1st Edition
Travel Writing, Form, and Empire The Poetics and Politics of Mobility
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
- Asia, Africa, Abyssinia: Writing the Land of Prester John
- Writing up a long journey: New France 1603-1636
JACK WARWICK (York University, Canada) - Richard Hakluyt’s Foreign Relations
MARY FULLER (MIT) - Tourist-dealing in Wales: National Identity and England’s Celtic ‘other’
- 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
- Discourses of Domesticity and Domination: Letters from India by Lady Hariot Dufferin
- Translating Culture: Harriet Martineau and the Mediation Between Cultures
- The Politics of Adventure: Theories of Travel, Discourses of Power
- Signs in the Jungle: Michaux in Ecuador
- Deep Maps: Travelling on the Spot
- Writing nomadically and Reading the Country
- Reconciliation and Contemporary Australian Travel Writing
- To Witness & Remember: Reconciliation Travel
- The Political Tourist’s Archive
- Chris Marker and the construction of travelling memories
- Road to Nowhere? Los autonautas de la cosmopista by Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop
- No longer upon a Tropical Beach: The Possible Futures of Ethnography and Travel Writing
- Afterword: Travel and Power
MARY BAINE CAMPBELL (Brandeis University, USA)
MONICA ANDERSON (University of Western Australia)
SUSAN PICKFORD (University of Toulouse, France)
EADAOIN AGNEW (Queens University Belfast)
LESA SCHOLL (University of kent, UK)
ALI BEHDAD (UCLA, USA)
Part 2 – Post-imperial Travel Writing
DAVID SCOTT (Trinity College Dublin)
PETER HULME (University of Essex, UK)
TIM YOUNGS (Nottingham Trent University, UK)
ROBERT CLARKE (University of Queensland, Australia)
PETER BISHOP (University of South Australia)
MAUREEN MOYNAGH (St. Francis Xavier University, Canada)
JEAN-XAVIER RIDON (University of Nottingham, UK)
CLAIRE LINDSAY (Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK)
LAUREL KENDALL (American Museum of Natural History) AND ALEXIA BLOCH (The University of British Columbia
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).