Keywords for Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary

By Charles Forsdick and Zoe Kinsley

Keywords for Travel Writing Studies draws on the notion of the ‘keyword’ as initially elaborated by Raymond Williams in his seminal 1976 text Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society to present 100 concepts central to the study of travel writing as a literary form. Each entry in the volume is around 1,000 words, the style more essayistic than encyclopaedic, with contributors reflecting on their chosen keyword from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The emphasis on travelogues and other cultural representations of mobility drawn from a range of national and linguistic traditions ensures that the volume has a comparative dimension; the aim is to give an overview of each term in its historical and theoretical complexity, providing readers with a clear sense of how the selected words are essential to a critical understanding of travel writing. Each entry is complemented by an annotated bibliography of five essential items suggesting further reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Apr 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783089246

Book preview

Keywords for Travel Writing Studies

Anthem Studies in Travel

Anthem Studies in Travel publishes new and pioneering work in the burgeoning field of travel studies. Titles in this series engage with questions of travel, travel writing, literature and history, and encompass some of the most exciting current scholarship in a variety of disciplines. Proposals for monographs and collections of essays may focus on research representing a broad range of geographical zones and historical contexts. All critical approaches are welcome, although a key feature of books published in the series will be their potential interest to a wide readership, as well as their originality and potential to break new ground in research.

Series Editor

Charles Forsdick – University of Liverpool, UK

Editorial Board

Mary Baine Campbell – Brandeis University, USA

Steve Clark – University of Tokyo, Japan

Claire Lindsay – University College London, UK

Loredana Polezzi – Cardiff University, UK

Paul Smethurst – University of Hong Kong, China

Keywords for Travel Writing Studies

A Critical Glossary

Edited by

Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

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and

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© 2019 Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester editorial matter

and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-922-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-922-9 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

