Anthem Studies in Travel Series

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.

Ever since human beings first travelled, cities have constituted important material and literary destinations. While the city has formed a key theme for scholars of literary fiction, travellers’ writings on the western city have been somewhat neglected by travel studies. However, travel writing with its attention to difference provides a rich source for the study of representational strategies and tactics in modern urban space. Beginning at the Crystal Palace in 1851 and ending up in the skyscrapers of NYC, this book analyses the writings of lesser-known as well as canonical French travel writers, including Paul Morand, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Perec and Jean Baudrillard. Tracing the work of these writers in London and New York from 1851 to the 1980s, it contributes to a body of work that analyses travel and travel writing beyond the Anglophone context, and engages in questions pertaining to the French imagination of possible meanings for life in the modern city. One of the central tenets of the book is that, in the way its spaces are planned, encountered and represented, the city is active in formulating identities, while the book’s guiding question is how analysis of French travel writing allows us to explore the multiplicity of urban modernities by engaging with the historical and cultural differences internal to ‘the West’. Bringing together the strands of theory, context and poetic analysis, the book treats of travel writing as a spatial practice, one that engages representations of urban space in questions of nationality, power and legibility. In this way, it opens avenues for the exploration of urban modernity from a position of alterity, whereby alternative imaginative geographies of the city come into view.

May Alcott Nieriker, Author and Advocate examines in-depth the writings on art and travel by the youngest sister of famed novelist Louisa May Alcott. Like other American women in the later nineteenth century, due to her gender May was unable to receive the advanced training and exhibition opportunities in the USA that she needed to become a notable professional painter. An additional obstacle was her family’s insecure financial status, making it difficult to study abroad for training. Fortunately, thanks to Louisa’s generosity May was able to make three extended trips to London and Paris in order to gain further training, and eventually attained the honor of having two paintings accepted into the Paris Salon. However, this book argues that Alcott Nieriker’s main contributions to cultural history were not necessarily her artistic creations, but rather her publications on travel and art—specifically, four articles for the Boston Evening Transcript and an 1879 guidebook, Studying Art Abroad and How To Do It Cheaply. In these works May sought to transform the art world, and social mores, through her advocacy for the rights of women to have equal access to a professional, artistic career.

This book derives from the conviction that Marguerite Blessington (1788–1849) merits scholarly attention as a travel writer, and thus offers the first detailed analysis of Blessington’s four travel books: ‘A Tour in The Isle of Wight, in the Autumn of 1820’ (1822), ‘Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris in 1821’ (1822), ‘The Idler in Italy’ (1839) and ‘The Idler in France’ (1841). It argues that travelling and travel writing provided Blessington with endless opportunities to reshape her public personae, demonstrating that her predilection for self-fashioning was related to the various tendencies in tourism and literature as well as the changing aesthetic and social trends in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Reconnaissance au Maroc is Charles de Foucauld’s adventurous account of his Moroccan explorations. For eleven months in 1883–84, Foucauld travelled through a country then off-limits to Europeans, documenting its landscape and charting its waterways. He travelled in disguise as a Russian rabbi, Joseph Aleman, accompanied by the real rabbi Mardochée Aby Serour, and sought hospitality in the mellahs, Jewish quarters, of villages along their route. Foucauld meticulously recorded every day of his time in Morocco, and by the time his memoir was published in 1888 it had already garnered praise in France and the prestigious gold medal from the Société de Géographie de Paris. The book is more than merely a travel memoir, however: as an artefact of cultural and religious encounter, and as a scientific compendium, Reconnaissance au Maroc offers an extraordinary glimpse of the late-nineteenth century French mentality toward North Africa, as well as a cross-section of Moroccan society in the pre-colonial era. Rosemary Peters-Hill’s volume translates Foucauld’s work into English for the first time, situating Reconnaissance within the contexts of both late-nineteenth century French writing about ailleurs, other places, and Foucauld’s own journey through Morocco: the “other” place where, paradoxically, he found his true self and calling.

This book studies design in airline travel posters of the 1920–1970: period. It is both a semiology and a sociocultural cultural history that explores the way advertising posters combine information and fantasy to create seductive images/texts. The book is lavishly illustrated in colour, the images constituting part of the overall argument. The field of poster studies is vast, but it is surprising how little work has been done till date on the fundamental structures – semiotic and semantic – that underpin the visual messages posters produce. Most studies of posters focus either on their history; on specific themes – politics, travel, sport, cinema; or on their status as collectable items. Though such approaches are valid, they hardly account for the specificity of the poster’s appeal or for the complex semiotic and cultural issues poster art raises. This book sets out to tackle these latter issues since they are fundamental both to the deeper significance and to the wider appeal of the poster as a cultural form.  In doing so it focuses on the field of airline travel posters which developed precisely in the period of the twentieth century (1920–1970) that coincided with the onset of mass travel. 

Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine is an anthology of travel accounts by a diverse range of writers and academics. Challenging conventional academic ‘authority’, each contributor writes, from memory during the Covid-19 lockdown, about a place they have previously visited, ‘accompanied’ by an historical traveller who published an account of the same place. As immobility is forced upon us, at least for the immediate future, we have the chance to reflect. Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine presents opportunities to approach a text as a scholar differently. We break with the traditional academic ‘rules’ by inserting ourselves into the narrative and foregrounding the personal, subjective elements of literary scholarship. Each contributor critiques an historical description of a place about which, simultaneously, they write a personal account.

This book argues that eighteenth-century British travel writings about the Arabian Overland Routes to India offered fascinating anecdotes of encounters that allow us to rethink Enlightenment understanding of the meaning of improvement. Travelling among and writing about the inhabitants, government, culture, religion and ruins of Syria and Mesopotamia offered Britons opportunities to pose themselves in their narratives as men of improvement abroad. To that end, travelling appeared in their books as serious attempt to improve their readers’ knowledge about a region that many in Britain saw as decayed, barbaric and primitive. But the various encounters British travellers experienced in the region allowed them to negotiate the impact of excessive materialism on the traditions, morality, religion and landscape of eighteenth-century Britain. At the heart of this book’s understanding of Enlightenment writings about the Levant is the idea that a journey in a region which many considered as a theatre for the arts, sciences and military conquests in the past and decay in the present represents a fraught relationship modern Europeans had with the past, present and future.