Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey

ZILCOSKY, John, Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey, Toronto, Toronto University Press (German and European Studies), 2008, 336 p.
ISBN 9780802098061

RÉSUMÉ

Interest in travel writing has grown rapidly within the disciplines of postcolonial and cultural studies; however, recent scholarship has failed to place travel writing within the larger literary tradition. Writing Travel assembles a superb collection of essays that demonstrate travel's literary attempt to reconfigure the world and, in so doing, become a metaphor for imagination, subjectivity, and representation itself.

Examining a broad range of texts and travellers from across the world, the contributors discuss canonical authors such as Homer, Goethe, and Baudelaire, alongside lesser known writers such as Theodor Herzl, Hans Erich Nossack, and William Gibson. This theoretically rich volume draws connections between travel and narrative, and provides powerful insights into the relationship between travel and the spoken act of storytelling, as well as the more ambivalent act of story writing.

An engaging collection of essays by first-rate scholars, Writing Travel is an illuminating exploration of the history of travel writing, its influence on other literary genres, and of the origins of narrative.

BIOGRAPHIE John Zilcosky is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and German and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto.