Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey

Description

Interest in travel writing has grown rapidly within the disciplines of postcolonial and cultural studies; however, recent scholarship has failed to place travel writing within the larger literary tradition. Writing Travel assembles a superb collection of essays that demonstrate how travel attempts to reconfigure the world and, in so doing, to become a metaphor for imagination, subjectivity, and representation itself. Examining a broad range of texts and travellers from across the world, the contributors discuss canonical authors such as Homer, Goethe, and Baudelaire, alongside lesser known writers such as Theodor Herzl, Hans Erich Nossack, and William Gibson. This theoretically rich volume draws connections between travel and narrative, and provides powerful insights into the relationship between travel and the spoken act of storytelling, as well as the more ambivalent act of story writing. An engaging collection of essays by first-rate scholars, Writing Travel is an illuminating exploration of the history of travel writing, its influence on other literary genres, and the origins of narrative. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Writing Travel Theoretical Overture 2 Chrono-Types: Notes on Forms of Time in the Travelogue Enlightenment to Modernism 3 On Site: Pilgrimage and Authorship in Goethe’s ‘Third Pilgrimage’ and Italian Journey 4 ‘Trouver du nouveau?’ Baudelaire’s Voyages 5 Seafaring Jews, World History, and the Zionist Imaginary 6 Ruins Travel: Orphic Journeys through 1940s Germany Postmodernism 7 Walking through Thought: Thomas Bernhard’s Walking and Peter Rosei’s Who Was Edgar Allan? 8 Charming the Carnivore: Bruce Chatwin’s Australian Odyssey 9 Touching the Real: Alternative Travel and Landscapes of Fear 10 Virtual Travellers: Cyberspace and Global Networks Epilogue 11 ‘Tears at the End of the Road’: The Impasse of Travel and the Walls at Angel Island Contributors Index