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

India and the Traveller: Aspects of Travelling Identity, a collection of essays on travel writings related to India, focuses on the evolving persona of travelers to India as well as Indians journeying to other lands or within India. It examines India as a space, reflected on and interrogated by others, as also people associated intrinsically with this space, who move in and out of it. The essays focus on the self-fashioning of the traveller - Buddhist pilgrims of Asia, European visitors to the Mughal court, the British colonizer, the Indian anthropologist, historian or whimsical civil servant, the wanderer seeking spiritual insight in nature, and the woman traveller with her distinct perceptions and sensitivities. Engaging with issues related to identity, this book explores the need for cultural accommodation by African and European travellers, the discovery of affinity by Asian travellers, the instability of postcolonial selves and travel as a means of negotiating complex problems of fashioning personae in literary works.

This handbook offers a systematic exploration of current key topics in travel writing studies. It addresses the history, impact, and unique discursive variety of British travel writing by covering some of the most celebrated and canonical authors of the genre as well as lesser known ones in more than thirty close-reading chapters. Combining theoretically informed, astute literary criticism of single texts with the analysis of the circumstances of their production and reception, these chapters offer excellent possibilities for understanding the complexity and cultural relevance of British travel writing.

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.

This edited collection poses crucial questions about the relationship between gender and genre in travel writing, asking how gender shapes formal and thematic approaches to the various generic forms employed to represent and recreate travel. While the question of the genre of travel writing has often been debated (is it a genre, a hybrid genre, a sub-genre of autobiography?), and recent years have been much attention to travel writing and gender, these have rarely been combined. This book sheds light on how the gendered nature of writing and reading about travel affect the genre choices and strategies of writers, as well as the way in which travel writing is received. It reconsiders traditional and frequently studied forms of travel writing, both European and non-European. In addition, it pursues questions about the connections between travel writing and other genres, such as the novel and films, minor forms including journalism and blogging, and new sub-genres such as the ‘new nature writing’; focusing in particular on the political ramifications of genre in travel writing. The collection is international in focus with discussions of works by authors from Europe, Asia, Australia, and both North and South America; consequently, it will be of great interest to scholars and historians in those regions.

What does it mean for Black diasporic writers to travel to Africa? Focusing on the period between the 1990s and 2010s, Isabel Kalous examines autobiographical narratives of travel to Africa by African American and Black British authors. She places the texts within the long tradition of Black diasporic engagement with the continent, scrutinizes the significance of Black mobility, and demonstrates that travel writing serves as a means to negotiate questions of identity, belonging, history, and cultural memory. To provide a framework for the analyses of contemporary narratives, her study outlines the emergence, development, and key characteristics of the multifaceted genre of Black travel writing. Authors discussed include, among others, Saidiya Hartman, Barack Obama, and Caryl Phillips.

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.

The first comprehensive review of all extant "Italian" chronicles set in the Philippine Islands, this book juxtaposes "Filipino" Otherness with the unique condition of "Italian" ambivalence and alterity within Europe. This book's contribution to the critical studies of travel is the opening of an analytical middle ground, highlighting the ambivalence of Italian chroniclers while acknowledging their participation in epistemological practices subsumed within the broader enterprise of conquest. Beyond the role of travel writing in colonial episteme, the book also situates the act of writing about one’s travels in instances of national character building (in Italy’s case) and in attempts of constructing a national historiography (in the Philippines' case). This manner of nuancing literary productions by the West while navigating its implications in the East, specifically, how pre-Unification “Italian” travel informed nationalist constructions in the Revolutionary Philippines, could enrich our understanding of and refract monolithic conceptions of metropole−periphery relations.

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