Keywords for Travel Writing Studies

Keywords for Travel Writing Studies

A Critical Glossary

Edited by Charles Forsdick
Zoë Kinsley
Kathryn Walchester

Anthem Studies in Travel

‘Keywords for Travel Writing Studies’ draws on the concept of the ‘keyword’ as initially elaborated by Raymond Williams in his seminal 1976 text, ‘Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society’, in order to present 100 concepts central to the study of travel writing as a literary form with cross-disciplinary implications.

PDF, 374 Pages

ISBN:9781783089239

April 2019

£65.00, $90.00

EPUB, 374 Pages

ISBN:9781783089246

April 2019

£33.95, $52.95

  • About This Book
  • Reviews
  • Author Information
  • Series
  • Table of Contents
  • Links
  • Podcasts

About This Book

The volume draws on the concept of the ‘keyword’ as initially elaborated by Raymond Williams in his seminal 1976 text, ‘Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society’, in order to present 100 concepts central to the study of travel writing as a literary form with cross-disciplinary implications. The significance of travel, the possibilities it holds for the individual and the impact it has upon our own society and those across the globe are debates that we encounter daily in the popular press and that have come sharply into focus in recent years at times of social, political, economic and humanitarian crises.

In its attention to the ‘keywords of travel’, this volume responds to what might be described as the ‘mobility turn’ in the arts and humanities over the past two decades. Travel writing has become a significant field of academic study across the humanities and social sciences, yet it is only in recent decades that it has been recognised as a serious area of enquiry and that the texts of travel have gained the status of important literary and cultural documents. At the same time, the volume acknowledges the way in which the notion of ‘keywords’ is being revised and considered in the academic community and more widely by other cultural stakeholders including museums and galleries. In terms of the keywords listed, whilst there is a marked absence of terms evoking ideas of travel and mobility in Williams’s original work, there is a notable emergence of travel-related terminology in recent publications that indicates the significance of keywords such as ‘diaspora’, ‘tourism’ and ‘place’.

In its attention to the ‘keywords of travel’, this volume takes into account the established status of studies in travel writing and the field’s significance for an audience beyond the academy. It responds to what might be described as the ‘mobility turn’ in the arts and humanities over the past two decades. Each entry is around 1,000 words, and the style is more essayistic than encyclopaedic, with contributors providing a reflection on their chosen keyword from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. There is an emphasis on travelogues and other cultural representations of mobility drawn from a range of national and linguistic traditions, ensuring 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 words selected are essential to a critical understanding of travel writing. Each entry is complemented by an annotated bibliography of five essential items suggesting further reading.

Reviews

‘This is a quirky, wide-ranging and very useful book that will be invaluable to anyone with an interest in travel writing.’
—Susan Bassnett, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, University of Warwick, UK

‘This is a very useful collection of 100 keywords for the study of travel and its representations. Written and edited by a number of leading specialists in the field, it offers a valuable introduction to the terms and concepts most commonly in use to discuss travel writing.’
—Jan Borm, Professor of British Literature, University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France

‘Keywords for Travel Writing Studies is a welcome and hugely exciting collection of the central concepts animating the critical study of travel writing. Rather than locking down a fixed map of the genre, this collection shows the vibrancy, contingency and ambivalence of these texts. Perhaps most impressively, this collection is able to foreground the genre’s constitutive power relations while also revealing its capacity to challenge and surprise us.’
—Debbie Lisle, Professor of International Relations, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy & Politics, Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Author Information

Charles Forsdick is the James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool, UK, and AHRC Theme Leadership Fellow for ‘Translating Cultures’. He has published widely on travel writing, colonial history, postcolonial literature and the cultures of slavery.

Zoë Kinsley is senior lecturer in English literature at Liverpool Hope University, UK. Her publications explore the literary representation of travel, space and landscape in the long eighteenth century.

Kathryn Walchester teaches in the Department of English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, UK, and has published on nineteenth-century women’s European travel.

Series

Anthem Studies in Travel

Table of Contents

Introduction; Notes on Contributors; Abroad; Adventure; Aesthetic; Affect; Anthropology; Arrival; Beaten Track; Body; Border; Boredom; Breakdown; Cartography; City; Class; Clothing; Coevalness; Colonialism; Companion; Contact Zone; Counterpoint; Curiosity; Dark Tourism; Death; Diaspora; Disability; Domestic Ritual; End-of-Travel; Ethics; Ethinicity; Exotic; Extreme Travel; Fiction; Form; Gender; Genre; Ghosts; Grand Tour; Hearing; History; Home; Home Tour; Humour; Identity; Illustration; Intermediaries; Intertextuality; Islands; Local Colour; Margins; Memory; Migration; Minority; Mobility; Monarch-of-All-I-Survey; Money; Motivation; Nation; Nature; Nomadism; Orientalism; Pedestrianism; Persona; Picturesque; Pilgrimage; Place; Poetics; Politics; Polygraphy; Primitivism; Psychoanalysis; Psychogeography; Reading; Science; Self; Semiotics; Sex/Sexuality; Skin; Slowness; Smell; Solitude; Subjectivity; Sublime; Taste; Technology; Time; Tourism; Trade; Translation;; Transport; Travel; Traveller/Travellee; Utopia; Velocity; Vertical Travel; Virtual Travel; Vision; War; Water; Wonder; World; Bibliography.

Links

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