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It traces the evolution of travel writing studies over the last two decades and points to innovative ways to study this heterogenous genre. The book revisits the complicated relationship between fact and fiction, science and literature, and the world and the word through pioneering transdisciplinary and transmedial approaches.
List of contents
ForewordJean Viviès
IntroductionSamia Ounoughi, Emmanuelle Peraldo, Anne-Florence Quaireau
"More than Just a Travel Book." Regarding Travel Writing.Tim Youngs
Chapter 1. From the Visited Place to the Visitor's Gaze: Decentering Perspectives on Nice and its Region in Smollett's Travels through France and Italy (1766)Nathalie Bernard
Chapter 2. Women Travellers Decentering 'the South' through Nordicity: Mary Wollstonecraft, the Wilmot Sisters and Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake Stéphanie Gourdon
Chapter 3. Unearthing Imperial Matters: a Postcolonial and Ecocritical Reading of Louisa Anne Meredith's Notes and Sketches of New South Wales (1844) and My Home in Tasmania during a Residence of Nine Years (1852)Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding
Chapter 4. "A broader, truer glimpse of existence": Ella Sykes's Post-Romantic, Affective Realism in Through Persia on a Side-Saddle (1898)Julia Kuehn
Chapter 5. A Geopoetic Approach to fin de siècle Adventure Travel Writing: R. L. Stevenson and Joseph Conrad as Writer-GeographersJulie Gay
Chapter 6. Travel Writing and Engineering: Experiential and Textual Hybridity in the Works of David and Robert Louis StevensonKevin Cristin
Chapter 7. Photography in Isabella Bird's Asian Travel Accounts: the Birth of a Personal Practice and Renewal of a GenreFloriane Reviron-Piégay
Chapter 8. Tristram Shandy goes to Greece: Patrick Leigh Fermor's Mani (1958)Anne Rouhette
Chapter 9. "Black flight-feathers spread like tight-rope-walkers' fingers:" Walking, Flying, and Reading the Sonorous World with Patrick Leigh FermorIsabelle Keller-Privat
Chapter 10. Harbingers of Taste: Mid-Twentieth Century Women's Food-Focused Travel Writings as a new Paradigm in Travel Writings and their StudiesVirginia Terry Sherman
Chapter 11. The Quest for the Lost Parrot: Trivial Travel in Julian Barnes's Flaubert's ParrotChristian Gutleben
Chapter 12. Writing "Countertravels" and Decolonising Environmental Epistemologies in Jamaica Kincaid's Among Flowers. A Walk in the Himalaya Pauline Amy de la Bretèque
Chapter 13. Travel Writing as a Conscious Reading of the World: an Ecocritical Approach of Henry Russell-Killough and Kev Reynolds' textsFrançoise Besson
Chapter 14. "'The Land Looks Empty.' - Writing the Far East in Colin Thubron's The Amur (2021)"Jan Borm
Chapter 15. Can Travel-Writing be Decolonised?: A Flat Place (2023) by Noreen MasudJaine Chemmachery
Index
About the author
Samia Ounoughi is a senior lecturer in English linguistics at Université Grenoble Alpes. She is a member of LIDILEM (Linguistique et Didactique des Langues Étrangères et Maternelles). She is also a member of LABEX ITTEM (Laboratoire d'Excellence Innovations et Transitions Territoriales en Montagne) where she works with geographers, cartographers, and historians. She was the vice-president of SELVA from 2019 to 2023. Her research deals with the relations between language and space, and she specialises in corpus discourse analysis of mountain travel writing. She has co-edited
Exceptions and Exceptionality in Travel Writing with Anne-Florence Quaireau (
Studies in Travel Writing, 2020). Her other publications tackle the process of mountain nomination ("Referential Conventions as Compromise," in
Reference: From Conventions to Pragmatics, John Benjamins, 2023). She is the co-editor of
Writing on the Move with Tim Hannigan (forthcoming: 2025).
Emmanuelle Peraldo is Professor of British literature at Université Côte d'Azur, Nice, and Director of the CTELA (Centre Transdisciplinaire d'Épistémologie de la Littérature et des Arts vivants, UPR6307). From 2019 to 2023, she was the president of SELVA, a French learned society devoted to the study of travel literature in English. Her PhD, obtained in 2008, was on Defoe and the writing of history (Champion, 2010). Since then, she has been working on the link between geography and literature in the eighteenth century (which was the title of her habilitation to supervise research), and more particularly in Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. Her interests lie in the field of travel writing, novels of the eighteenth century, ecocriticism, geocriticism, and animal studies. Her most recent publications include an article on "Animal Fridays in
Robinson Crusoe and its Afterlives" in
The Nordic Journal of English Studies (2024) and the co-edition of a special issue of
Viatica on Patrick Leigh Fermor (2023).
Anne-Florence Quaireau is an Associate Professor of British literature and translation at the University of Angers and a member of the research team CIRPaLL (Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur les Patrimoines en Lettres et Langues). She specialises in nineteenth-century women's travel writing and has published several articles and chapters on the subject. Her PhD dissertation on Anna Jameson's travel writing in Canada was awarded the SELVA Doctoral Prize in 2013. Her monograph
Le Féminin en partage: le récit de voyage d'Anna Jameson au Canada (Sorbonne Université Presses, 2022) was finalist for the 2023 Joint Book Prize of the French Society for the Study of English (SAES) and French Association for American Studies (AFEA). She has co-edited a special issue of
Studies in Travel Writing on exceptions and exceptionality with Samia Ounoughi, and has co-written three textbooks for students on travel in literature,
L'ici et l'ailleurs (Atlande, 2015)
,Voyage, parcours initiatique, exil (Atlande, 2016), and
Voyages et migrations (Atlande, 2020). From 2019 to 2023, she was the secretary for SELVA, a French learned society dedicated to the study of travel literature in English.
Summary
It traces the evolution of travel writing studies over the last two decades and points to innovative ways to study this heterogenous genre. The book revisits the complicated relationship between fact and fiction, science and literature, and the world and the word through pioneering transdisciplinary and transmedial approaches.
