This book is a collective effort to investigate and problematise notions of time and temporality in European travel writing from the late medieval period up to the late nineteenth century. It brings together nine researchers in European travel writing and covers a wide range of areas, travel genres, and languages, coherently integrated around the central theme of time and temporalities. Taken together, the contributions consider how temporal aspects evolve and change in regard to spatial, historical, and literary contexts. In a chapter-by-chapter account this volume thus offers various case studies that address the issue of temporality by showing, for example, how time is inscribed in landscape, how travellers’ encounters with other temporalities informed other disciplines; it interrogates the idea of "cultural temporalities" in regard to a tension between past and future, passivity and progression; and focuses on how time is entangled in identity construction proper to travelogues.

The volume asks how the literatures of the Americas and the Caribbean present multiple or internally differentiated spaces and how these are distinguished or traversed by different temporalities. The historical and (post)colonial experiences of these areas turns them into especially fertile ground for the exploration of the connections between landscape/geography and historical/temporal palimpsests as well as the specificities of literary form. The contributions are dedicated to individual, yet conceptually interconnected studies of staggered, multiple, non-simultaneous temporalities in modern and contemporary literature. The volume adopts a comparative perspective throughout and intends to foster the dialogue between the study of Latin/American and Caribbean literatures—in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Therefore, the individual essays are not grouped according to geographical or linguistic areas, but follow a trajectory from spatiotemporal constellations of the 19th century to ruined/catastrophic landscapes and the geopoetic inscriptions of time in regions. The essays should appeal to all readers interested in World Literature, Hemispheric Studies as well as temporal approaches to space and geography.

The book draws on the history of economics, literary theory, and the history of science to explore how European travelers like Alexander von Humboldt and their readers, circa 1750–1850, adapted the work of British political economists, such as Adam Smith, to help organize their observations, and, in turn, how political economists used travelers’ observations in their own analyses. Cooper examines journals, letters, books, art, and critical reviews to cast in sharp relief questions raised about political economy by contemporaries over the status of facts and evidence, whether its principles admitted of universal application, and the determination of wealth, value, and happiness in different societies. Travelers citing T.R. Malthus’s population principle blurred the gendered boundaries between domestic economy and British political economy, as embodied in the idealized subjects: domestic woman and economic man. The book opens new realms in the histories of science in its analyses of debates about gender in social scientific observation: Maria Edgeworth, Maria Graham, and Harriet Martineau observe a role associated with women and methodically interpret what they observe, an act reserved, in theory, by men.

Travel Writing and Re-Enactment: Echotourism explores the popular subgenre of travel narratives that re-enact historically prominent journeys. Drawing on philosopher Walter Benjamin, this monograph reads such re-enactments as quests for aura in which travellers seek to capture a sense of distinction and historical profundity. Travel Writing and Re-Enactment frames the re-enactment of past journeys in a number of contexts, including Benjamin’s writing on mechanical reproduction, Judith Butler’s work on gender performance, and postmodern parody. Echotourist journeys are surprisingly contingent and precarious, and force travellers to navigate historical changes involving empire, gender, and travel practice in densely performative ways. Through close readings of contemporary travel narratives, this monograph considers the legacies of Lord Byron, Charles Darwin, Graham Greene, Mary Kingsley, and Ernest Shackleton, among others. Travel Writing and Re-Enactment examines the way literary re-enactment expresses, and sometimes confounds, the desire to find meaning through travel in the contemporary world.

Broadly this book is about the Arabian desert as the locus of exploration by a long tradition of British travellers that includes T. E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger; more specifically, it is about those who, since 1950, have followed in their literary footsteps. In analysing modern works covering a land greater than the sum of its geographical parts, the discussion identifies outmoded tropes that continue to impinge upon the perception of the Middle East today while recognising that the laboured binaries of “East and West”, “desert and sown”, “noble and savage” have outrun their course. Where, however, only a barren legacy of latent Orientalism may have been expected, the author finds instead a rich seam of writing that exhibits diversity of purpose and insight contributing to contemporary discussions on travel and tourism, intercultural representation, and environmental awareness. By addressing a lack of scholarly attention towards recent additions to the genre, this study illustrates for the benefit of students of travel literature, or indeed anyone interested in “Arabia”, how desert writing, under the emerging configurations of globalisation, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism, acts as a microcosm of the kinds of ethical and emotional dilemmas confronting today’s travel writers in the world’s most extreme regions.

