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This paper applies David Lowenthal’s 1968 Geographical Review article “The American Scene” and John Dos Passos’ 1963 travelogue Brazil on the Move to develop a notion of the Brazilian scene. It arg...

Postcolonial forms of countertravel writing are sites through which previously marginalised subjects such as women and queer others produce agency. This article examines Damon Galgut’s In a Strange...

The term “Atlantic archipelago” was coined by an Antipodean historian, J. G. A. Pocock, whose country, New Zealand, consists of two main islands and a few smaller islands. It shares a significant r...

This article uncovers the first publication of Gertrude Bell, known in the early twentieth century for her exploration, archaeological work, and diplomacy in the Middle East. Examining her 1894 tra...

In June 2020, the hasthtag #TF1raciste began trending on French Twitter after the synopsis of a TV series broadcast on France’s first television channel described a female character of Maghrebi des...

This article contends that “disguise” has been both overlooked in studies of travel writing and is more complex than current studies suppose. The performance of disguise raises important questions about trust—in the traveler, in the truth of what is narrated, and in the knowledge gained in exploration. The article examines examples of disguise in action: nineteenth-century exploration; woman travelers dressing as men; use of scientific instruments by subterfuge. The article suggests that we must distinguish between the intention behind disguise, the forms taken in its performance, and the consequences of disguise. Rather than reject outright the truth claims of what, by the author’s own admission, was arrived at through deceit, the article argues that we must understand the reasons behind the adoption of disguise and that studies of travel writing should pay more attention to how and why disguise features in travel accounts and exploration narratives.

In Abala Basu’s travelogues for children, published in the journal Mukul and based on her travels across India and Europe, the author appears to be performing the dual task of disseminating knowled...

Why would one send a postcard showing a department store or a housing estate? Did the people writing such postcards pay any attention to the image at all? Moreover, why did they send postcards from...

This article analyses the image of Montenegrins in various Italian travelogues published at a time of significant interest among Italians about Montenegro, in the late nineteenth and early twentiet...

Scholarship on travel writing tends to focus on accounts by writers who spent time in the places they depict. But neither Romantic-era nor twenty-first-century cognitive theory gives such a limited...

The travel accounts examined here were written by Dutch travellers to Hong Kong in the late-nineteenth to early twentieth-century. By applying the imagological approach, examples of ethnotypes and ...

Ostensibly, Muslim women in colonial India only rarely wrote travel narratives, particularly in Urdu. In truth, women’s travel writing in Urdu is anything but chimerical, but persistent archival an...

This article focuses on vernacular travel writings on America and Europe by Swami Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’ (1879–1961), one of the first persons to systematically write travelogues in Hindi. I argue t...

Guided by autobiographical, travel, and life writing theories in general, this article examines Sihle Khumalo’s travelogs to argue that contemporary ways of knowledge production about Africa are ov...

In 1982, Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop commenced a thirty-three-day journey from Paris to Marseille in which they promised to never leave the autoroute and to stop at every single rest stop. The ...

From a triple perspective including travel writing studies, disability studies and gender studies, this article addresses a corpus of works and letters by deafblind activist and political writer He...

There has been a resurgence of interest in Frederick Law Olmsted’s career, yet his landscape architecture tends to overshadow his travel writing. This article offers a re-appraisal of his literary ...

This article combines elements of a personal essay with travel writing, in which geographers have expressed renewed interest. Constructed not through contemplations of the mind but from lived corpo...

Migritude literature focuses predominantly on migration from the global south to the countries of Europe and North America and the everyday life forged in these new contexts. The lived experience o...

British author and philosopher Vernon Lee understood emotions not simply as personal experiences, but as phenomena occurring through trans-historical, trans-spatial ecologies existing beyond the bo...

This introduction outlines the background and contexts of this special issue of Studies in Travel Writing, which emerged from the Borders and Crossings 2019 conference held at the University of Lei...

Beginning with contemporary calls to decolonise travel writing, this article considers the intersection of race and sexuality in the genre. Why is the analysis of postcolonial travel writing so straight? Why is the analysis of queer travel writing so white? By answering these questions simultaneously, the article argues for the creation of a space from which we can understand how single-issue approaches to identity politics fail to take account of structural forms of homophobia and racism. Acknowledging their structural manifestations through the history of colonialism should advance an understanding of how and why some of the most historically queer-inclusive and diverse places in the world have come to be represented as the most hostile to queers in travel writing.

In conversation with Tim Hannigan in Dorset on 2 October 2017, and updated by email in November 2020, Rory MacLean discusses his long travel writing career, from the publication of Stalin’s Nose in...

Travel writing, an important influence on tourism, is often criticized as hegemonic/colonial by postcolonial studies. This study notes that postcolonial studies invariably solely search for such in...

What is it that makes travelling in our century anxious, uncomfortable, insecure or even dangerous? And what may be the challenges or anxieties authors face when writing about such travels?Possible...

In times past, much travel writing commenced in a bookshop, as a customer flicked through a guide-book to a foreign place or purchased a book of travel writing and then decided: I want to go there ...

Rebecca Jones’ At the Crossroads: Nigerian Travel Writing and Literary Culture in Yoruba and English evokes my early encounter with Yoruba fiction, especially that by D. O. Fagunwa and J. F. Odunjo...

I discuss here the creation of a course-related, collaborative website that involved students in the important work of recovering British women’s travel writing from the early nineteenth century. E...

This article reconsiders English domestic writing in the wake of the global turn in early modern studies, taking Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania ([1621] 1995), the first romance wr...