1.Abroad

Paul Smethurst

2.Adventure

Richard Phillips

3.Aesthetic

Mary-Ann Constantine

4.Affect

Joanna Price

5.Anthropology

Aedín Ní Loingsigh

6.Arrival

Steve Clark

7.Beaten Track

Sharon Ouditt

8.Body

Charles Forsdick

9.Border

Tim Youngs

10.Boredom

Joe Moran

11.Breakdown

Richard Phillips

12.Cartography

Claire Lindsay

13.City

Gábor Gelléri

14.Class

Kathryn Walchester

15.Clothing

Dúnlaith Bird

16.Coevalness

Aedín Ní Loingsigh

17.Colonialism

Alex Drace-Francis

18.Companion

Alasdair Pettinger

19.Contact Zone

Claire Lindsay

20.Counterpoint

Siobhán Shilton

21.Curiosity

Richard Phillips

22.Dark Tourism

Charles Forsdick

23.Death

A. V. Seaton

24.Diaspora

Shine Choi

25.Disability

Charles Forsdick

26.Domestic Ritual

Betty Hagglund

27.End-of-Travel

Rune Graulund

28.Ethics

Corinne Fowler

29.Ethnicity

Aedín Ní Loingsigh

30.Exotic

Vladimir Kapor

31.Extreme Travel

Robert Burroughs

32.Fiction

Scott Carpenter

33.Form

Alex Drace-Francis

34.Gender

Dúnlaith Bird

35.Genre

Stacy Burton

36.Ghosts

A. V. Seaton

37.Grand Tour

A. V. Seaton

38.Hearing

Charles Forsdick

39.History

Kathryn Walchester

40.Home

Rune Graulund

41.Home Tour

Zoë Kinsley

42.Humour

Scott Carpenter

43.Identity

Alex Drace-Francis

44.Illustration

Kathryn Walchester

45.Intermediaries

Ángel Tuninetti

46.Intertextuality

Betty Hagglund

47.Islands

JOHANNES Riquet

48.Local Colour

Vladimir Kapor

49.Margins

Zoë Kinsley

50.Memory

Robert Burroughs

51.Migration

Aedín Ní Loingsigh

52.Minority

Heather Williams

53.Mobility

Charles Forsdick

54.Monarch-of-All-I-Survey

Claire Lindsay

55.Money

Alasdair Pettinger

56.Motivation

Kathryn Walchester

57.Nation

Steve Clark

58.Nature

Catherine Armstrong

59.Nomadism

Claire Lindsay

60.Orientalism

Julia Kuehn

61.Pedestrianism

Alasdair Pettinger

62.Persona

Alex Drace-Francis

63.Picturesque

Zoë Kinsley

64.Pilgrimage

Mary Baine Campbell

65.Place

Rune Graulund

66.Poetics

Julia Kuehn

67.Politics

Paul Smethurst

68.Polygraphy

Eimear Kennedy

69.Primitivism

Aedín Ní Loingsigh

70.Psychoanalysis

Robert Burroughs

71.Psychogeography

Alasdair Pettinger

72.Reading

Catherine Armstrong

73.Science

Mary Orr

74.Self

Stacy Burton

75.Semiotics

David Scott

76.Sex/Sexuality

David Scott

77.Skin

Charles Forsdick

78.Slowness

Sharon Ouditt

79.Smell

Charles Forsdick

80.Solitude

Joe Moran

81.Subjectivity

Joanna Price

82.Sublime

Sharon Ouditt

83.Taste

Charles Forsdick

84.Technology

Gary Totten

85.Time

Jacqueline Dutton

86.Tourism

Zoë Kinsley

87.Trade

Guido van Meersbergen

88.Translation

Aedín Ní Loingsigh

89.Transport

Gary Totten

90.Travel

Charles Forsdick

91.Traveller/Travellee

Paul Smethurst

92.Utopia

Jacqueline Dutton

93.Velocity

Gary Totten

94.Vertical Travel

Alasdair Pettinger

95.Virtual Travel

Margaret Topping

96.Vision

Margaret Topping

97.War

Corinne Fowler

98.Water

Carl Thompson

99.Wonder

Mary Baine Campbell

100.World

Catherine Armstrong

Bibliography

CONTRIBUTORS

Catherine Armstrong is senior lecturer in modern history at Loughborough University. She has published two monographs on travel narratives concerning colonial North America: Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century (2007) and Landscape and Identity in North America’s Southern Colonies (2013).

Dúnlaith Bird is a senior lecturer in English at the Université Paris 13. She has published on travel writing, gender identity and vagabondage in her monographTravelling in Different Skins: Gender Identity in European Women’s Travelogues, 1850–1950 (2012), and in The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (2015), Exiles, Travellers, and Vagabonds (2016) and Itinéraires (2018) among others.

Robert Burroughs is a reader and head of English in the School of Cultural Studies and Humanities at Leeds Beckett University. His publications include Travel Writing and Atrocities (2011), The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade (co-edited with Richard Huzzey, 2015) and African Testimony in the Movement for Congo Reform (2018).

Stacy Burton is professor of English and vice provost, emerita, at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her scholarly publications include Travel Narrative and the Ends of Modernity (2013) and articles in Modern Language Quarterly, Modern Philology, Comparative Literature, Genre and other venues.

Mary Baine Campbell is a poet and literary historian, Professor Emerita at Brandeis University and 2019 Kennedy Professor of Renaissance Literature at Smith College.She has published two histories of travel writing in relation to the histories of fiction and the sciences: The Witness and the Other World and Wonder and Science.

Scott Carpenter teaches literature and creative writing at Carleton College. His books include Acts of Fiction, Reading Lessons, The Aesthetics of Fraudulence in Nineteenth-Century France, Theory of Remainders: A Novel and This Jealous Earth: Stories. His travel writing has appeared in such publications as The Rumpus, Lowestoft Chronicle and Silk Road.

Shine Choi is a member of the Politics and IR faculty at Massey University School of People, Environment and Planning. Her publications include Re-imagining North Korea in International Politics: Problems and Alternatives (2015) and journal articles and book chapters on love, the colour grey, conflict and aesthetics.

Steve Clark is visiting professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, University of Tokyo. Previous publications include Travel Writing and Empire (editor, 1999) and Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and South-East Asia (co-edited with Paul Smethurst, 2008).

Mary-Ann Constantine is reader at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. She works on the literature and history of Romantic-period Wales and Brittany, and has a particular interest in travel writing and in the cultural politics of the 1790s. She was joint general editor of the ten-volume series Wales and the French Revolution (2012–15), and jointly edited with Nigel Leask Enlightenment Travel and British Identities: Thomas Pennant’s Tours in Scotland and Wales (2017). She is currently writing a monograph on the Welsh Tour: 1750–1820.

Alex Drace-Francis is associate professor of modern European literary and cultural history at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on European cultural history including several volumes on east European travel writing, most recently Where to Go in Europe, edited with Wendy Bracewell. He has contributed chapters to the forthcoming Cambridge History of Travel Writing and the Routledge History of East-Central Europe.

Jacqueline Dutton is associate professor of French studies at the University of Melbourne. She writes mainly about French and Francophone literatures and cultures, including travel writing, world literatures, comparative utopian studies, island studies and gastronomy. Her publications include a monograph on 2008 Nobel Laureate JMG Le Clézio, Le Chercheur d’or et d’ailleurs (2003) and a co-edited volume Wine, Terroir, Utopia: Making New Worlds (2019).

Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool, and Arts & Humanities Research Council Theme Leadership Fellow for ‘Translating Cultures’. He has published on a range of subjects, including travel writing, colonial history and postcolonial literature. He is a member of the Academy of Europe.

Corinne Fowler directs the Centre for New Writing and is an associate professor of postcolonial literature at the University of Leicester, United Kingdom. Among her publications is Chasing Tales: Travel Writing, Journalism and the History of British Ideas about Afghanistan (2008) and an edited volume, Travel and Ethics: Theory and Practice (2013), with Charles Forsdick and Ludmilla Kostova.

