Women, Travel, and Writing in the Interwar Era engages feminist, temporal, and narrative theories to offer fresh examinations of interwar-era accounts by women about travel and movement and considers the use and limitations of time as a subversive force in their texts. This book makes a significant contribution to the under-examined study of women’s travel writing between the wars and synthesises and applies a variety of feminist, narrative, and postcolonial theories to excavate new understandings of the intersection between women, travel, and time in writing. The book studies the emergence of the aviatrix after the Great War and moves through to the representations of war in women’s travel on the brink of World War II. Each chapter offers a unique theoretical framework and examines how experiences of time impact perceptions of women’s bodies and identities, their engagement with history and discourse, and the problematic influence on colonialism. Women, Travel, and Writing in the Interwar Era is essential reading to any student or researcher in the field of women’s travel writing, as well as scholars of gender studies, war and interwar history, and cultural heritage.

How people traveled, and how people wrote about travel, changed in the interwar years. Novel technologies eased travel conditions, breeding new iterations of the colonizing gaze. The sense that another war was coming lent urgency and anxiety to the search for new places and "authentic" experiences. In Interwar Itineraries: Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing, Emily O. Wittman identifies a diverse group of writers from two languages who embarked on such quests. For these writers, authenticity was achieved through rugged adventure abroad to economically poorer destinations. Using translation theory and new approaches in travel studies and global modernisms, Wittman links and complicates the symbolic and rhetorical strategies of writers including André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Michel Leiris, Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, among others, that offer insight into the high ethical stakes of travel and allow us to see in new ways how models of the authentic self are built and maintained through asymmetries of encounter. "This book offers a valuable account of literary activity in a genre still inadequately covered in literary-critical history. Emily Witt- man organizes her material through pairings and contextualizing that are instructive and illuminating and often exciting . . . This is comparative literature at its best." --Vincent Sherry, Washington University

This book studies travel writing produced by French authors between the two World Wars following visits to authoritarian regimes in Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It sheds new light on the phenomenon of French political travel in this period by considering the well-documented appeal of Soviet communism for French intellectuals alongside their interest in other radical regimes which have been much less studied: fascist Italy, the Iberian dictatorships and Nazi Germany. Through analyses of the travel writing produced as a result of such visits, the book gauges the appeal of these forms of authoritarianism for inter-war French intellectuals from a broad political spectrum. It examines not only those whose political sympathies with the extreme right or extreme left were already publicly known, but also non-aligned intellectuals who were interested in political models that offered an apparently radical alternative to the French Third Republic. This study shows how travel writing provided a space for reflection on the lessons France might learn from the radical political experiments of the inter-war years. It argues that such writing can usefully be read as a form of utopian thinking, distinguishing this from colloquial understandings of utopia as an ideal location. Utopianism is understood neither as a fantasy ungrounded in the real nor as a dangerously totalitarian ideal, but, in line with Karl Mannheim, Paul Ricœur, and Ruth Levitas, as a form of non-congruence with the real that it seeks to transcend. The utopianism of French political travel writing is seen to lie not in the attempt to portray the destination visited as utopia, but rather in the pursuit of a dialogue with radical political alterity.

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.

Female philanthropy was at the heart of transformative thinking about society and the role of individuals in the interwar period. In Britain, in the aftermath of the First World War, professionalization; the authority of the social sciences; mass democracy; internationalism; and new media sounded the future and, for many, the death knell of elite practices of benevolence. Eve Colpus tells a new story about a world in which female philanthropists reshaped personal models of charity for modern projects of social connectedness, and new forms of cultural and political encounter. Centering the stories of four remarkable British-born women - Evangeline Booth; Lettice Fisher; Emily Kinnaird; and Muriel Paget - Colpus recaptures the breadth of the social, cultural and political influence of women's philanthropy upon practices of social activism. Female Philanthropy in the Interwar World is not only a new history of women's civic agency in the interwar period, but also a study of how female philanthropists explored approaches to identification and cultural difference that emphasized friendship in relation to interwar modernity. Richly detailed, the book's perspective on women's social interventionism offers a new reading of the centrality of personal relationships to philanthropy that can inform alternative models of giving today.

Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain looks at the impact of aviation in Britain and beyond through the 1920s and 1930s. This book considers how in this period flying went from a weapon of war to an extensive industry that included civilian air travel, air mail delivery, flying shows and campaigns to create ‘airmindedness’. Essays look at these developments through the work of writers, filmmakers and flyers and examines the airminded modernism that marked this radical period. Its fourteen chapters include studies of texts by Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Elizabeth Bowen, W.H. Auden, T.H. White and John Masefield; accounts of the annual RAF Display at Hendon and the Schneider Trophy; and the achievements of celebrity flyers such as Amy Johnson. This collection provides a fresh perspective on the interwar period by bringing analysis of aviation and airmindedness to the study of British literature, history, modernism, mobilities and the history of technology and transportation.

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.

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.

This book studies how the rhetoric of travel introduces different conceptualizations of space and time in scenarios of war during the last decades of the 19th century, in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. By examining accounts of war and travel in the context of the consolidation of state apparatuses in these countries, Uriarte underlines the essential role that war (in connection to empire and capital) has played in the Latin American process of modernization and state formation. In this book, the analysis of British and Latin American travel narratives proves particularly productive in reading the ways in which national spaces are reconfigured, reimagined, and reappropriated by the state apparatus. War turns out to be a central instrument not just for making possible this logic of appropriation, but also for bringing temporal notions such as modernization and progress to spaces that were described — albeit problematically — as being outside of history. The book argues that wars waged against "deserts" (as Patagonia, the sertão, Paraguay, and the Uruguayan countryside were described and imagined) were in fact means of generating empty spaces, real voids that were the condition for new foundations. The study of travel writing is an essential tool for understanding the transformations of space brought by war, and for analyzing in detail the forms and connotations of movement in connection to violence. Uriarte pays particular attention to the effects that witnessing war had on the traveler’s identity and on the relation that is established with the oikos or point of departure of their own voyage. Written at the intersection of literary analysis, critical geography, political science, and history, this book will be of interest to those studying Latin American literature, Travel Writing, and neocolonialism and Empire writing.

This A-Z reference work provides the first comprehensive reference guide to the wide range of historical writing with which women have been involved, particularly since the Renaissance. The Companion covers biographical writing, travelogue and historical fictions, broadening the concept of history to include the forms of writing with which women have historically engaged. The focus is on women writing in English internationally, but historical and historiographical traditions from beyond the English-speaking world are also examined. Brief biographies of individual writers are included.