This paper examines the intertwining of early tourism, gender and scientific discourses in The Way to Saint James (1920), written by the American Art History professor Georgiana Goddard King. With ...

Attempts to prevent tourists from fraternising with the natives in Suva marks the decade of the 1930s as one of significant change for Fijian society. The accounts of cruise ship visitors to Fiji d...

This article explores how Caryl Phillips and Ferdinand Dennis embody the contested figure of the postcolonial flâneur in their travel narratives. Movement is integral to the practice of flânerie, a...

The Kashmir region figures prominently in the orientalist imagination of nineteenth-century European travel writers. Travellers explored this region amid colonial anxieties by largely sounding pro-...

This new companion to travel writing, edited by two renowned experts in the field and presenting an impressive lineup of scholars, brings together a host of scholarship accumulated over the last fe...

Vernon Lee is regularly upheld as a model of late-Victorian cosmopolitanism, with her travel writing, in particular that dealing with Italy, displaying an openness to other places and cultures. Yet, as this essay argues, there is in Lee’s model of topographical writing a neglect of the people who live and dwell within landscapes. Examining in detail her critically neglected travel writing of the British Isles, published between 1899 and 1916, the essay surveys her hostility towards English landscapes and towards the forces of industrial modernity that shape them. From her antipathy to London to her celebration of the empty landscapes of Northern England, Lee’s travel writing suggests her cosmopolitanism raises ethical questions about her relationship to those people and places that do not accord with her aesthetic taste.

Zeyneb Hanoum’s A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions (1913) contains the letters of Zeyneb Hanoum and her sister, sent to the British journalist Grace Ellison during their travels as exiles throu...

In the opening of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904), the protagonist, Elizabeth, comes across Marianne North’s autobiography, Recollections of a Happy Life (1894) and her description of the bathing near Putbus, “a sandy cove where the water was always calm, and of how you floated about on its crystal surface, and beautiful jellyfish, stars of purest colours, floated with you”. This essay examines Arthur Schuster’s Fuhrer durch die Insel Rugen (1902) and Marianne North’s travel autobiography as background to Elizabeth’s Adventures in Rügen (1904) and how the Rügen novel began as a travel account before merging into fiction as the protagonist attempts and fails to write her own travel guide and, in opposition to social conventions for her gender and class, become a female solitary traveller.

This article reconstructs and analyses James and Marion Bryce’s visit to Mexico in 1901. It elucidates and compares their reading of the country during the Porfirian regime (1876–1911), wit...

This article analyses the gendered dynamics of narratives that re-enact earlier travel narratives, a subgenre of travel writing that it terms “echotourism”. After discussing the implication...

The Slow Travel movement encourages tourists to use slower modes of transport, to leave the beaten track, to meet locals and to learn some basics of the foreign language. All of these princ...

Inspired by postcolonial theory, this essay reads Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks as a critique of nineteenth-century US and European travel writers who recorded their encounters with Arabs livin...

The reviews in the Monthly Review and La Décade philosophique of Bartolomeo Benincasa's travelogue from revolutionary France, Journal d’un voyageur neutre (1796), offer valuable insight into the periodical practice of the travel review. The present article examines the processes of rewriting and remediation at work in these reviews, showing how they were driven by political concerns, but also by different views on the function of the review within the larger framework of the periodicals. The article argues that rewriting and remediation are important analytical tools to be put to use if book reviews are to be better exploited as historical sources. We can thereby acquire a better understanding of the role of the travel review in late-eighteenth-century literary culture, notably of its complexity in transmitting and constructing perceptions of major historical events such as the French Revolution.

In conversation with Tim Hannigan in Dublin on 23 November 2017, Samanth Subramanian discusses his work as a journalist and travel writer. He considers the distinctions between, and intersections o...

The matting of hair, understood as a medical condition since around 1600 and named Plica polonica, appears prominently in the writings of eighteenth-century authors travelling to Polish lan...

Susmita Roye’s edited collection adds to the existing scholarship on empire, gender, race and travel writing from prominent scholars in the field such as Antoinette Burton, Sara Suleri and Inderpal...

With the exception of Jiři Opelik, the laureate of Czech scholarship on Karel Capek (cf. Opelik 2008; 2006) and a few journal articles (in particular I would like to highlight works by Petr Malek, ...

Once, when travel writing was young, the Revd. John Hutton went into some caves in the West Riding and on returning to daylight wrote a Tour. Reviews were mixed, including one from the young Wordsw...

Within the growing scholarly attention, in the field of Italian Studies, devoted to contemporary travel writing, on the one hand, and to writers coming from the geo-historical ‘margins’ of the peninsula, on the other, Paolo Rumiz’s works have sparked critical interest in recent years. In contrast with the prevailing reading of Rumiz’s work as mostly concerned with Eastern Europe, in this essay I assess the centrality of the Mediterranean in the author’s narrative imaginary, as it emerges in Il Ciclope (2015). Drawing on geocritical and ecocritical theories, I show how Rumiz’s Mediterranean island – where the real and imaginary travel of Il Ciclope takes place – narratively reveals itself as a space that comprises land and sea at the same time; a space that, while being localised, can also address global concerns, and that, from its supposedly marginal position in the global world, can become a centre of critical thinking. Postprint

The study of travel writing owes a great deal to “theory” – the critical methodologies that emerged from the Frankfurt School, French structuralism, and the social movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. ...

This article uses Anne Lister’s diaries as the basis of an exploration of writing about travel as part of a diary-keeping routine. It focuses on entries relating to Lister’s tour of Scotlan...