Gábor Gelléri is lecturer in French at Aberystwyth University, specializing in travel in early modern France. He is the author of Philosophies du voyage: visiter l’Angleterre aux 17e-18e siècles (2016). He is preparing a book on eighteenth-century educational travel programs and co-editing a volume on travel and conflict.

Rune Graulund is associate professor at the Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He is the co-editor of Postcolonial Travel Writing (2011) and co-author of Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing (2012), as well as author of a wide range of articles and chapters on travel writing in desert and polar regions.

Betty Hagglund is librarian and learning resources manager at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham, England; she also supervises MPhil and PhD students within the Centre for Research in Quaker Studies. Her publications include Tourists and Travellers: Women’s Non-fictional Writing about Scotland, 1770–1830 (2010) and four edited volumes of nineteenth-century women’s travel writing.

Vladimir Kapor lectures in French at the University of Manchester. He has authored two monographs, Pour une poétique de l’écriture exotique (2007) and Local Colour – A Travelling Concept (2009), and co-edited the travelogue Voyage à l’île de France for the new scholarly edition of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s complete works.

Eimear Kennedy obtained her PhD in 2017 and is currently a lecturer in Irish and Celtic studies in Queen’s University Belfast. Her current research focuses on Irish-language emigration and travel literature and explores issues of representation, intercultural encounter and ethics in travel writing.

Zoë Kinsley is a senior lecturer in English literature at Liverpool Hope University. Her work explores the literary representation of travel, space and landscape, and she has a particular interest in British home tour travel writing of the long eighteenth century. She has written widely on these themes and is the author of Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812 (2008).

Julia Kuehn is professor of English at the University of Hong Kong where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century literature and culture. She has published on women’s popular and Empire fiction, as well as on (China-related) travel writing, in the Victorian era and beyond.

Claire Lindsay is reader in Latin American literature and culture at University College London. She is the author of Locating Latin American Women Writers (2003) and Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America (2010), which has been translated into Spanish as Escritura contemporánea de viajes de América Latina (2016).

Aedín Ní Loingsigh is a lecturer in French at the University of Stirling. As well as articles and book chapters on African travel practices, she is the author of Postcolonial Eyes: Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African Literature (2009). Her current research is focused on travel and translation in the context of the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar.

Guido van Meersbergen is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick, where he is a member of the Global History and Culture Centre. His current projects focus on early-modern ethnography, cross-cultural encounters, diplomacy and the Dutch and English East India Companies in South Asia.

Joe Moran is professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University. His books include On Roads: A Hidden History (2009), Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV (2013) and Shrinking Violets: A Field Guide to Shyness (2016).

Mary Orr is Buchanan Chair of French at the University of St Andrews. Her research on intertextuality, the French novel and literatures of nineteenth-century French science are encapsulated in Flaubert’s Tentation: Remapping Nineteenth-Century History of Religion and Science (2008). She is currently preparing the first study of the scientific traveler Sarah Bowdich (1791–1856).

Sharon Ouditt is head of English at Nottingham Trent University. She has written extensively on World War I, but more recently has published Impressions of Southern Italy: British Travel Writing from Henry Swinburne to Norman Douglas (2014). She is presently working on an edition of Evelyn Waugh’s Labels for Oxford University Press.

Alasdair Pettinger is an independent scholar based in Glasgow, Scotland. He has published on travel literature, the cultures of slavery and abolitionism, and representations of Haiti. His books include the anthology Always Elsewhere (1998) and Frederick Douglass and Scotland, 1846 (2018).

Richard Phillips is the author and editor of a number of books in cultural geography and cultural history. These include Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (1997), Sex, Politics and Empire (2006); Muslim Spaces of Hope: Geographies of Possibility in Britain and the West (2008); Liverpool ‘81: Remembering the Riots (2011) and Fieldwork for Human Geography (2012). He is professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield.

Joanna Price lectures in English and American literature at Liverpool John Moores University. She has written about trauma, memory and mourning, for instance, in fiction about the war in Vietnam and in travel writing. She is currently exploring these topics in the context of the literature and culture of Antarctica.

Johannes Riquet is associate professor of English literature at the University of Tampere. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception, Ideology, Geopoetics (2019). He co-founded the international Island Poetics project, and is on the editorial board of the Island Studies Journal.

David Scott is emeritus professor of French (textual and visual studies) at Trinity College Dublin. His research focuses on travel writing, poetry and the visual arts, graphic design and boxing. His creative writing includes a Utopian fiction (Dynamo Island, 2015), short stories (Cut Up on Copacabana, 2018) and poetry.

