Tim Youngs

Bats, beetles, wolves, butterflies, bulls, panthers, apes, leopards and spiders are among the countless creatures that crowd the pages of literature of the late nineteenth century. Whether in Gothic novels, science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, journalism, political discourse, realism or naturalism, the line between the human and the animal becomes blurred. Beastly Journeys examines these bestial transformations across a range of well-known and less familiar texts and shows how they are provoked not only by the mutations of Darwinism but by social and economic shifts that have been lost in retellings and readings of them. The physical alterations described by George Gissing, George MacDonald, Arthur Machen, Arthur Morrison, W.T. Stead, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, and many of their contemporaries, are responses to changes in the social body as Britain underwent a series of social and economic crises. Metaphors of travel social, spatial, temporal, mythical and psychological keep these stories on the move, confusing literary genres along with the indeterminacy of physical shape that they relate. Beastly Journeys will appeal to anyone interested in the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and its contexts and especially to those interested in the fin de siècle and in metaphors of travel, animals and shape-changing.

Travel and Transformation at the Fin de Siècle

Beastly Journeys

"This Very Short Introduction examines the meanings and uses of travel writing from its appearance on clay tablets to the digital age. It shows how the genre not only describes places and the journeys to them, but also communicates the cultural and personal values of its authors, reinforcing and challenging their sense of identity and of the foreign. Tim Youngs discusses questions of the genre's definition and its literary forms, the representation of self and other, the effect of modes of transport on authors' experiences and their stories of travel, and attitudes towards the environment. Throughout he demonstrates how travel writing is a diverse genre that offers a full range of perspectives, often alert to its own processes and viewpoints, and one that casts a critical eye on its authors' home countries as well as on their destinations." --Amazon.com

Travel Writing: a Very Short Introduction

Peter Hulme

The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing brings together specialists from anthropology, history, literary and cultural studies to offer a broad and vibrant introduction to travel writing in English between 1500 and the present. This comprehensive introduction to the subject features specially commissioned contributions, including six essays surveying the period's travel writing; a further six focusing on geographical areas of particular interest - Arabia, the Amazon, Tahiti, Ireland, Calcutta, the Congo and California; and three final chapters analysing some of the theoretical and cultural dimensions to this enigmatic and influential genre of writing. Several invaluable tools are also provided, including an extensive list of further reading, and a detailed five-hundred year chronology listing important events and publications. This volume will be of interest to teachers and students alike.

The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing

Travel and Transformation at the fin de siècle

Alasdair Pettinger

Showcasing established and new patterns of research, The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing takes an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship and to travel texts themselves. The volume adopts a thematic approach, with each contributor considering a specific aspect of travel writing – a recurrent motif, an organising principle or a literary form. All of the essays include a discussion of representative travel texts, to ensure that the volume as a whole represents a broad historical and geographical range of travel writing. Together, the 25 essays and the editors’ introduction offer a comprehensive and authoritative reflection of the state of travel writing criticism and lay the ground for future developments.

The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing

Nandini Das

Bringing together original contributions from scholars across the world, this volume traces the history of travel writing from antiquity to the Internet age. It examines travel texts of several national or linguistic traditions, introducing readers to the global contexts of the genre. From wilderness to the urban, from Nigeria to the polar regions, from mountains to rivers and the desert, this book explores some of the key places and physical features represented in travel writing. Chapters also consider the employment in travel writing of the diary, the letter, visual images, maps and poetry, as well as the relationship of travel writing to fiction, science, translation and tourism. Gender-based and ecocritical approaches are among those surveyed. Together, the thirty-seven chapters here underline the richness and complexity of this genre.

The Cambridge History of Travel Writing

An insightful and illuminating collection of essays on the political and cultural dynamics of travel literature in the nineteenth century.

Filling the Blank Spaces

Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century

Surveying various works of travel literature, this text argues that travel writing redefines the myriad genres it often comprises.

Tim Youngs

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