The Flâneur

Abstract

The flâneur is an urban type who first emerges in early nineteenth-century Paris, understood as a wanderer in and voyeur of the modern city. This entry discusses, first, the origins of this type and its significance for nineteenth-century Paris and its literature, including Balzac and Baudelaire. The significance of Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the flâneur in its classical heyday is also addressed. Second, the entry outlines the reinvention of the flâneur in the modernist period and the development of his female counterpart, the flâneuse. The contributions of Hope Mirrlees, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Louis Aragon, and James Joyce are highlighted. Non-European literary presentations of the flâneur in the modernist period are also discussed. Finally, the entry considers the resurgence of literary and filmic representations of the flâneur and flâneuse since around 1980. Under the ongoing influence of theorists such as Guy Debord and Michel de Certeau, as well as of the original flâneurs of the nineteenth century, recent writers and directors including Iain Sinclair, W.G. Sebald, Rebecca Solnit, Orhan Pamuk, Don DeLillo, Patrick Keiller, Jonathan Glazer, Teju Cole, and Lauren Elkin are shown to have continued to innovate with the literary and conceptual potential of the figure.