Travel Writing Across the Disciplines – serie

The contributors to Methods for Teaching Travel Literature and Writing: Exploring the World and Self discuss how and why they have integrated travel literature and writing into their courses. Subjects range from the study of travel literature granting insight into how travel authors, such as Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux, convince readers to "buy into" their worlds and reflect the readers’ positions in society, to contemplating the meanings of the words "traveler" and "tourist." Other chapters examine how actual traveling can shape students’ writing and vice versa, whereas still others address how the study of the genre and actually writing it promotes interdisciplinarity.

Fast Cars and Bad Girls: Nomadic Subjects and Women’s Road Stories explores the road narratives of women and the various ways their work re-maps American space. Moving from Mary Rowlandson’s famous captivity narrative to the frontier texts of the American West to the postapocalyptic novels of postmodern experience, Fast Cars and Bad Girls interrogates the intersections of nomadic theory and contemporary feminism. What would happen, the text queries the reader, if Jack Kerouac had gone on the road with a baby in the back seat? Women’s road texts are different, insists author Deborah Paes de Barros; notions such as resistance to the West, the revision of the natural world, mother-daughter relationships, avant-garde angst, and feminist utopias construct this discussion of women travel writers.

From the postcolonial perspective of the early twenty-first century, the importance of travel literature, for considerations of national and international cultures and identities, has become increasingly apparent. Travel literature in French has, however, received little critical scrutiny. This book contributes to contemporary reassessments of the form in a number of disciplines, focusing specifically on the discourses and contexts of travel in twentieth-century texts written in French. Its scope is interdisciplinary, involving theoretical and generic considerations as well as a historical overview of colonial and postcolonial texts. The book provides essential reading for all students of travel literature in French – and of travel literature in general.

The uncertainties and newness that surround us today prompt radical questions about ourselves and our relationship with the external world. How do and can we belong to the places and spaces of today? Movement and Belonging: Lines, Places, and Spaces of Travel describes current realities and suggests ways in which you can define yourself in an ever-changing world. Using the travel writings of V. S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick White, and D. H. Lawrence, Movement and Belonging demonstrates that «authentic» travel – embracing changing boundaries and cultures – enables you to create sites of belonging where you can find your sense of self.