A Trajectory of Human Imagination from Walking to Flying Saucers

The present book is a wonderful initiative to bring to the contemporary readership the rich tradition of 'the literature of walking.' It establishes the links between the act of walking and the art of writing through the Romantics, the modern urban flâneur and the concept of Benjamin's 'ambulatory gaze.' It also locates a more postmodern response of walking as protest against the urgency of the automobile. The book can be a wonderful reference material for not just the researchers of 18th-19th century literature and philosophy but also for students of cultural studies and postmodernism who face in Artificial Intelligence a far more formidable foe than ambivalence and indecisiveness and which seems to be threatening the very nature in which humankind is likely to behave in days to come. From the 'Foreword' of Prof. Saroj Kumar Mahananda, Professor, Department of English, Faculty of Humanities and Languages, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.