This book is a detailed study of salient examples of Mexican travel writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While scholars have often explored the close relationship between European or North American travel writing and the discourse of imperialism, little has been written on how postcolonial subjects might relate to the genre. This study first traces the development of a travel-writing tradition based closely on European imperialist models in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico. It then goes on to analyse how the narrative techniques of postmodernism and the political agenda of postcolonialism might combine to help challenge the genre's imperialist tendencies in late twentieth-century works of travel writing, focusing in particular on works by writers Juan Villoro, Héctor Perea and Fernando Solana Olivares.

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.

Keywords for Travel Writing Studies draws on the notion of the ‘keyword’ as initially elaborated by Raymond Williams in his seminal 1976 text Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society to present 100 concepts central to the study of travel writing as a literary form. Each entry in the volume is around 1,000 words, the style more essayistic than encyclopaedic, with contributors reflecting on their chosen keyword from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The emphasis on travelogues and other cultural representations of mobility drawn from a range of national and linguistic traditions ensures that the volume has a comparative dimension; the aim is to give an overview of each term in its historical and theoretical complexity, providing readers with a clear sense of how the selected words are essential to a critical understanding of travel writing. Each entry is complemented by an annotated bibliography of five essential items suggesting further reading.

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

How colonial mapping traditions were combined with practices of nineteenth-century visual culture in the first maps of independent Mexico, particularly in those created by the respected cartographer Antonio Garc&ía Cubas.

Containing more than 600 entries, this valuable resource presents all aspects of travel writing. There are entries on places and routes (Afghanistan, Black Sea, Egypt, Gobi Desert, Hawaii, Himalayas, Italy, Northwest Passage, Samarkand, Silk Route, Timbuktu), writers (Isabella Bird, Ibn Battuta, Bruce Chatwin, Gustave Flaubert, Mary Kingsley, Walter Ralegh, Wilfrid Thesiger), methods of transport and types of journey (balloon, camel, grand tour, hunting and big game expeditions, pilgrimage, space travel and exploration), genres (buccaneer narratives, guidebooks, New World chronicles, postcards), companies and societies (East India Company, Royal Geographical Society, Society of Dilettanti), and issues and themes (censorship, exile, orientalism, and tourism). For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia website.

Containing more than 600 entries, this valuable resource presents all aspects of travel writing. There are entries on places and routes (Afghanistan, Black Sea, Egypt, Gobi Desert, Hawaii, Himalayas, Italy, Northwest Passage, Samarkand, Silk Route, Timbuktu), writers (Isabella Bird, Ibn Battuta, Bruce Chatwin, Gustave Flaubert, Mary Kingsley, Walter Ralegh, Wilfrid Thesiger), methods of transport and types of journey (balloon, camel, grand tour, hunting and big game expeditions, pilgrimage, space travel and exploration), genres (buccaneer narratives, guidebooks, New World chronicles, postcards), companies and societies (East India Company, Royal Geographical Society, Society of Dilettanti), and issues and themes (censorship, exile, orientalism, and tourism). For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia website.

This volume brings together the proceedings of “Going North: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Travel and Intercultural Communication” held in Halden, Norway, in 2016. Today’s world is akin to a global network where spatial, linguistic and cultural mobility reshapes our identities. This mobility is unprecedented in its scope, and is caused by a multitude of reasons, from purely leisurely travel to desperate flight. The “Going North” conference addressed the role of travel – past and present – and intercultural communication connected to travel. The book brings together texts focusing on going north from several geographical points of departure, from a wide range of genres, and explores a range of intercultural aspects such as issues of identity, othering, the crossing of borders, and cultural perceptions of the north.

Interviews with nine Mexican American authors conducted primarily in 2007.

American and British Writers in Mexico is the study that laid the foundation upon which subsequent examinations of Mexico’s impact upon American and British letters have built. Chosen by the Mexican government to be placed, in translation, in its public libraries, the book was also referenced by Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz in an article in the New Yorker, “Reflections—Mexico and the United States.” Drewey Wayne Gunn demonstrates how Mexican experiences had a singular impact upon the development of English writers, beginning with early British explorers who recorded their impressions for Hakluyt’s Voyages, through the American Beats, who sought to escape the strictures of American culture. Among the 140 or so writers considered are Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Langston Hughes, D. H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, Katherine Anne Porter, Hart Crane, Malcolm Lowry, John Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Tennessee Williams, Saul Bellow, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, Ray Bradbury, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. Gunn finds that, while certain elements reflecting the Mexican experience—colors, landscape, manners, political atmosphere, a sense of the alien—are common in their writings, the authors reveal less about Mexico than they do about themselves. A Mexican sojourn often marked the beginning, the end, or the turning point in a literary career. The insights that this pioneering study provide into our complex cultural relationship with Mexico, so different from American and British authors’ encounters with Continental cultures, remain vital. The book is essential for anyone interested in understanding the full range of the impact of the expatriate experience on writers.