Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine

After a long career in the business world, David P. Robinson completed his PhD in History in 2020. His research interests have been, predominantly, concerned with how British travel in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries helped to shape a British liberal-bourgeois identity.Gary F. Fisher is an inter-disciplinary teacher and researcher in the Liberal Arts tradition, with interests ranging from the history of education to twentieth-century literature.

“This captivating collection of personal, historical essays engages in a dialogue with the past through the shared experience of travel. Evocatively written, Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine raises questions about the relationship between time, space and belonging. Written in the context of lockdown due to the global pandemic, the authors grapple with the meaning of travel for themselves and the worlds beyond the locality that they are now prohibited from entering or passing through.”— Onni Gust, Professor, University of Nottingham, UK

• Foreword; Acknowledgements; Introduction, David Robinson and Gary F. Fisher; Chapter One ‘Off-Stage, A War’: Wuhan, 1938, Jonathan Chatwin; Chapter Two Frederic Lees in Varese Ligure, 1911, Ross Balzaretti; Chapter Three ‘A Rude People Subjected to No Restraint’: In Tanimbar with Anna Keith Forbes, Henry Forbes and So’u Melatunan, Will Buckingham; Chapter Four Sent to Coventry: A Journey Home?, David Civil; Chapter Five Bedouin Is a Place: Freya Stark’s Travel with Nomads, EmmaLucy Cole; Chapter Six With Wilkie in the West: Reading Wilkie Collins’s Rambles beyond Railways from a Cornish Perspective, Tim Hannigan; Chapter Seven Picturing Rome: Walking the Eternal City with the Last Victorian, Tory Hayward; Chapter Eight Su e zo per i ponti; or, How History Does Not Help, David Laven; Chapter Nine A Town Called Entropy: Boom and Bust in Arnold Bennett’s Potteries, Gary F. Fisher; Chapter Ten Travelling towards Transculturalism? Statues, Remembrance and Mourning in Bloemfontein, South Africa, Kate Law; Chapter Eleven Recollections of the King’s House, David Robinson; Chapter Twelve Occupying Her Time: Ginette Eboué, France, 1940–42, Sarah Frank; Epilogue, David Robinson and Gary F. Fisher; List of Contributors; Works Cited.