Read more
First published in 1982. The Art of Travel is the first collection of critical essays to be devoted to British travel writing. It attempts to give a sense of the wealth of such writing, to map some of its forms and conventions and, implicitly, to claim a place for travel writing in any revised definition of literature. For this collection, travel includes sea voyages, European tours, commissioned enquiries into social conditions, and urban writing; travel writing ranges from works such as Sea and Sardinia by D.H. Lawrence whose status as a novelist guarantees his travel books some attention, through the essays and books of Victorian middle-class travellers into working-class London, to the work of V.S. Naipaul, a contemporary writer, who has increasingly preferred the travel book to the novel.
List of contents
Chapter 1 “'Tis not to divert the Reader”: Moral and Literary Determinants in some Early Travel Narratives; Chapter 2 The Voyages of Jerónimo Lobo, Joachim Le Grand, and Samuel Johnson; Chapter 3 A Semi-Mental Journey: Structure and Illusion in Smollett's Travels; Chapter 4 ::; Chapter 5 The Spectacle of Reality in Sea and Sardinia; Chapter 6 Debunking the Jungle: The Context of Evelyn Waugh's Travel Books 1930–9, MARTINSTANNARD; Chapter 7 The Views of Travellers: Travel Writing in the 1930s; Chapter 8 Authorial Voice in V.S. Naipaul's The Middle Passage; Chapter 9 Travel Writing Victorian and Modern: A Review of Recent Research;
About the author
Philip Dodd is the editor of the journal Prose Studies and of a volume of essays on Walter Pater, and the author of a number of essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. He is currently working on a study of English Autobiography, 1870–1940.
