Writing Travel : The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey

__Writing Travel__ assembles a superb collection of essays that demonstrate how travel attempts to reconfigure the world and, in so doing, to become a metaphor for imagination, subjectivity, and representation itself.

Interest in travel writing has grown rapidly within the disciplines of postcolonial and cultural studies; however, recent scholarship has failed to place travel writing within the larger literary tradition. Writing Travel assembles a superb collection of essays that demonstrate how travel attempts to reconfigure the world and, in so doing, to become a metaphor for imagination, subjectivity, and representation itself.

Examining a broad range of texts and travellers from across the world, the contributors discuss canonical authors such as Homer, Goethe, and Baudelaire, alongside lesser known writers such as Theodor Herzl, Hans Erich Nossack, and William Gibson. This theoretically rich volume draws connections between travel and narrative, and provides powerful insights into the relationship between travel and the spoken act of storytelling, as well as the more ambivalent act of story writing.

An engaging collection of essays by first-rate scholars, Writing Travel is an illuminating exploration of the history of travel writing, its influence on other literary genres, and the origins of narrative.

Contents 7 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 13 1. Writing Travel 13 Theoretical Overture 35 2. Chrono-Types: Notes on Forms of Time in the Travelogue 35 Enlightenment to Modernism 67 3. On Site: Pilgrimage and Authorship in Goethe’s ‘Third Pilgrimage’ and Italian Journey 67 4. ‘Trouver du nouveau?’ Baudelaire’s Voyages 89 5. Seafaring Jews, World History, and the Zionist Imaginary 108 6. Ruins Travel: Orphic Journeys through 1940s Germany 133 Postmodernism 173 7. Walking through Thought: Thomas Bernhard’s Walking and Peter Rosei’s Who Was Edgar Allan? 173 8. Charming the Carnivore: Bruce Chatwin’s Australian Odyssey 183 9. Touching the Real: Alternative Travel and Landscapes of Fear 205 10. Virtual Travellers: Cyberspace and Global Networks 221 Epilogue 249 11. ‘Tears at the End of the Road’: The Impasse of Travel and the Walls at Angel Island 249 Contributors 271 Index 273 German and European Studies 287 "Examining a broad range of texts and travellers from across the world, the contributors discuss canonical authors such as Homer, Goethe, and Baudelaire, alongside lesser known writers such as Theodor Herzl, Hans Erich Nossack, and William Gibson. This theoretically rich volume draws connections between travel and narrative, and provides powerful insights into the relationship between travel and the spoken act of storytelling, as well as the more ambivalent act of story writing."--Jacket