Chapter 5 examines how early nineteenth-century accounts of walking in the city traced the nuisances and delights of urban living, helping to articulate a sense of collective experience that in turn shaped a sense of what it meant to be a Londoner. Many of these accounts of London emphasized the modernity of their moment by reimagining earlier eighteenth-century works, presenting them as inadequate to the task of describing the contemporary experience of the city. Trivia’s “art of walking the streets of London” was reworked to propose forms of selfish behaviour in the streets, and Pierce Egan’s Life in London broadly followed the template of spy guides while also showing his characters delighting in, rather than simply observing, all aspects of urban pleasure. Together, these works suggested new ways of thinking about moving through the streets of a city as crowded and busy as London.

This chapter will lay out a potted account of the literature of New York and its relationship to world literature braiding two main themes: first will be that of New York as a center of self-invention, a place that was primarily commercial at its inception but progressively expanded to embrace diverse forms of ethnic, cultural, sexual, and urban interactions. And second will be to focus on the significance of neighborhoods and sweatshops as the spatial vectors through which immigrants and diasporics gain a sense of New York. The bulk of the chapter and will be devoted to a close analysis of the chronotopes of the neighborhood and the sweatshop in Toni Morrison’sJazzand Melissa Rivero’sThe Affairs of the Falcónsrespectively as a means of grasping the relationship between localized foci of individual mobility, identity, and alienation in the literature of New York and the ways in which we might also discern these as key organizing principles of world literature.

Each of the individuals considered in the book had a different relationship to landscape. This reflected the varying circumstances, situations, events and influences (including cultural influences) that shaped their lives. Despite these contrasts, it is possible to identify four broad groupings. Adherers like Hallam and Cresswell were motivated by a passionate need to maintain their connection with a cherished past. Rural landscapes associated with this past served as a guarantee of its continuity. Withdrawers such as Dickinson and Spear Smith sought to escape from an oppressive present, be that family tensions and social prejudice as in Dickinson’s case, or Spear Smith’s vocational difficulties. Restorers turned to the countryside as a place in which they could reconnect with and re-energize belief systems that had been challenged, disrupted or pushed aside by personal exigencies or professional demands – medical practice for Johnston and probation work for Bissell. Finally, Explorers like Barmes and Catley valued rural landscapes above all as sites of self-discovery and self-development.

A long walking tour is an arduous form of pilgrimage with the potential to transform the walker. The Japanese island of Shikoku, with its eighty-eight-temple circuit, is the most famous Buddhist walking pilgrimage. Two Western writers, Oliver Statler and Robert Sibley, depict how this demanding walk affected them, although they are modest about claiming to have been transformed. The legend of Kobo Daishi shapes their encounters and experiences on the Shikoku circuit. Another traditional form of Buddhist pilgrimage is visiting sites important in the Buddha’s life. Two Englishmen, Ajahn Sucitto and Nick Scott, wrote two volumes about their 700-mile journey through India and Nepal. The contrasting perspectives of the Theravada monk and his devoted friend and student reveal their different temperaments and religious insights, which are evident in the ways each of them experiences unselfing and understands Buddhist ideas of no-self. Walking provides many opportunities for these pilgrims to discern the self’s ceaseless arising and dissipation and to practice patient returning to the present moment.

Infant motor skill acquisition is so rapid and dramatic that a century of researchers – and eons of parents – have marveled at the scope of developmental change. At birth, infants are essentially prisoners of gravity, unable to lift their heads from their caregivers’ chest. But by 2 years of age, infants can “pluck a pellet with fine pincer prehension” (Gesell, 1929, p. 132) and race on two feet across the living room floor. This remarkable transformation in action characterizes the development of basic motor skills – posture for supporting the body against gravitational and inertial forces, manual skills for interacting with objects and surfaces, and locomotion for moving the body through the environment (Adolph & Berger, 2015).

This chapter focuses on the representation of young protagonists and the city space in a select number of children’s realist novels, published from the mid part of the twentieth century to the present day, that are set in New York City – Manhattan to be exact. In particular, it analyses the ability of young characters to upend traditional power structures, to navigate and understand urban environments, and in so doing see the possibilities for the transformation of self. In many children’s texts set in New York empowerment is depicted as only possible through direct engagement with the city, a landscape Michel de Certau describes as ‘a space of enunciation’ where the act of walking in the city offers the opportunity for subversion and transformation. This is a city that is always in the process of becoming. As a result, the parallels with childhood experience and coming of age are immediately apparent.

