The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth Century American Literature

In this publication, Dana Brand traces the origin of the flaneur, a detached and powerful urban spectator, to seventeenth-century English literature and to nineteenth-century American literature. Brand then offers his own readings of three of the most important American writers of the nineteenth century, Poe, Hawthorne, and Whitman.

In this publication, Brand traces the origin of the flaneur, a detached, casual, and powerful urban spectator, who regards the metropolis as an entertaining spectacle and text, of 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 his own 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.