Re-Imagining the Streets of Paris

The present monograph is concerned with the origins and evolution of the French literary flaneur from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The flaneur is a figure that illustrates the development and dynamics of the modern metropolis and its impact on the literary discourse from a formal as well as a thematic perspective. Thus, the study of this urban type can shed light on the artists’ response to the challenge of the modernisation of the city, and the unfolding of new literary techniques to solve the problem of urban representation. This study deals not only with well-known writers such as Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Honoré de Balzac, Louis Huart, Charles Baudelaire or Gustave Flaubert, but it also brings to light a wide range of forgotten novels, sketches and journalistic essays published in the nineteenth century that offer remarkable and hitherto neglected accounts of Paris.