Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit

Travel writing has become central to postcolonial studies; this book provides a comprehensive introduction to the genre. It combines detailed evaluations of major contemporary models of analysis--new historicism, travelling theory, and post-colonial studies--with a series of specific studies detailing the complicity of the genre with a history of violent incursion. These explore: "Othering" discourses--of cannibalism and infanticide; the production of colonial knowledge--geographic, medicinal, zoological; the role of sexual anxiety in the construction of the gendered travelling body; the interplay between imperial and domestic spheres; reappropriation of alien discourse by indigenous cultures. The book resists the temptation to think in terms of a simple monolithic Eurocentrism and offers a more complex reading of texts produced before, during and after periods of imperial ascendancy. In doing so, it provides a more nuanced account of the hegemonic functions of travel-writing.