A. V. Seaton is MacAnally Professor of Travel History and Tourism Behavior at the University of Limerick. He has taught and published widely for over 30 years on travel history, literary tourism, heritage and thanatourism. His recent research has been in the iconography and representation of travel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Siobhán Shilton is reader in French studies and the visual arts at the University of Bristol. She has written about contemporary art and literature exploring cultural encounters between France and the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa and Vietnam, and is currently working on art and the ‘Arab Spring’. Her most recent book is Transcultural Encounters: Gender and Genre in Franco-Maghrebi Art (2013).

Paul Smethurst recently retired from the University of Hong Kong where he taught travel writing, theory and contemporary fiction. His books include The Postmodern Chronotope (2000), Travel Writing and the Natural World (2012) and The Bicycle: Towards a Global History (2015), and he recently co-edited New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (2015), with Julia Kuehn. He is currently completing a book on the ecocritical imagination in nature writing. He divides his time between Dorset and Bali, working with the environmental charity, Common Ground and growing orchids.

Carl Thompson is reader in English literature at the University of Surrey. His publications include (as author) The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (2007) and Travel Writing (2011); and (as editor) The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (2016), Romantic-Era Shipwreck Narratives (2007) and Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day (2013).

Margaret Topping is professor of French literary and visual cultures at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research trajectory has developed from an early disciplinary focus on one of France’s canonical writers, Marcel Proust, to a firmly interdisciplinary approach to debates linked to travel, tourism and migration, and to the ethics and aesthetics of cross-cultural representation. Particular focal points are the ethical role and responsibilities of public spaces such as museums and archives in negotiating diversity, as well as the possibilities for creating enhanced connectivity, cohesion and social well-being in postconflict or postcolonial societies through community-based initiatives such as cultural festivals or urban art projects.

Gary Totten is professor and chair of the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and editor of the journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. His most recent book is African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (2015).

Ángel Tuninetti is a native of Argentina. He obtained his PhD at Washington University in St. Louis, and currently teaches Latin American literature at West Virginia University (United States). His main area of research is travel literature to and from Latin America, especially the Southern Cone region.

Kathryn Walchester is senior lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University. Her work focuses on women’s travel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, northern travel and mountaineering. Her publications include ‘Our Own Fair Italy’; Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Writing and Italy 1800–1844 (2007), Gamle Norge and Nineteenth-Century British Women Travellers and Norway (2014) and Servants and the British Travelogue 1750–1837 (forthcoming).

Heather Williams was Co-I on the AHRC-funded ‘European Travellers to Wales 1750–2910’ project and is a research fellow at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth. She specializes in French studies and Celtic studies and has published Postcolonial Brittany (2007) and Mallarmé’s Ideas in Language (2004).

Tim Youngs is professor of English and travel studies at Nottingham Trent University. He is founding editor of the journal Studies in Travel Writing (1997–present) and the author or editor of several books on travel writing, including The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing (2013).

INTRODUCTION

Keywords for Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary is a collaborative and cross-disciplinary response to what might be described as the ‘mobility turn’ in the Arts and Humanities (Greenblatt 2010), as well as in the social sciences more generally (Sheller 2011). In recent decades, the study of travel has become increasingly recognized as a serious area of enquiry; the study of travel writing itself, while still relatively young, is also now fully acknowledged as a multidisciplinary critical practice in its own right. This volume suggests that embracing the concept of the keyword is a way of federating the diverse areas that the study of travel writing encompasses, providing a common lexicon while at the same time inviting a differential approach to the ways in which particular terms are variously deployed. When Raymond Williams first published his seminal work Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society in 1976, he stressed that it was ‘not a dictionary or glossary of a particular academic subject’. Instead, he described the intention to create ‘the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society’ (Williams 1988 [1976], 15; emphases in the original). We have approached our own keywords project in very much the same way. Now that travel writing studies has reached a certain stage of disciplinary maturity, it seemed timely to reflect on the shared critical vocabulary that has emerged and is being used, adapted and reconsidered across a number of disciplines. Rather than ‘defining’ terms in any straightforward sense, what we and our contributors hope to do is to foster thoughtful consideration of the language and terminology we use collectively and in a variety of different contexts to express our ideas about the ways in which travellers write about their journeys.

We consider travel writing in its widest senses to designate the textual recording of a variety of practices of mobility, spontaneously in the field or retrospectively on the traveller’s return, and as a form that lays bare the ways in which culture and cultural identities are fundamentally constituted by mobility (Clifford 1986, 96). In doing so, we hope to offer a snapshot of the critical and theoretical landscapes of our field of enquiry, tracing the origins of the vocabulary and concepts that have emerged as key and recurrent ones for travel writing studies, and – acknowledging that keywords are constantly changing – indicating emerging and possible directions for future work. We have found that ours is an area of enquiry that has been particularly influenced by developments in fields such as disability studies and postcolonialism. For example, revising their influential Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts for the third edition, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (2013, viii) identified the increasing significance of ‘borders and borderlands’ in the negotiation of, and battle for, cultural identity, and it is evident that travel writing studies is a field which bears witness to such a development. At the same time as finding synergies with these current schools of thought, we also look to make connections back to Williams’s (1988, 23) original proposals about language, seeking to identify clusters of keywords for travel, and in so doing ‘reassert the facts of connection and interaction from which this whole inquiry began’ and ‘make possible the sense of an extended and intricate vocabulary, within which both the variable words and their varied and variable interrelations are in practice active’.

As Noel Salazar and Kiran Jayaram (2016, 4–7) have pointed out, Williams’s work has left a significant legacy, and his project is increasingly being revised and continued as he hoped it would. These ongoing enquiries are in evidence, for example, through the Keywords project run by the Universities of Cambridge and Pittsburgh, and in the work of the Raymond Williams Society. And in 2005 Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris edited New Keywords, a revision of Williams’s work, in an attempt to reflect changes that had occurred in the vocabulary of culture and society in the years since Williams’s original study was published. We are also conscious that this book follows the publication of a number of recent works which apply Williams’s critical and conceptual framework to particular areas of literary and cultural study. Some of those texts, such as the ‘Keywords’ volumes published by Wiley Blackwell, focus on particular historical periods, revealing the at times radical ways in which the usage and meaning of particular terms can be transformed under the pressure and influence of particular political, social and economic conditions. Introducing Romanticism: Keywords, for example, Frederick Burwick (2015, ix) identifies the Romantic period as one in which ‘literary terms and concepts that had been in use since classical times, or had emerged in the Renaissance, took on new meanings and significance, and newer terms were introduced’. Other volumes, such as those in the series published by New York University Press, emerge from research and debates within specific disciplines, yet also, as the editors of Keywords for Disability Studies point out, seek to influence and engage ideas beyond their own field (Adams et al. 2015, 4). There are additional collections such as with Other Press, which includes titles on ‘experience’ (Tazi 2004a), ‘gender’ (Tazi 2004b), ‘identity’ (Tazi 2004c) and ‘truth’ (Tazi 2004d) that seek to explore these keywords from a range of different cultural perspectives.

Keywords of Mobility: Critical Engagements makes a specific and important contribution to discussions about the language and paradigms used for discussing travel and movement, primarily through an anthropological lens. By placing welcome emphasis on ‘motility’ – one of the nine keywords covered in the collection – the authors highlight the significance of an individual’s potential to travel, their ‘agency to be mobile and to choose whether to move or to stay put’ (Salazar and Jayaram 2016, 6). The volume challenges the straightforward association of mobility with positive values related to improvement and ‘access to capital’, arguing that ‘the movement of people and the various translocal connections may, and often do, create or reinforce difference and inequality, as well as blending or erasing such differences’ (2). Keywords of Mobility is deliberately focused upon a small number of ‘general’ terms, whereas our project in some ways operates very differently, tackling a much larger group of ‘keywords’ ranging from the general – ‘class’, ‘history’, ‘politics’ and of course ‘travel’ itself – to more specific terms that carry very particular meanings for the albeit interdisciplinary field of travel writing studies. And yet there are ways in which our efforts here share the aims and objectives of Noel Salazar and Kiran Jayaram. Like them, we have been heavily influenced by – and seek to engage actively with – the ‘mobility turn’ in social theory and beyond; and just as they challenge the assumption that all mobility demonstrates positive, upward movement in social and economic terms, by including terms such as ‘exile’, ‘death’ and indeed ‘mobility’ within our own corpus, we have intended to develop the work of others in the field of travel writing studies who emphasize that not all who travel do so by choice, or for reasons that have anything to do with pleasure and leisure. Like Keywords of Mobility and Keywords for Disability Studies, we ask what it actually means to be ‘mobile’ – and in particular to record textually the experience of mobility.

Keywords relevant to travel are not particularly prevalent in Williams’s original Keywords; the greater prominence of the language of travel and movement in the later New Keywords volume draws attention to the increasing significance of mobility in contemporary cultural and academic discourse. For example, terms included in New Keywords which relate explicitly to travel are ‘diaspora,’ ‘tourism’, ‘globalization’ and ‘space’. However, there are linguistic and cognitive rhythms and echoes which connect our work to that of Williams, as well as to the more recent New Keywords volume. Williams (1988, 173) devoted an entry to ‘isms’, the uses of which include the formation of nouns identifying the ‘actions and beliefs characteristic of some group […] or tendency […] or school’, and it was necessary to include a number of such terms in our own work (‘colonialism’, ‘tourism’, ‘orientalism’, ‘nomadism’, ‘primitivism’, ‘pedestrianism’). There are also precise, travel-related terms included here, which were chosen by Williams for his original consideration of the keywords for understanding culture and society. ‘Class’, ‘history’ and ‘science’, for example, are present in Keywords, in New Keywords and in our own volume. And beyond those direct resonances, there are threads of meaning and significance which have been important for those studying travel writing, just as they were for Williams, although they might now be framed in slightly different ways. For example, Williams wrote on ‘capitalism’ and ‘wealth’, and we have included entries on ‘money’ and ‘trade’; one of Williams’s keywords was ‘ecology’, and after much discussion we decided to explore critical ideas about travellers’ representation of the natural landscape and environmental concerns – with a nod towards the increasingly evident intersections between travel writing and nature writing – under the heading ‘nature’. Taken as a set of keywords, we hope that the group of 100 terms we present recognizes the disciplinary stability that has emerged in the study of travel writing, while at the same time avoiding any sense of ossification. Like Williams (1988, 27), we acknowledge the ‘necessarily unfinished and incomplete’ nature of this endeavour; we share his desire to initiate a living project that prompts further analysis and discussion and hope this ‘inquiry remains open’ as his has (26).

The glossary encompasses three interlacing chronologies: with Williams’s insistence on the significance of semantic history in mind, the first addresses the discussion of etymology in each entry. As Williams (1976, 17) asserts, the ‘history and complexity of meanings […] are masked by a nominal continuity so that words which seem to have been there for centuries, with continuous general meanings, have come in fact to express radically different or radically variable, yet sometimes hardly noticed, meanings and implications of meaning’. Entries seek to include reference to such changing patterns of use and meaning, making visible the relationship of each term to travel and travel writing. Some of the terms encapsulate a rich history of shifts and manoeuvres in meaning. The entry on ‘travel’ is indicative in this regard. As Charles Forsdick shows in his discussion of ‘travel’, the meanings of both ‘travel’ and ‘writing’ ‘have evolved considerably, and belong to complex semantic fields’. Other entries, such as ‘contact zone’ and ‘end-of-travel’, pertain specifically to, and have emerged from, recent developments in travel writing studies.

The second frame of reference includes the range of critical and theoretical texts from travel writing studies and its concomitant fields, such as sociology, literary studies, history and geography, to which the authors of the entries make frequent reference, and which largely come from scholarly developments in the past 30 years. The third and final chronological frame arises from the focus on the critical and theoretical texts mentioned above, but also in the examples of illustrative texts alluded to in the entries. This range of primary texts has a much wider temporal frame than the first, deliberately echoing the interests of each author and illustrating the enormous variety and scope of travel writing. As Carl Thompson (2011, 34) notes, ‘[T]‌ravel writing has a long history, stretching back into antiquity’, and, ‘if we expand our definition of the genre to include tales of travel passed on by word of mouth, it doubtless extends into prehistory’. The scope of the primary texts addressed in Keywords for Travel Writing Studies complements such historical depth by including recent trajectories in contemporary travel. Alasdair Pettinger’s entry on ‘vertical travel’, for example, addresses the phenomenon of ‘deep mapping’ and the detailed description of Italian cities in the Contromano series. The volume also goes beyond the contemporary, anticipating travels of the future and new modes of depicting them. By way of example, Margaret Topping’s entry on ‘virtual travel’ points towards the increasing use of virtual technologies in leisure travel and describes the ‘borderlessness’ of cybertravel with the world’s first virtual tour operator, while Paul Smethurst notes the emergence of ‘multimodal’ travel writing and increased self-reflexivity in travel writing in his entry on ‘traveller/travellee’.

The range of reference in the short essays that follow reflects the fact that studies in travel writing is a relatively young field of academic study, emerging as part of wider debates in the humanities including postcolonialism, gender studies and the ‘spatial turn’. Since scholarly interest in the area emerged in the 1980s, the focus of critical attention on travel writing has itself travelled considerably. Often challenging conventional conceptions of canonicity and tradition, early approaches addressed the generic status of travel writing and its relationship to other, more widely analysed, forms. In recent years, emphasis has been retained on the significance of theory, not least taking into account ‘complex issues of globalization, cultural hybridization and the large-scale flow of populations both within and across national borders’ as Carl Thompson (2016a, xvi) acknowledges. Recent texts such as The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (2016) edited by Carl Thompson and New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (2015) edited by Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst feature the re-conceptualization of key concerns, including postcolonialism, gender and genre. Although travel writing studies has kept sight of its early preoccupation with genre, as Kuehn and Smethurst (2015, 2) note, the essays in their collection ‘will not explain what travel writing is, but they will reflect on where it might extend through permeable borders and margins’ (emphases in the original). A postcolonial approach is reworked, for example, by the writing of Kuehn on cosmopolitanism in Hong Kong, and in the analysis of a corpus of texts which ‘write back’, such as the work of Swaralipi Nandi (2014) on Bengali travellers and Sam Knowles (2014) in his study of the ‘transnational’ travel writer. Other recent directions include the influence of the sensory humanities; the effect of travel on bodily and sensory perception and the corporeality of mobility are explored in a range of recent publications, supplementing or challenging earlier emphases on ocularcentrism and the visual. Studies examining different modes and means of travel have drawn attention to the significance of the materialities of travel and the ways in which the paraphernalia that accompanies and permits mobility are integral to its experience in the field. Scholars continue to widen the corpus of travel writing through the recovery of forgotten texts and through projects addressing the history of the book. The typology of the traveller and travel writer has also been extended as studies address new forms of travel, and the accounts of journeys made by people who had previously been ‘excluded from the role of proper travellers because of their race and class’ are considered (Clifford 1997, 33). Recent scholarship on queer travel by Mark DeStephano and Churnjeet Mahn has drawn attention to the extent of heteronormativity in travel and travel writing and the sexual identity of the traveller (DeStephano 2015; Mahn 2016).

