Travel Studies

Examining the aesthetics and politics at stake in urban travel writing as spatial practice, this book explores French travellers’ representations of London and New York from 1851 to the 1980s.

This study examines how convicts sent to France’s most notorious penal colony in French Guiana would use the colonial postal system to document and challenge lived experiences of transportation and forced labour.

The book examines the relationship between the Enlightenment idea of improvement and eighteenth-century travel writings about Middle Eastern overland routes to India.

Reconnaissance au Maroc is Charles de Foucauld’s adventurous memoir of exploring Morocco. For eleven months in 1883–84, Foucauld travelled incognito through a country then off-limits to Europeans, mapping its waterways. This book is a translation of Foucauld’s memoir into English, with an extensive introduction and notes that contextualize the work within Francophone post-colonial studies.

Design in Airline Travel Posters 1920–1970 offers an original insight into the structure of travel advertisements and the way recurrent motifs adapt to changing times and functions. It is both a semiology and a sociocultural history that explores the way advertising posters combine information and fantasy to create seductive image/texts. The book is lavishly illustrated in colour, the images constituting an essential part of the overall argument.

‘Enlightenment Travel and British Identities’ is the first-ever collection of essays devoted to the influential eighteenth-century travel-writer, antiquarian and naturalist, Thomas Pennant (1726–1798). Offering a truly multidisciplinary range of perspectives, it explores the complex networks of informants who helped Pennant undertake and write-up the journeys behind his widely-read Welsh and Scottish ‘Tours’.

‘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.

This volume aims to explore the role of the (lived) body and embodiment in travel writing. As a first step in systematizing the topic, four thematic sections – “Mobility”, “Encounters”, “Incorporation”, and “Vulnerability” – feature chapters on travelogues from the early modern period to the present day.

May Alcott Nieriker, Author and Advocate examines in-depth the travel writings by the youngest sister of famed novelist Louisa May Alcott. Her critical commentary on social and cultural concerns of the nineteenth century, such as gender and class discrimination, still resonate today.

This volume explores and historicizes the phenomenon of ‘microtravel’, a term coined to designate slower journeys within a limited radius which allow, and sometimes necessitate, new forms of experiencing the world. The chapters study travelogues that recalibrate the scale of journeying, with travellers slowing down their journeys and readjusting their relationship to the proximate and nearby.

Nikolai Gretsch's Travel Letters reprints the travel letters of Russian journalist Nikolai Gretsch, who visited post-Napoleonic England, France, and Germany in 1837.  Gretsch’s witty and perceptive prose captures an outsider’s view of Western Europe in the early nineteenth century, providing a treasure-trove of cultural information about contemporary daily life.

Nikolai Gretsch's Travel Letters reprints the travel letters of Russian journalist Nikolai Gretsch, who visited post-Napoleonic England, France, and Germany in 1837. Gretsch’s witty and perceptive prose captures an outsider’s view of Western Europe in the early nineteenth century, providing a treasure-trove of cultural information about contemporary daily life.