Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing Decentring Epistemologies
Edited By Emmanuelle Peraldo, Samia Ounoughi et Anne-Florence Quaireau
Routledge, 2025.
Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing: Decentring Epistemologies
Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing evidences the evolution of travel writing studies over the last two decades and points to innovative ways to study this heterogeneous genre. This volume seeks to build bridges between the study of travel writing and disciplines of sciences and human sciences so that the analyses of travel texts, images, and objects lead to interdisciplinary enrichment. This volume revisits the complicated relationship between fact and fiction, science and literature, and the world and the word through transdisciplinary approaches. Through case studies of British travel writing from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the contributors provide illustrations of the fruitful intersection of travel writing studies with other methodologies, such as literary studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, visual studies, areal studies, engineering studies, food studies, animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, and geocriticism.
Foreword
Jean Viviès
Introduction
Samia Ounoughi, Emmanuelle Peraldo, Anne-Florence Quaireau
“More than Just a Travel Book.” Regarding Travel Writing.
Tim Youngs
Chapter 1. From the Visited Place to the Visitor’s Gaze: Decentering Perspectives on Nice and its Region in Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (1766)
Nathalie Bernard
Chapter 2. Women Travellers Decentering ‘the South’ through Nordicity: Mary Wollstonecraft, the Wilmot Sisters and Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake
Stéphanie Gourdon
Chapter 3. Unearthing Imperial Matters: a Postcolonial and Ecocritical Reading of Louisa Anne Meredith's Notes and Sketches of New South Wales (1844) and My Home in Tasmania during a Residence of Nine Years (1852)
Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding
Chapter 4. “A broader, truer glimpse of existence”: Ella Sykes’s Post-Romantic, Affective Realism in Through Persia on a Side-Saddle (1898)
Julia Kuehn
Chapter 5. A Geopoetic Approach to fin de siècle Adventure Travel Writing: R. L. Stevenson and Joseph Conrad as Writer-Geographers
Julie Gay
Chapter 6. Travel Writing and Engineering: Experiential and Textual Hybridity in the Works of David and Robert Louis Stevenson
Kévin Cristin
Chapter 7. Photography in Isabella Bird’s Asian Travel Accounts: the Birth of a Personal Practice and Renewal of a Genre
Floriane Reviron-Piégay
Chapter 8. Tristram Shandy goes to Greece: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Mani (1958)
Anne Rouhette
Chapter 9. “Black flight-feathers spread like tight-rope-walkers’ fingers:” Walking, Flying, and Reading the Sonorous World with Patrick Leigh Fermor
Isabelle Keller-Privat
Chapter 10. Harbingers of Taste: Mid-Twentieth Century Women’s Food-Focused Travel Writings as a new Paradigm in Travel Writings and their Studies
Virginia Terry Sherman
Chapter 11. The Quest for the Lost Parrot: Trivial Travel in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot
Christian Gutleben
Chapter 12. Writing “Countertravels” and Decolonising Environmental Epistemologies in Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya
Pauline Amy de la Bretèque
Chapter 13. Travel Writing as a Conscious Reading of the World: an Ecocritical Approach of Henry Russell-Killough and Kev Reynolds' texts
Françoise Besson
Chapter 14. “‘The Land Looks Empty.’ – Writing the Far East in Colin Thubron’s The Amur (2021)”
Jan Borm
Chapter 15. Can Travel-Writing be Decolonised?: A Flat Place (2023) by Noreen Masud
Jaine Chemmachery