Traveling Bodies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Traveling as an Embodied Practice explores the central role the body has in and for traveling and thus complements and expands upon existing research in travel studies with new perspectives on and insights in the entanglement of bodies and traveling. The case studies assembled in this volume discuss a variety of traveling practices, experiences, and media with chapters featuring Asian, American, and European historical and contemporary perspectives. Truly interdisciplinary in its approach, the volume identifies and examines diverse literary, historical and cultural texts, contexts, and modes in which traveling and the body intersect, including ‘classic’ travelogues, (new) media (e.g., film, digital travel apps), surf culture, and travel-inspired tattoos. The contributions offer various avenues for further research, not only for scholars working with body theory and travel (writing), but also for anyone interested in the intersections of literature, culture, media, and embodied practices of traveling.

With the rise of mass tourism, Italy became increasingly accessible to Victorian women travellers not only as a locus of artistic culture but also as a site of political enquiry. Despite being outwardly denied a political voice in Britain, many female tourists were conspicuous in their commitment to the Italian campaign for national independence, or Risorgimento (1815–61). Revisiting Italy brings several previously unexamined travel accounts by women to light during a decisive period in this political campaign. Revealing the wider currency of the Risorgimento in British literature, Butler situates once-popular but now-marginalized writers: Clotilda Stisted, Janet Robertson, Mary Pasqualino, Selina Bunbury, Margaret Dunbar and Frances Minto Elliot alongside more prominent figures: the Shelley-Byron circle, the Brownings, Florence Nightingale and the Kemble sisters. Going beyond the travel book, she analyses a variety of forms of travel writing including unpublished letters, privately printed accounts and periodical serials. Revisiting Italy focuses on the convergence of political advocacy, gender ideologies, national identity and literary authority in women’s travel writing. Whether promoting nationalism through a maternal lens, politicizing the pilgrimage motif or reviving gothic representations of a revolutionary Italy, it identifies shared touristic discourses as temporally contingent, shaped by commercial pressures and the volatile political climate at home and abroad.

Ethics of Description: The Anthropological Dispositif and French Modern Travel Writing follows the development of a minor tradition in French literature where metropolitan authors traveling abroad demonstrate their awareness of the ethical conundrums of representing world peoples. During the colonial–modern era, currents of anthropological thought and representational practice are identifiable throughout society, and across literature, the arts, and the sciences. Collectively, they can be theorized as belonging to a dispositif, the anthropological dispositif. The modernization of anthropology serves as an ambivalent interlocutor for the realizations of the writers studied in this book about the difficulties of describing cultural realities that lie largely outside their ken. Anthropology motivates new literary representational strategies that are, alternatively, in keeping with scientific mandates or operate against them. Forty images are analyzed alongside literary works. A postcolonial chapter shows how the ethical awareness of the colonial–modern authors studied have impacted minority self-representation in contemporary France.

With the aim to write the history of Christianity in Scandinavia with Jerusalem as a lens, this book investigates the image – or rather the imagination – of Jerusalem in the religious, political, and artistic cultures of Scandinavia through most of the second millennium. Volume 3 analyses the impact of Jerusalem on Scandinavian Christianity from the middle of the 18. century in a broad context. Tracing the Jerusalem Code in three volumes Volume 1: The Holy City Christian Cultures in Medieval Scandinavia (ca. 1100–1536) Volume 2: The Chosen People Christian Cultures in Early Modern Scandinavia (1536–ca. 1750) Volume 3: The Promised Land Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–ca. 1920)

The volume Paradigms of Pilgrimage: FromDevotional Journey to (Religious)Tourism endeavours to present someinsights into the multi-layered significance of pilgrimage, starting from a theoretical approach and then addressing specific situations. The first two parts deal chronologically with instances of traditional images of pilgrimage and the last two parts move towards analysing modern and post-modern examples of journeys with a spiritual purpose. Each chapter is independent and provides an original rendering of the concept of pilgrimage. The authors use various approaches to discuss the notion of pilgrimage and the images interconnect creating an irregular, but harmonious mosaic. Le volume Paradigmes du pèlerinage : du voyage dévotionnel au tourisme (religieux) vise à présenter les différentes facettes du pèlerinage, en partant d'une approche théorique et en proposant ensuite des situations spéciiques. Les deux premières parti esexaminent, chronologiquement, les exemples d'images traditionnelles de pèlerinage tandis que les deux dernières parties s'orientent vers l'analyse d'exemples modernes et postmodernes des voyages à travers la spiritualité. Chaque chapitre est indépendant et montre une interprétation originale de la notion de pèlerinage. Les auteurs utilisent diverses approches pour discuter de la notion de pèlerinage et les images s'interconnectent en créant une mosaı̈que irrégulière, mais harmonieuse.