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16+ Works 454 Members 8 Reviews

About the Author

Matthew Beaumont is a senior lecturer in the department of English at University College London.
Image credit: from University College, London faculty page

Works by Matthew Beaumont

Associated Works

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) — Editor, some editions — 7,011 copies
Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (2009) — Contributor — 79 copies
The Public Domain Review: Selected Essays, Vol. III (2016) — Contributor — 3 copies

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Common Knowledge

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Reviews

i really enjoyed this, my first foray into book-length lit crit. i kind of wish it had just been the lit crit parts because the sudden new architectural theory right at the end was definitely related thematically but felt textually like it was pulled from a different book. still really good though!
 
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i. | 3 other reviews | Oct 30, 2022 |
A collection of essays by an english literature academic loosely concerned with walking and its relationship to, well just about everything. Particularly liked the one on 'Where does the body begin?' The answer being the big toe, being essential to bipedalism, the consequent ability of humans to use tools and therefore to develop a bigger brain. The big toe - the reason for human civilisation.
 
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Steve38 | 3 other reviews | Sep 8, 2022 |
I really wanted to like this more. It is a worthy and well-researched piece of work, which explores various guises of the flaneur throughout literature, but it reads as a very dry academic text, with copious footnotes and that air of ivory-tower floweriness of language.

A book like this needs, for a general audience, some interaction between the author, the subject and the reader - which does come, but frustratingly only in the final chapter when the author loosens the bonds of academic strictures and dares to insert himself into the text, as he himself walks the city. This is what was needed throughout; other successful books which manage this transition from dry academic tome to accessible general text should have provided a template for what would have worked.

There is no denying the research and intelligence behind the book. It just needed a good editor to request a re-write for a more general audience. This book, I fear, is destined for the dusty shelves of libraries and the studies of academics only. Which is a shame.
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Alan.M | 3 other reviews | Nov 20, 2020 |
Beaumont's thesis is that utopias aren't really imagined as real places, either in time or space, but they're just ghosts of the present. In fact, utopias can only be good if they are are imagined-- otherwise they become malignant. He sees both an inability to enact real change (12) and a collective conviction of imminent change (29) that gives birth to these narratives of the future where everything has already changed. It's impossible for us to imagine what comes between 1887 and 2000 in the subtitle of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, for example, but that's where the real action of the novel is. Much of his book is about Bellamy's novel, which makes sense given how influential it was, but it's almost too much; sometimes I wanted him to broaden his outward a bit more. But he does touch on 1890s feminist utopianism, Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man under Socialism" (he says Wilde has just dressed up capitalist progressive platitudes in wittier language), and H. G. Wells (specifically The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and When the Sleeper Wakes), and presents provocative readings of them.

Some of the book reminded me about Peter Paik's excellent From Utopia to Apocalypse: we find it impossible to really imagine ourselves doing what needs to be done to change things. Either we skip over the intervening time, or we imagine a vague "progress" will handle it for us, or we let a natural disaster do the work for us. A book to come back to, and a strong development of strands begun in Beaumont's Utopia Ltd., even though I read them the wrong way round!
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Stevil2001 | Nov 18, 2016 |

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