Abstract
Despite its long and venerable heritage, travel writing as a genre did not attract much critical attention until the 1980s. Previously, travel texts were mainly attached to historical and regional studies or used to support author-based literary studies. Although travel writing from the period of European exploration onwards was published in huge quantities and was very popular — or perhaps partly because of this — its poetics, form and themes never attracted the same academic interest as its more prestigious cousins, the novel, poetry or drama. In short, whether true or false — and this was largely the measure of its efficacy and value — travel writing was below the scholarly radar.
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Notes
See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1974], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)
Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22–7.
See for example, Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991)
David James, Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space (London: Continuum, 2008), 3.
Michael Kowaleski (ed.), Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 7
Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), x–xi
Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 1
Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Jan Borm, ‘Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology’, in Perspectives on Travel Writing, eds. Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 13–26
Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 1–2.
See Jonathan Raban, ‘The Journey and the Book’ [1982], For Love and Money: Writing, Reading, Travelling, 1969–1987 (London: Collins Harvill, 1987), 253–60
James Buzard, ‘What Isn’t Travel?’, in Unraveling Civilization: European Travel and Travel Writing, ed. Hagen Schulz-Forberg (Brussels: Lang, 2005), 43–61.
See Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation [1987] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
See Mike Featherstone, John Urry, Nigel Thrift et al., Automobilities (London: SAGE, in association with Theory, Culture & Society, 2005).
Edward Thomas, In Pursuit of Spring (London: Nelson, 1914), 79.
See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Valerie Wheeler, ‘Travelers’ tales: observations on the travel book and ethnography’, Anthropological Quarterly 59.2 (1986): 52–61
Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Fieldwork in Common Places’, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 27–50
Jan Bonn, ‘In-Betweeners? On the Travel Book and Ethnographies’, Studies in Travel Writing 4.1 (2000): 68–105
Joan Pau Rubiés, ‘Travel writing and ethnography’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 242–60
Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall, Travel, Writing and Empire: In the Margins of Anthropology (London: Tauris, 2007).
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© 2015 Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst
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Kuehn, J., Smethurst, P. (2015). Introduction. In: Kuehn, J., Smethurst, P. (eds) New Directions in Travel Writing Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457257_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457257_1
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