to East Anglia.”
—Robert McCrum, Observer

“Part literary criticism, part social history, part polemic, this is a haunting addition to the canon of psychogeography.”
—Financial Times

“An important and lively book.”
—Times Higher Education

“A lively and learned study ... a book that remains personal in tone even when it is flexing its considerable intellectual muscle.”
—Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Guardian

“Rarely has a book about darkness been so illuminating.”
—Spectator (“Books of the Year”)

“One of the most brilliant of the younger generation of English critics.”
—Terry Eagleton

“Nothing less than a grand unifying theory of the counter-enlightenment.”
—Will Self

“He releases an ancient, urban miasma that rises from the page, untroubled by electric illumination, allowing us to inhale what Shakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Dekker called ‘that thick tobacco-breath which the rheumaticke night throws abroad.’”
—Independent

“Teeming and glorious ... Matthew Beaumont probes far into the shadows.”
—Alexandra Harris, Times Literary Supplement

“This is a book pulsing with life, just as the streets do, despite attempts to cut that liminal, semi-illicit life off. The foreword and afterword, by Will Self, beautifully bracket the book, reinforcing the idea that the city is layered over time, and that each layer is accessible, and can be made vivid in the imagination. Why Nightwalking has not won a major award is beyond mine.”
—Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

“In Nightwalking, Matthew Beaumont rubs shoulders with the deviants, dissidents and dispossessed who lurk in the shadows of Shakespeare, Johnson, Blake and De Quincey.”
—Mark Sanderson, Evening Standard (“The Best Books About London”)

“The joy of Beaumont’s book is the way it illuminates both literature and urban politics through the splendors and panics of their nighttime journeys.”
—Flavorwire

“A historical guide to the capital, Beaumont details everything including the ‘villainous’ common nightwalkers and prostitutes of the middle ages and Charles Dickens’s time as an insomniac.”
—Dazed & Confused

L'autore:

Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900 (2005), and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He has also edited Restless Cities (2010). He lives and walks in London.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Verso Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1784783781
• ISBN 13: 9781784783785
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 484