About the Book
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.
Table of Contents:
Contents: Kristi Siegel: Travel Writing and Travel Theory - Edward Whitley: Race and Modernity in Theodore Roosevelt's and Ernest Hemingway's African Travel Writing - Melanie R. Hunter: British Travel Writing and Imperial Authority - Adam Piette: Travel Writing and the Imperial Subject in 1930s Prose: Waugh, Bowen, Smith, and Orwell - Cecilia Novero: Contemporary German Journeys to Italy - Andrea Feeser: Constance Fredericka Gordon Cumming's Picturesque Vision: A Christian, Westernized Hawai'i - Kristi Siegel/Toni B. Wulff: Travel as Spectacle: The Illusion of Knowledge and Sight - Marco Diani: Baudrillard's Explorations of Tocqueville's America: Wandering in Hyperdemocracy - Gary Totten: Simone de Beauvoir's America Day by Day: Reel to Real - Cynthia Ho: St. Lawrence and the Pagans in The Marvels of Rome - Theodore C. Humphrey: John McPhee's Spiritual Journeys: The Authenticating Eye - Donna Foran: Kurt Vonnegut's Search for Soul - Heidi N. Sjostrom: Willa Cather's Nebraska Prairie: Remembering the Spirit of its Land and People - Maria Francisca Llantada Diaz: Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage as a Journey. Down to the Center of Being - Joseph Pugliese: In the Ruins of Diaspora: A Southern Italian Perspective - Andrew Palmer: (Re)-Visiting Der Heim: The Amazing Return to the Place You've Never Been Which Isn't There - Katy Nebhan: Australian Muslim Experiences of the Meccan Pilgrimage or Hajj - Pallavi Rastogi: A Million Enigmas Now: V.S. Naipaul's Use of Landscape in the Construction of the English Self - Jan Borm: Jonathan Raban's Coasting and Literary Strategies in Contemporary British Travel Writing.
About the Author :
The Editor: Kristi Siegel is Associate Professor of English at Mount Mary College in Wisconsin and earned her Ph.D. in modern studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Women's Autobiographies, Culture, Feminism (Peter Lang, 2001), and is currently editing a collection of essays about women's travel writing, Gender, Genre, Identity in Women's Travel Writing (Peter Lang, forthcoming). She also serves as general editor for the book series Travel Writing Across the Disciplines (Peter Lang), and has published various articles on postmodern, feminist, cultural, and autobiographical theory.
Review :
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)
