Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle, and Displacement

Although many have noted--with surprise--the sudden burgeoning of travel studies, its emergence is logical. Travel theory follows on the heels of critical interest in autobiography (a genre closely aligned to travel writing); commentary on multiculturalism, nationalism, colonialism, and postcolonialism; and interest in spectacle and visual culture. The essays collected here address these diverse impulses and focus on issues of colonialism/postcolonialism, empire, identity, culture, spectacle, pilgrimage, map theory, diaspora, and displacement, and treat writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt, Jean Baudrillard, Alexis de Tocqueville, Simone de Beauvoir, V. S. Naipaul, Evelyn Waugh, John McPhee, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Constance Fredericka Gordon Cumming, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bowen, Kurt Vonnegut, Dorothy Richardson, Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, and Doris Lessing.