Looks at how contemporary travel writing reflects gender, cultural history, and social class

To what extent do best-selling travel books, such as those by Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, Bruce Chatwin and Michael Palin, tell us as much about world politics as newspaper articles, policy documents and press releases? Debbie Lisle argues that the formulations of genre, identity, geopolitics and history at work in contemporary travel writing are increasingly at odds with a cosmopolitan and multicultural world in which 'everybody travels'. Despite the forces of globalization, common stereotypes about 'foreignness' continue to shape the experience of modern travel. The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing is concerned with the way contemporary travelogues engage with, and try to resolve, familiar struggles about global politics such as the protection of human rights, the promotion of democracy, the management of equality within multiculturalism and the reduction of inequality. This is a thoroughly interdisciplinary book that draws from international relations, literary theory, political theory, geography, anthropology and history.

Critics have long struggled to find a suitable category for travelogues. From its ancient origins to the present day, the travel narrative has borrowed elements from various genres - from epic poetry to literary reportage - in order to evoke distant cultures and exotic locales, and sometimes those closer to hand. Tim Youngs argues in this lucid and detailed Introduction that travel writing redefines the myriad genres it comprises and is best understood on its own terms. To this end, Youngs surveys some of the most celebrated travel literature from the medieval period until the present, exploring themes such as the quest motif, the traveler's inner journey, postcolonial travel and issues of gender and sexuality. The text culminates in a chapter on twenty-first-century travel writing and offers predictions about future trends in the genre, making this Introduction an ideal guide for today's students, teachers and travel writing enthusiasts.

Ranging from the early modern to the postcolonial, and dealing mainly with encounters in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, Perspectives on Travel Writing is a collection of new essays by international scholars that examines some of the various contexts of travel writing, as well as its generic characteristics. Contributions examine the similarities between autobiography and memoir, fiction, and travel writing, and attempt to define travel writing as a genre. Utilising a variety of approaches, the essays display a shared concern with what travel writing does and how it does it. The effects of encounter and border-crossing on gender, 'race', and national identity are considered throughout. The collection begins with a review of some of the problems and issues facing the scholar of travel writing and moves on to a detailed discussion of the qualities of travel writing and its related forms. It then presents in chronological order a number of case studies, before closing with a critical discussion of approaches to the subject. An essay collection with broad historical and geographical coverage, this volume should appeal to students and researchers of travel and travel-related literatures from across the Humanities.

This dissertation begins with the premise that the founding assumptions undergirding the interdisciplinary field of Tourism Studies have necessarily, if not inevitably, engendered a set of critical lacunae around race and ethnicity. Specifically, these assumptions have functioned to circumscribe any racial paradigm in which people of color are anything but the objects of touristic inquiry. "When the 'other' is ourselves: imperial legacies, tourist imaginaries, and the representation of difference in Chicana/o travel writing and cultural production" asks what subjectivities are (re)formed when the supposed "Other" is doing the touring, particularly when that someone encounters what she senses is an exoticized or fetishized reflection of herself. Through an examination of Chicana/o memoirs, visual art, and fiction that center Mexican-American (actual and imagined, factual and fictionalized) experiences of touristic mobility, this study considers new and different questions about identity, difference, and representation in literary and cultural discourses.

This book takes a new approach to travel writing about Latin America by examining ‘domestic’ journey narratives that have been produced by travellers from the continent itself and largely in Spanish. Historically, travel writing about Latin America has been written primarily from the perspective of the foreign, often European, traveller. As such, and following the large influx of military, scientific, and leisure travellers in the region since its colonisation, much of this foreign travel writing has depicted the continent in predominantly exoticist and/or imperialist terms. Lindsay explores how Latin American travellers have conceived and constructed narratives about travel at home and considers how such texts (many of them available in English translation or with subtitles) function to counter or corroborate long-standing myths about the continent. Through a series of regionally- and thematically-oriented case studies that engage with key issues, themes and debates in both Latin American and travel studies, Lindsay provides the first sustained interdisciplinary study of contemporary domestic travel narratives about the region and will also comprise an important intervention into methodological debates about travel and travel writing.

Why has “car society” proven so durable, even in the face of mounting environmental and economic crises? In this follow-up to his magisterial Atlantic Automobilism, Gijs Mom traces the global spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates why adopting more sustainable forms of mobility has proven so difficult. Drawing on archival research as well as wide-ranging forays into popular culture, Mom reveals here the roots of the exuberance, excess, and danger that define modern automotive culture.

This Companion addresses an exciting emerging field of literary scholarship that charts the intersections of postcolonial studies and travel writing.

Late Victorian Orientalism is a work of scholarly research pushing forward disciplines into new areas of enquiry. This collection of essays tries to redefine the task of interpreting the East in the nineteenth century taking as a starting point Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) in order to investigate the visual, fantasised, and imperialist representations of the East as well as the most exemplary translations of Oriental texts. The Victorians envisioned the East in many different modes or Orientalisms since as Said suggested ‘[t]here were, perhaps, as many Orientalisms as Orientalists’. By combining together Western and Oriental modes of art, this study is not only aimed at filling a gap in Victorian and Oriental studies but also at broadening the audiences it is intended for.

Sarah De Mul is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Leuven. Her publications and research interests are in the field of comparative postcolonial studies, with a particular focus on gender, memory, and empire in Neerlandophone and Anglophone literature.