1st Edition

Travel Writing, Form, and Empire The Poetics and Politics of Mobility

Edited By Julia Kuehn, Paul Smethurst Copyright 2009
    266 Pages
    by Routledge

    266 Pages
    by Routledge

    This collection of essays is an important contribution to travel writing studies -- looking beyond the explicitly political questions of postcolonial and gender discourses, it considers the form, poetics, institutions and reception of travel writing in the history of empire and its aftermath.

    Starting from the premise that travel writing studies has received much of its impetus and theoretical input from the sometimes overgeneralized precepts of postcolonial studies and gender studies, this collection aims to explore more widely and more locally the expression of imperialist discourse in travel writing, and also to locate within contemporary travel writing attempts to evade or re-engage with the power politics of such discourse. There is a double focus then to explore further postcolonial theory in European travel writing (Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanic), and to trace the emergence of postcolonial forms of travel writing. The thread that draws the two halves of the collection together is an interest in form and relations between form and travel.

    Introduction

    PAUL SMETHURST (University of Hong Kong)

    Part 1 – Travel Writing and Imperialism

    1. Asia, Africa, Abyssinia: Writing the Land of Prester John
    2. MARY BAINE CAMPBELL (Brandeis University, USA)

    3. Writing up a long journey: New France 1603-1636
      JACK WARWICK (York University, Canada)
    4. Richard Hakluyt’s Foreign Relations
      MARY FULLER (MIT)
    5. Tourist-dealing in Wales: National Identity and England’s Celtic ‘other’
    6. MONICA ANDERSON (University of Western Australia)

    7. Public and private space: The use of mise en page as an expression of the public/private nature of discourse in two editions of Mariana Starke’s travel writings on Italy, 1800 and 1826
    8. SUSAN PICKFORD (University of Toulouse, France)

    9. Discourses of Domesticity and Domination: Letters from India by Lady Hariot Dufferin
    10. EADAOIN AGNEW (Queens University Belfast)

    11. Translating Culture: Harriet Martineau and the Mediation Between Cultures
    12. LESA SCHOLL (University of kent, UK)

    13. The Politics of Adventure: Theories of Travel, Discourses of Power
    14. ALI BEHDAD (UCLA, USA)

       

       

      Part 2 – Post-imperial Travel Writing

    15. Signs in the Jungle: Michaux in Ecuador
    16. DAVID SCOTT (Trinity College Dublin)

    17. Deep Maps: Travelling on the Spot
    18. PETER HULME (University of Essex, UK)

    19. Writing nomadically and Reading the Country
    20. TIM YOUNGS (Nottingham Trent University, UK)

    21. Reconciliation and Contemporary Australian Travel Writing
    22. ROBERT CLARKE (University of Queensland, Australia)

    23. To Witness & Remember: Reconciliation Travel
    24. PETER BISHOP (University of South Australia)

    25. The Political Tourist’s Archive
    26. MAUREEN MOYNAGH (St. Francis Xavier University, Canada)

    27. Chris Marker and the construction of travelling memories
    28. JEAN-XAVIER RIDON (University of Nottingham, UK)

    29. Road to Nowhere? Los autonautas de la cosmopista by Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop
    30. CLAIRE LINDSAY (Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK)

    31. No longer upon a Tropical Beach: The Possible Futures of Ethnography and Travel Writing
    32. LAUREL KENDALL (American Museum of Natural History) AND ALEXIA BLOCH (The University of British Columbia

    33. Afterword: Travel and Power

    BILL ASHCROFT (University of New South Wales, Australia)

     

     

    Biography

    Julia Kuehn teaches English literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her publications include Glorious Vulgarity: Marie Corelli’s Feminine Sublime in a Popular Context (2004), A Century of Travels in China: Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s (ed., 2007), and China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces (ed., forthcoming 2009).

     

    Paul Smethurst is Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong. His publications include The Postmodern Chronotope (2000) and The Reinvention of Nature: Scientific, Picturesque and Romantic Travel Writing (forthcoming). He is co-editor with Steve Clark of Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and South East Asia (2008).