Contributions from cognate disciplines have also revealed valuable insights and new directions. Anthropologists Noel Salazar and Nelson H. H. Graburn draw attention to the nexus of social practices which coalesce to construct objects of tourism in their Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches (2014), while Professor of Latin American culture Ilan Stavans and writer on Jewish culture Joshua Ellison (2015) argue that journeys and their purpose need to be reimagined as searches for meaning in a global context. As suggested above, eco-criticism and the new nature writing have formed important additions to the range of approaches for scholars of travel writing, alongside those considering ideas of vertical travel, microspection and ‘place’. Despite such articulations of new critical and theoretical approaches, including accounts of innovative practices of recording travel, many recent publications have continued to rely on historical and geographical emphases. The distinctiveness of the keywords approach is that it permits travel writing studies to be considered thematically, cutting across boundaries of time and space and enabling new intersections to be made.

Such intersections are central to another new development in studies of travel writing, a shift from a traditional comparatism that juxtaposes national and linguistic traditions relating to the production and consumption of the travelogue towards an actively transnational approach that acknowledges the cross-cultural entanglements that the form encapsulates. The study of travel writing – which, like other strands of literary analysis, has developed along cultural, linguistic and even national lines – reflects such complexities and reveals the limitations and blind spots of any approach that pretends to universality: in its Anglophone manifestations, for instance, postcolonial studies has had a major influence on the field, whereas French-language scholarship has often focused more on questions of genre and imagology (Forsdick 2005a). Published in English and locating itself within a primarily English-language tradition, the current volume is characterized by an Anglocentrism and even Anglonormativity that we acknowledge. As editors, we assume the collection will be used primarily (but certainly not exclusively) by students and scholars with an interest in Anglophone travelogues. By actively including entries by specialists of travel writing in languages other than English, and by ensuring that our contributors extend where possible their range of reference in primary and secondary literature beyond the Anglosphere, we have sought nevertheless to pay attention to questions of transnationalism and multilingualism. This approach is associated with an attempt to underline elements intrinsic to the subject matter in question as well as being based on grounds of analytical method: travel writing often captures experiences that are inherently cross-cultural and multilingual, despite the tendency of some travel writers to downplay the overtly translational elements of their practices in the field and on the page (Cronin 2000). We would argue that these aspects inherent in the very generic make-up of travel writing require reading practices that are open to multiple perspectives, in particular those of places visited; acknowledge that journeys often occur in ‘contact zones’ (Pratt 1992) or ‘translation zones’ (Apter 2006) where multiple cultures and languages meet; and understand that approaches to the travelogue that are linguistically insensitive fail to capture these dimensions. As Carol Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2009) have recently suggested in their discussion of the possibility of a ‘global lexicon’ – in a study of 16 different terms that have emerged in particular locations before taking on more complex transnational lives – words themselves are often ‘in motion’, subject to processes of travel in their own right.

For Raymond Williams (1988), keywords tend to travel transhistorically within a single language rather than transculturally across languages. He nevertheless called Keywords ‘a book in which the author would positively welcome amendment, correction and addition’ (26), and in that spirit accepted the limitations of his own approach in a 1977 interview with the New Left Review: ‘What would be really interesting is […] to pursue this research across languages and see whether there are, as there must be, certain shared semantic changes in certain kinds of social orders’ (2014 [1976], 177). From a contemporary perspective, we may suggest that Williams gestured here towards a convergence between his own conception of Keywords and a more recent project, Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables. Although ‘travel’ does not feature in the latter, philosophical and ethical concerns central to the term feature in a number of entries, not least that on ‘autrui’ where the exploration of alter and alius leads to a reflection on questions of alterity and identity central to critical readings of the travelogue across cultures (2014, 76). We are not aware of another attempt to study the keywords relating to travel writing in another language, although a collection edited by Jérôme Godeau and Madeleine Volcouve, Les Mots du voyage (2001), offers a whimsical, essayistic alphabet book of terms relating to travel more generally, a number of which (e.g., ‘eaux’ (water), ‘Grand Tour’, ‘missionaires’ (missionaries)) match or are at least closely cognate to words we have selected. Thomas Höniger adopts a different approach and offers a wide selection of Mots du voyageur (2013), again a number of which relate to those in the current volume, but illustrates each by a quotation drawn from travel literature. Christian Noack (2011) – in a volume of essays on travel beyond the Iron Curtain – proposes a German-language A-to-Z of tourist-related terms.

