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NEW FROM VERSO: NIGHTWALKING: A NOCTURNAL HISTORY OF LONDON BY MATTHEW BEAUMONT FOREWORD BY WILL SELF A captivating literary portrait of the writers who explore the city at night, and the people they met. http://www.versobooks.com/books/1851-nightwalking To read the recent review of NIGHTWALKING in the Independent, go here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/nightwalking-a-nocturnal-history-of-london-from-chaucer-to-dickens-by-matthew-beaumont-book-review-10072410.html To read the recent review of NIGHTWALKING in the Times Higher Education, go here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/nightwalking-a-nocturnal-history-of-london-by-matthew-beaumont/2018658.article ------------ UPCOMING AUTHOR EVENTS Matthew Beaumont in conversation with Lauren Elkin about his latest book, Nightwalking. London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Place, London, WC1A 2JL Wednesday March 25th 2015 7.00pm-8.00pm http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/events/2015/3/nightwalking-matthew-beaumont-and-lauren-elkin Matthew Beaumont gives a lecture as part UCL's Urban Lab's Nocturnal City series, exploring how the introduction of gaslight and electric lighting into cities led to the expansion of urban night-time activity. UCL, Medawar G01 Lankester Lecture Theatre, Malet Place, London, WC1H 0AT Thursday March 26th 2015 6.15pm-7.30pm http://www.versobooks.com/events/1041-nightwalking ------------ “Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,” wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today – home to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun’s down. If nightwalking is a matter of “going astray” in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city. In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets. With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a captivating literary portrait of the writers who explore the city at night and the people they meet. ------------ Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900 (2005), and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He has edited or co-edited several collections of essays: As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century; The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble; Adventures in Realism; and Restless Cities. ------------ “One of the most brilliant of the younger generation of English critics.” – Terry Eagleton “Matthew Beaumont excavates strata upon strata of literary sources to help us find the answer. In the process he both explores the night side of some of English literature's greatest writers and resurrects many unjustly forgotten voices, who in their turn give flickering life to the denizens of London's darkness: the vagrant, the fallen, the alienated and the dispossessed.” – Independent “Nothing less than a grand unifying theory of the counter-enlightenment.” – Will Self “While Nottingham lays claim to D. H. Lawrence and Hull to Philip Larkin, and even Nuneaton has George Eliot, London hardly need bother to boast of its riches: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, Blake, Dickens. Beaumont not only documents the kinds of inspiration that London offers each of these literary giants, but he also does so in a way that places the city at the very heart of their artistic achievements.” – Times Higher Education ------------ HARDBACK: MARCH 2015 / 496 pages / ISBN: 9781781687956 / £20 / $29.95 / $35 (Canada) NIGHTWALKING is available at a 40% discount on our website, with free shipping and bundled ebook. 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