The new edition of Travel Writing is an accessible and interdisciplinary guide to this prolific and popular literary genre. Carl Thompson offers a clear and concise overview of the long history of travel writing from the ancient world to the present day.
Considering a wide range of primary sources from Sir Walter Raleigh to Jenny Diski, the extensively updated second edition:
- introduces the genre and outlines key debates within the field, such as gender, sexuality, postcolonial studies, and visual culture;
- explores the autobiographical dimensions and different approaches for depicting the self;
- surveys a range of canonical and more marginal works, featuring new discussion of refugee and migrant narratives and LGBTQ travel writing;
- includes a new chapter walking readers through the developments in the genre since the first edition, such as online forms, environmentalism and ecocriticism, and travel writing as an increasingly transnational, multicultural genre.
With a comprehensive glossary and further reading, Travel Writing, Second Edition is an ideal primer to the genre for students—bridging the gap between distant times and distant places—as well as offering literary studies scholars an essential overview of current debates in the field.
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Defining The Genre
Exclusive and Inclusive Definitions of ‘Travel Writing’
Travellers’ Tales: Fact and Fiction in Travel Writing
The Cultural and Intellectual Status of Travel Writing
3. Travel Writing Through the Ages
An Overview
The Ancient World
Medieval Travellers and Travel Writing
Early Modern Travel Writing
The Long Eighteenth Century, 1660–1837
The Victorian and Edwardian Periods, 1837–1914
Travel Writing from 1914 to the Present
4. Reporting the World
Discoveries and Wonders: Some Perennial Problems in Travel Writing
Epistemological Decorum in Travel Writing: Gaining The Reader’s Trust
Authority and Veracity in the Modern Travel Book
5. Revealing the Self
Grand Tourists, Pilgrims and Questing Knights: Self-Fashioning in Addison’s Remarks on Italy (1705) and Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596)
Writing the Self: Travel Writing’s Inward Turn
The Imperious ‘I’?
6. Representing the Other
Strategies of Othering I: Travel Writing and Colonial Discourse
Strategies of Othering II: Travel Writing and Neo-Colonialism
Other Voices: Contesting Travel Writing’s Colonialist Tendencies
7. Questions of Gender and Sexuality
Masculinity, Travel and Travel Writing
Performing Femininity on the Page: Women’s Travel Writing in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Women Travellers and Colonialism
Women’s Travel Writing Today
8. Travel Writing Now: Continuities, Translations, Transformations
The Emergence of the Travel Blogosphere
Environmentalism, Ecocriticism and Eco-Travel Writing
Diversifying Travel Writing, Decolonising Travel Writing Studies
Glossary
Bibliography and Further Reading
Index
Biography
Carl Thompson is Reader in English Literature at the University of Surrey, UK. His publications include The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (2007), Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day (2013), and The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (2016).
