The Art of Travel

Essays on Travel Writing

Philip Dodd, Philip Dodds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134726813
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1982. The Art of Travel is the first collection of critical essays to be devoted to British travel writing. It attempts to give a sense of the wealth of such writing, to map some of its forms and conventions and, implicitly, to claim a place for travel writing in any revised definition of literature. For this collection, travel includes sea voyages, European tours, commissioned enquiries into social conditions, and urban writing; travel writing ranges from works such as Sea and Sardinia by D.H. Lawrence whose status as a novelist guarantees his travel books some attention, through the essays and books of Victorian middle-class travellers into working-class London, to the work of V.S. Naipaul, a contemporary writer, who has increasingly preferred the travel book to the novel.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Editor's Preface
• “'Tis not to divert the Reader”: Moral and Literary Determinants in some Early Travel Narratives
• The Voyages of Jerónimo Lobo, Joachim Le Grand, and Samuel Johnson
• A Semi-Mental Journey: Structure and Illusion in Smollett's Travels
• “Terra Incognita” — An Image of the City in English Literature, 1820–1855
• The Spectacle of Reality in Sea and Sardinia
• Debunking the Jungle: The Context of Evelyn Waugh's Travel Books 1930–9
• The Views of Travellers: Travel Writing in the 1930s
• Authorial Voice in V.S. Naipaul's The Middle Passage
• Travel Writing Victorian and Modern: A Review of Recent Research