This chapter examines the representation of walking within the modern novels of New York. In American literature, walking the city seems to incarnate some coincidence between the uncertainties of discourse and the fluctuations of a place that is both circumscribed and open to the unknown. Walking the city cannot simply be considered as the pretext of a realist description nor simply associated with an abstract means of enunciation either. The act of walking reveals the manner in which writers sense and recite what may be no more than an emotion: an experience of the influx of fragments, of the grating notes and inflexions that nonetheless constitute the city. Walking the streets of New York, in American fiction, therefore simultaneously emblematizes the metatextual questioning of a discourse that is now conscious of its own limitations and the involvement of this discourse in the sensitive diversity of the world. Indeed, far from estranging the text from the world, far from alienating words into some reflexive abstraction, far from secluding discourse into some intransitive, self–sufficient construct, the consideration of the limits of language makes the very substance of the novel vibrate with endless possibilities.

This chapter examines the role of selection in driving certain aspects of pelvic morphology, particularly the differences between mediolateral breadths and anteroposterior breadths. The chapter is divided into three sections, representing the three key selection pressures researchers have spent the most time on – namely, obstetrics, locomotion and thermoregulation. Data for the role of each of these on pelvic morphology are considered, as is discussion of the myriad ways human populations have mixed and matched morphological traits to manage these selection pressures. Clearly, there is not a single strategy for handling the interactive nature of these pressures.

The Epilogue returns us to Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne (1789) to illuminate the last novel in Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). We can better grasp Trollope’s novel of a geographically bounded fictional reality by remembering the way White established reverent natural history as a local and bounded subject deep into the nineteenth-century. Trollope’s Barsetshire Chronicles are likewise local and devoted to capturing an ecology: for Trollope the ecology is social, for White it is natural. Trollope’s provincial realism dilates upon the ordinary that is typical of natural history informed by a natural theological worldview, but is a distinctly different iteration of English provincial realism than Austen, Eliot, Kingsley, or Gaskell in that there is little description of nature; instead, Trollpe focuses on the human world of Barsetshire. The epilogue focuses on the novel’s absence of event or plotlessness as an extreme example of the focus on the everyday; in the form of the novel there is a persistent religiosity that is reflected as well in the thematic focus on Rev. Crawley’s marginality as expressed in scenes of walking and weather.

We know a great deal about Brahms’s professional activities, thoughts about music and musicians, and general views on politics and culture, from his voluminous surviving correspondence. These letters and the reminiscences of his friends also trace his personal habits – what his daily routine was like, his enjoyment of food, drink, and tobacco, his delight in pranks and walking in the outdoors, his peculiar attire and occasional curmudgeonliness.

For Brahms, holidays did not just mean a nice break; they constituted important or even essential periods of composition. This is best seen through the example of his First Symphony Op. 68: as is well known, it had its roots in a birthday greeting of 12 September 1868 to Clara Schumann, in which Brahms notated an alphorn call he allegedly heard during a walk from Grindelwald to Lauterbrunnen. He then worked on the symphony in summer 1874 in Rüschlikon (near Zurich) and in 1876 in Sassnitz on the island of Rügen where he enjoyed the landscape. As he wrote to his publisher Fritz Simrock, the Symphony ‘was dangling’ from the Wissower Klinken cliffs, the famous chalk formations on the east coast of the island. The manuscript was finally completed in September 1876 in Lichtenthal, near the fashionable spa town of Baden-Baden, where the composer often stayed.

‘Today, my dear wife, née Nissen, successfully delivered a healthy boy. 7th May 1833. J. J. Brahms.’ Thus, on 8 May 1833Johann Jakob Brahms announced the birth of his first son Johannes in the local paper, the Privileged Weekly General News of and for Hamburg (Privilegirte wöchentliche gemeinnützige Nachrichten von und für Hamburg). At a time when such announcements were the exception, this was a clear sign of pride. Johann Jakob Brahms or Brahmst, as he also spelled it, was born on 1 June 1806 in Heide in Holstein, the second son of the innkeeper and trader Johann Brahms, who had moved to Heide from Brunsbüttel via Meldorf. His ancestors were from Lower Saxony. Johann Jakob completed a five-year apprenticeship as a city wait in Heide and Wesselburen, during which he learned the flugelhorn, flute, violin, viola and cello, then standard instruments. In early 1826, the young journeyman began his travels with his certificate of apprenticeship, received in December 1825.