Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing

Decentring Epistemologies

Samia Ounoughi, Emmanuelle Peraldo, Anne-Florence Quaireau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040328811
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing evidences the evolution of travel writing studies over the last two decades and points to innovative ways to study this heterogeneous genre. This volume seeks to build bridges between the study of travel writing and disciplines of sciences and human sciences so that the analyses of travel texts, images, and objects lead to interdisciplinary enrichment. This volume revisits the complicated relationship between fact and fiction, science and literature, and the world and the word through transdisciplinary approaches. Through case studies of British travel writing from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the contributors provide illustrations of the fruitful intersection of travel writing studies with other methodologies, such as literary studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, visual studies, areal studies, engineering studies, food studies, animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, and geocriticism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• “More than just a travel book.” Regarding travel writing
• 1 From the visited place to the visitor’s gaze: Decentring perspectives on Nice and its region in Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (1766)
• 2 Women travellers decentring “the South” through nordicity: Mary Wollstonecraft, the Wilmot sisters, and Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake
• 3 Unearthing imperial matters: A postcolonial and ecocritical reading of Louisa Anne Meredith’s Notes and Sketches of New South Wales (1844) and My Home in Tasmania during a Residence of Nine Years (1852)
• 4 “A broader, truer glimpse of existence”: Ella Sykes’s post-romantic, affective realism in Through Persia on a Side-Saddle (1898)
• 5 A geopoetic approach to fin de siècle adventure travel writing: R. L. Stevenson and Joseph Conrad as writer-geographers
• 6 Travel writing and engineering: Experiential and textual hybridity in the works of David and Robert Louis Stevenson
• 7 Photography in Isabella Bird’s Asian travel accounts: The birth of a personal practice and renewal of a genre
• 8 Tristram Shandy goes to Greece: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Mani (1958)
• 9 “Black flight-feathers spread like tight-rope-walkers’ fingers”: Walking, flying, and reading the Sonorous World with Patrick Leigh Fermor
• 10 Harbingers of taste: Mid-twentieth-century women’s food-focused travel writings as a new paradigm in travel writings and their studies
• 11 The quest for the lost parrot: Trivial travel in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot
• 12 Writing “countertravels” and decolonising environmental epistemologies in Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya
• 13 Travel writing as a conscious reading of the world: An ecocritical approach of Henry Russell and Kev Reynolds’ texts
• 14 “The land looks empty”: Writing the Far East in Colin Thubron’s The Amur (2021)
• 15 Can travel writing be decolonised?: A Flat Place (2023) by Noreen Masud
• Index