Foreign Correspondence

Though writers and readers have long agreed that travel does not only broaden the mind, but that it is also useful to report on such an experience, the question of what to report on and how has remained a matter of debate. To think of travel and travel writing as “foreign correspondence” is to apply, metaphorically, a phrase that has its own complex and overlapping history in journalism, politics, and international culture. The chapters of this volume focus on this notion, seen here as a dual problematic oscillating between the private and the public, whether as letters or other forms of writing sent from abroad. From Mandeville’s notorious Travels to fin de siècle Hispanic writing, this volume offers readings of accounts by early modern and more recent Lithuanian and Polish travellers, representations of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire and India, Quixotic tropes in English travel writing about Spain, Galignani’s newspaper aesthetics, and several contributions on translation issues and the foreign as an idiom to be rendered in more familiar terms. The essays collected here thus all take foreign correspondence as their starting point, whether as letters or in other narrative forms. These texts are involved in complex webs of personal, political, social, and cultural negotiations between travellers and their hosts, as well as their presumed target audience; a key aspect of the rhetorics of foreign correspondence, as the chapters of this volume also go to show.

About the Author :
Jan Borm is Full Professor in British Literature and Director of the research laboratory CEARC (Culture, Environment, Arctic, Representation, Climate) at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. He has published widely on travel writing in English, French, and German. The co-editor of Bruce Chatwin's posthumous volume Anatomy of Restlessness (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996) and author of the portrait Jean Malaurie, un homme singulier (Paris: éditions du Chêne, 2005), he has also co-edited several collective volumes including Christentum und der Natürliche Mensch/Christianisme et l'homme naturel (2010) and Savoir et pouvoir au siècle des Lumières (éditions de Paris, 2011).Benjamin Colbert is Reader in English Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research at the University of Wolverhampton. He is the author of Shelley's Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision (Ashgate, 2005), and has edited a number of essay collections and scholarly editions, including Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland (Palgrave, 2012), Women's Travel Writings in Post-Napoleonic France, vols. 5–8 (Pickering and Chatto, 2012), and British Satire 1785–1840, vol. 3 (Pickering and Chatto, 2003). He is currently leading a major database project, British Travel Writing 1780–1840, from which a pilot, Women's Travel Writing 1780–1840, has been published online (2014).