Sketches of the nineteenth century

"Taking issue with Walter Benjamin's critique of the flaneur and of feuilleton writing about the city, this new study reveals the central significance of metropolitan sketches within nineteenth-century culture. As a dynamic form of cognition, sketches transform models of visual and printed media (panorama and encyclopedia) and of life science (physiology) into a kind of sociology, presenting a self-critique of the middle class on the brink of industrial modernity."--BOOK JACKET.