Cassin’s increasingly influential work on questions of (un)translatability was anticipated by an earlier study by Anna Wierzbicka (1997) that sought to explore ways of ‘understanding cultures through their keywords’. Her argument is not only that key concepts evolve in specific cultural and linguistic niches, reflecting the concerns and priorities of the often-national frames in which they are to be understood, but also – much in the unspoken logic of Williams – that keywords can operate as a telling way into a culture for outsiders. In terms of etymology, semantic field and wider cultural or ideological resonance, the majority of the terms we have selected are, in Cassin’s terms, ‘untranslatable’, that is, not resistant to translation but containing meanings whose complexity is revealed by the unfinished, unfinishable process of their translation. ‘Travel’ does not mean the same thing as ‘voyage’, which in turn does not equate to ‘Reise’ (we could, of course, go on, beyond this predictably narrow range of languages). Had we sought to factor in the wider implications of such an apparently obvious observation, as made explicit in the work of both Wierzbicka and Cassin, this book would have been a very different one – and we hope that the collection might trigger further reflection along these lines about a genuinely cross-cultural, cross-linguistic praxis of travel writing criticism. Our aim remains the more modest one of providing a practical and at times possibly provocative selection of what we consider to be some of the shared vocabulary of studies in travel writing, with the hope that embedded in and often made explicit through the entries is an awareness of the inevitable transformations these terms undergo in their much wider existence as they are translated between languages and cultures.

The limitations of the volume are linked not only to these questions of cultural specificity and the changing meanings of keywords as they cross various borders, but also to the potentially subjective and certainly selective range of terms we have limited ourselves to including. A number of recent keywords projects have deployed the techniques of digital humanities – not least text mining to identify the frequency of use of particular terms – to determine the concepts on which they focus. The criteria for selection in this volume have deliberately avoided any such emphasis on the scientific or the systematic. Our final list of keywords has developed over a number of years, since the conception of this collection initially emerged via an iterative process of consultation among the contributors and the wider community of travel writing scholars. Informal exchanges as well as more formal presentations at conferences and seminars have allowed us to test the range of entries in the glossary, focusing on which words should be included or excluded, but also exploring (and then determining the most appropriate keyword that encapsulates) the cognate terms that circulate around the core concepts, ideas and phenomena we have identified. There is a deliberate eclecticism to the result, with a core of our chosen terms (e.g., ‘aesthetic’, ‘colonialism’, ‘gender’, ‘sex’) belonging quite obviously to the ‘vocabulary of culture and society’ that Williams’s conception of the ‘Keyword’ implies, while others (e.g., ‘coevalness’, ‘contact zone’, ‘counterpoint’, ‘polygraphy’) are clearly more specific and specialized, often even associated with a particular critic and not as saturated in meaning as those in the former category. This juxtaposition is deliberate, bringing together the macro and the micro, that is, terms with a general resonance beyond the field of travel with those with a particular pertinence for new understandings of journey narratives. Other recent collections that have similarly associated terms encompassing these different, even divergent understandings of the keyword have ultimately distanced themselves from Williams’s example, anxious about the extent to which newly coined or emergent terms are ‘not so crucial or so established’ (Hayot and Walkowitz 2016, 5). A ‘dictionary’, ‘lexicon’ or ‘vocabulary’ is seen as an alternative, but we have retained ‘keywords’ as a result of the close attention to the shifting semantics and to the materiality of language this term allows.

Throughout the production of this collection, we have anticipated the criticism that our selection might elicit: we acknowledge as a result that although certain terms we include have an indisputable place in the critical vocabulary relating to travel writing, the selection of others may be seen as more subjective. It is our contention that such issues are intrinsic to the subject matter of the volume, and that such debates about inclusion and exclusion illustrate the richness of studies in travel writing as an area of enquiry. At the same time, as was the case with Williams’s own Keywords, we accept that the final list of terms we have included provides a particular snapshot, and that the nature of a critical vocabulary is that it is subject to organic development. In the 1983 revised edition of his collection, Williams noted his ‘sense of the work as necessarily unfinished and incomplete’ – that is, as a work of scholarship, he saw the project as much as an invitation for collaboration, extension and correction as it was a finished product in its own right. We submit the words we have selected to the same logic, aware that other editorial teams are likely to have determined alternative lists, and hope as a result that the volume will solicit discussion among readers, scholars and students about the keywords best suited not only to analysing individual travel narratives, but also to allowing dialogue across often very different texts, whether these might approach the same place but at different historical moments, or engage simultaneously with diverse locations. Such engagement will, we