Writing on the Move

Form, Practice and (Im)mobility in Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century Travel Writing

Samia Ounoughi, Tim Hannigan

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781836953579
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Sociology

Travel writing appears to be the most oxymoronic of genres: the practice of writing and reading typically requires stasis, and travel writing emerges from movement. From the concurrent physical and emotional journeys of Ella Maillart and Annemarie Schwarzenbach to the instantaneous digital discourses of contemporary urban travellers, and from the challenges of writing in the extreme conditions of the Antarctic to those of updating guidebooks via Google Streetview, this book examines the tensions between actual journeys and their resultant texts. Writing on the Move asks questions about the meaning of 'movement' – and what counts as 'travel writing' – in an age of virtual journeying and enforced immobility.

Table of contents

• Writing on the Move
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Travel Writing and Movement
• Chapter 1 — Figures in a Landscape: Movement, Stasis and the Travel Writer as Image Collector
• Chapter 2 — Canoeing on the Waterways of Europe: Defining a Practice and a Genre through Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Inland Voyage and Accounts of Other Travellers
• Chapter 3 — F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s Literary and Visual European Journeys: A ‘Carnival by the Sea’, and Many ‘Quick Odysseys’
• Chapter 4 — Terror, Pity, Love: The Trials and Tribulations of Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Ella Maillart on the Road to Kabul
• Chapter 5 — The Novel at the End of the Road: The Soul Circuit of Jack Kerouac as a Professional Writer
• Chapter 6 — ‘A Strange Kind of Limbo’: Navigating the Unknown in Contemporary Anglophone Female Travel Writing
• Chapter 7 — Writing from the Ice: An Examination of Contemporary Travel Writing in Antarctica
• Chapter 8 — Moving between Modes: Robert Macfarlane’s and Kathleen Jamie’s Journeys on Foot and in Time
• Chapter 9 — ‘Did They Even Go There?’: Virtual Experience and Projected Journeys in Contemporary Travel Guidebooks
• Chapter 10 — Dialogue Journaling in Travel Writing Projects
• Conclusion — Writing on the Move: About and Beyond Travel Writing
• Index