Bowlby, R; (2019) Romantic Walking and Railway Realism. In: Chao, S-L and Corrigan, JM, (eds.) Romantic Legacies: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts. Routledge: New York, US.

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Abstract

In Romantic literature, walking is often a way of thinking: in the writings of Rousseau and Wordsworth, it is the solitary philosophical “promenade” through a natural landscape at once far from the distractions of the modern world and of interest in itself. But after Romanticism, the rural walker becomes a passenger, as the path is taken over by the railway. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that railways began at the same moment as realism, in the late 1820s: at the end of Romanticism, we could say. What does the railway do to the walking imagination and the imagination of walking? Far from the indefinite passages of a ramble, the train journey is a direct and regular movement between predetermined points. But hitherto unseen worlds appear via this new mode of travel cutting its straight, level lines. And the older reflective walker now appears, romantically, as an anachronism, a figure in a pre-industrial landscape—as if seen from the train window. With examples from Rousseau’s Confessions, Nerval’s Promenades et souvenirs, and Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbevilles, amongst others, this chapter looks at some possible relations between realism, Romanticism, and the railway: that carrier of new kinds of post-Romantic narrative prospect.

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