Abstract

The scenic walk— the saunter— remains the product of Romantic-era epistemology and rapidly transforming transportation infrastructure. In its modes and motives as well as its destinations—the earliest of which include England’s Lake District and America’s Catskills—the saunter imagines itself to be a simple reflective stroll in nature, a natural act of feeling and freedom. A sensitive walker moves through a picturesque spot, with emotional knowledge that comes as naturally as art that appears to be nature’s own. Walking automatically becomes feeling, the result of a solitary self in an ideal landscape. The scenic walker, a tourist who thinks of herself as an artist, celebrates freedom as a retreat from society. And yet, as Buzard, Fussell, and others have noted, walking tourists who ramble off the beaten path become transformative, economically as well as physically. They bring a demand for transportation to their walks— steamboats, railways, roads—accelerating the technological changes that make walking meaningful. That demand, plus nineteenth-century increases in urbanization, purchasing power, and leisure time meant that what seemed to be a function of nature or feeling was a thoroughly social phenomenon. For the saunterer through the Catskills and through the Lakes, both eye and gait were markers of social class, of manners as well as taste. And thus, one implication of the saunter is that it erases its own aestheticized cultural and ecological content in the emotive wash of simplicity, liberty, and escape, simultaneously sanctioning the economies it tries to forget.

Presenters

Mark Minster
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Indiana, United States

Details

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Theme

2024 Special Focus—Tourism, Leisure and Change: Transforming People and Places

KEYWORDS

Walking, Freedom, Transportation, Historical

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