The increased attention now devoted to studying travel writing and theory follows on the heels of a growing critical interest in autobiography (a genre closely aligned to travel writing); commentary on multiculturalism, nationalism, colonialism, and post-colonialism; and in spectacle and visual culture. The essays collected here address these diverse impulses and focus provocatively on issues of colonialism/post-colonialism, empire, identity, culture, spectacle, pilgrimage, map theory, narrative theory, diaspora, and displacement, and discuss writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt, Jean Baudrillard, Alexis de Tocqueville, Simone de Beauvoir, V. S. Naipaul, Evelyn Waugh, John McPhee, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Walter Benjamin, Constance Fredericka Gordon Cumming, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bowen, Kurt Vonnegut, Dorothy Richardson, Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, and Doris Lessing.
«Regardless of the time periods associated with the travel writers they interrogate, the essays in this book are timely. As Kristi Siegel observes in her thoughtful introduction to this splendid collection, given the world in which we live, and through which we traverse, 'the sudden burgeoning of travel writing and travel studies...is logical.' If we are citizens of a global village, we need to understand how our fellow citizens perceive the legacy of colonialism and the reality of post-colonialism. To a great degree, these twin forces have shaped the world in which we live and struggle to comprehend. Theorizing about travel literature is not, then, a vicarious vacation from the problems of geopolitics. When conducted on the level found in Siegel's collection, theorizing about travel literature is very much about the world we inhabit. Siegel and the contributors to this book help us to see the spectacle presented by travel literature and to understand our place within that spectacle as observers and the observed.» (James J. Schramer, Professor of English and Professional Writing, Youngstown State University)