Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing

Samia Ounoughi is a senior lecturer in English linguistics at Université Grenoble Alpes. She is a member of LIDILEM (Linguistique et Didactique des Langues Étrangères et Maternelles). She is also a member of LABEX ITTEM (Laboratoire d’Excellence Innovations et Transitions Territoriales en Montagne) where she works with geographers, cartographers, and historians. She was the vice-president of SELVA from 2019 to 2023. Her research deals with the relations between language and space, and she specialises in corpus discourse analysis of mountain travel writing. She has co-edited Exceptions and Exceptionality in Travel Writing with Anne-Florence Quaireau (Studies in Travel Writing, 2020). Her other publications tackle the process of mountain nomination (“Referential Conventions as Compromise,” in Reference: From Conventions to Pragmatics, John Benjamins, 2023). She is the co-editor of Writing on the Move with Tim Hannigan (forthcoming: 2025).Emmanuelle Peraldo is Professor of British literature at Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, and Director of the CTELA (Centre Transdisciplinaire d’Épistémologie de la Littérature et des Arts vivants, UPR6307). From 2019 to 2023, she was the president of SELVA, a French learned society devoted to the study of travel literature in English. Her PhD, obtained in 2008, was on Defoe and the writing of history (Champion, 2010). Since then, she has been working on the link between geography and literature in the eighteenth century (which was the title of her habilitation to supervise research), and more particularly in Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. Her interests lie in the field of travel writing, novels of the eighteenth century, ecocriticism, geocriticism, and animal studies. Her most recent publications include an article on “Animal Fridays in Robinson Crusoe and its Afterlives” in The Nordic Journal of English Studies (2024) and the co-edition of a special issue of Viatica on Patrick Leigh Fermor (2023).Anne-Florence Quaireau is an Associate Professor of British literature and translation at the University of Angers and a member of the research team CIRPaLL (Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur les Patrimoines en Lettres et Langues). She specialises in nineteenth-century women’s travel writing and has published several articles and chapters on the subject. Her PhD dissertation on Anna Jameson's travel writing in Canada was awarded the SELVA Doctoral Prize in 2013. Her monograph Le Féminin en partage: le récit de voyage d’Anna Jameson au Canada (Sorbonne Université Presses, 2022) was finalist for the 2023 Joint Book Prize of the French Society for the Study of English (SAES) and French Association for American Studies (AFEA). She has co-edited a special issue of Studies in Travel Writing on exceptions and exceptionality with Samia Ounoughi, and has co-written three textbooks for students on travel in literature, L'ici et l'ailleurs (Atlande, 2015),Voyage, parcours initiatique, exil (Atlande, 2016), and Voyages et migrations (Atlande, 2020). From 2019 to 2023, she was the secretary for SELVA, a French learned society dedicated to the study of travel literature in English.

This insightful collection of essays offers a dynamic and multifaceted evaluation of the study of English travel literature in France, blending diverse theoretical approaches with emerging perspectives both within French scholarship and beyond. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the evolving boundaries of travel writing.-Nandini Das, Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture, Oxford University, UKThis richly varied collection amply demonstrates that both travel writing and travel writing studies are alive and well. The essays gathered here present innovative new readings of canonical and neglected historical works, and place a new scholarly spotlight on the most recent writings of both established authors and the new voices testing the formal limits of contemporary travel writing. Crucially, the renewed emphasis on text as well as context, and the underpinning conception of British travel writing as a generic body, provides an important reassertion of confidence in the scholarship of travel and its literature in the twenty-first century-Tim Hannigan Assistant Lecturer in Writing and Literature, Atlantic Technological University Sligo, IrelandTwenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing highlights the ways in which travel writing pushes the boundaries of form, subjectivity, genre, and rhetorical technique as scholars attempt to redefine the field and break the perception of it as rooted in imperialism and exploitation. This book illustrates the promise of travel writing to reveal the complexity and contradiction in the relationship between the traveller, the writer, and the world around us.-Kate Stephenson, Associate Professor of English, University of Virginia, USA. . . this very rewarding volume certainly decentres our gaze and our knowledge of travel writing. The genre appears as ever more inventive, through its various forms of hybridization, subversions, and ambiguities, which continually renew it. Adopting different theoretical frameworks combined with close reading, most chapters offer new perspectives on well-known travel writings or tackle recent or neglected ones in a productive way.-Christine REYNIER, e-Rea

• ForewordJean VivièsIntroductionSamia Ounoughi, Emmanuelle Peraldo, Anne-Florence Quaireau“More than Just a Travel Book.” Regarding Travel Writing.Tim YoungsChapter 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 GourdonChapter 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-FieldingChapter 4. “A broader, truer glimpse of existence”: Ella Sykes’s Post-Romantic, Affective Realism in Through Persia on a Side-Saddle (1898)Julia KuehnChapter 5. A Geopoetic Approach to fin de siècle Adventure Travel Writing: R. L. Stevenson and Joseph Conrad as Writer-GeographersJulie GayChapter 6. Travel Writing and Engineering: Experiential and Textual Hybridity in the Works of David and Robert Louis StevensonKevin CristinChapter 7. Photography in Isabella Bird’s Asian Travel Accounts: the Birth of a Personal Practice and Renewal of a GenreFloriane Reviron-PiégayChapter 8. Tristram Shandy goes to Greece: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Mani (1958)Anne RouhetteChapter 9. “Black flight-feathers spread like tight-rope-walkers’ fingers:” Walking, Flying, and Reading the Sonorous World with Patrick Leigh FermorIsabelle Keller-PrivatChapter 10. Harbingers of Taste: Mid-Twentieth Century Women’s Food-Focused Travel Writings as a new Paradigm in Travel Writings and their StudiesVirginia Terry ShermanChapter 11. The Quest for the Lost Parrot: Trivial Travel in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s ParrotChristian GutlebenChapter 12. Writing “Countertravels” and Decolonising Environmental Epistemologies in Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers. A Walk in the Himalaya Pauline Amy de la BretèqueChapter 13. Travel Writing as a Conscious Reading of the World: an Ecocritical Approach of Henry Russell-Killough and Kev Reynolds' textsFrançoise BessonChapter 14. “‘The Land Looks Empty.’ – Writing the Far East in Colin Thubron’s The Amur (2021)”Jan BormChapter 15. Can Travel-Writing be Decolonised?: A Flat Place (2023) by Noreen MasudJaine ChemmacheryIndex