The Spectator and the City in 19th Century American Literature

In this book Brand traces the origin of the flaneur, a detached and powerful urban spectator, to seventeenth century English literature. He then discusses the development of the English language tradition of the flaneur in its social, cultural and philosophical contexts. Taking the encounter with the spectator and city life as an important point of contact with modernity, Brand offers new readings of three of the most important American writers of the nineteenth century, Poe, Hawthorne, and Whitman, and the way in which, at various points in their work, each author represents a spectator who looks at a city crowd and responds to it as an entertaining spectacle, tracing the similarities and the differences that distinguish each author in his common search for literary forms adequate to the rush of city life.

• Scholarly study of the spectator motif in American literature • Some overlap with English Lit. as the motif is traced back to the seventeenth century

1. The Flaneur and modernity; 2. The development of the Flaneur in England; 3. The Flaneur in the nineteenth century; 4. The Flaneur in America; 5. From the Flaneur to the detective: interpreting the city of Poe; 6. The urban spectator in Hawthorne\'s sketches; 7. The Blythedale Romance and the culture of modernity; 8. \'Immense phantom concourse\': Whitman and the urban crowd; 9. Conclusion; 10. Works cited.