Lifelong Learning Lecture: “Walking: Keeping Company with Literature’s Most Obsessive Pedestrians”
Writing and walking have always shared an association. Wordsworth clocked over 175,000 miles of walking with his sister and his friend Coleridge, climbing in the Alps, as well as in more pastoral Grasmere. This lecture will follow a number of authors and their fictional characters on their excursions. Wordsworth on his rambles, many of which resulted in poems, most famously, his surprise encounter with a whole line of daffodils which he later recalled in the inward eye of solitude; Dickens, who thought nothing of tramping 30 miles into the country, even after long night walks in London, making metaphoric use of the activity in several of his novels. Finally, the lecture will examine other literary walkers, real ones like Thoreau and Virginia Woolf, and in several novels, exploring the relationship between walking and literary composition.
Register: http://bit.ly/FPL-Lifelong-Learning-Lectures.