Travel Writing

Animals in Dutch Travel Writing, 1800-Present

Apart from humans, animals play a pivotal role in travel literature. However, the way they are represented in texts can vary from living companions to metaphorical entities. In this edited volume, scholars from the Netherlands and abroad analyse the roles that animals play in Dutch travel literature from 1800 to the present. In this way, we aim to provide new insights into the relationships between man and animals, in textual expressions and real life, and to add the 'Dutch case' to the flourishing international field of travel writing studies.

Anxious Journeys

The first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates. The book analyzes texts by leading authors such as Felicitas Hoppe, Christoph Ransmayr, Julie Zeh, Navid Kermani, Judith Schalansky, Ilija Trojanow, and others, as well as topics such as Turkish-German travelogues and the relationship of comics to travel writing. The volume examines how writers engage with classic tropes of travel writing. It also links travel to ongoing debates about the role of the nation, mass migration, and the European project, as well as to Germany's place in the larger world order.

Black Travel Writing

What does it mean for Black diasporic writers to travel to Africa? Focusing on the period between the 1990s and 2010s, Isabel Kalous examines autobiographical narratives of travel to Africa by African American and Black British authors. She places the texts within the long tradition of Black diasporic engagement with the continent, scrutinizes the significance of Black mobility, and demonstrates that travel writing serves as a means to negotiate questions of identity, belonging, history, and cultural memory. Authors discussed include, among others, Saidiya Hartman, Barack Obama, and Caryl Phillips.

The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing

The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing takes an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship and to travel texts themselves. 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.

Travel writing

Carl Thompson offers a clear and concise overview of the long history of travel writing from the ancient world to the present day. Considering a wide range of primary sources from Sir Walter Raleigh to Jenny Diski, the extensively updated second edition introduces the genre and outlines key debates within the field, such as gender, sexuality, postcolonial studies, and visual culture.

Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century

The eighteenth century witnessed the publication of an unprecedented number of voyages and travels, genuine and fictional. Within a genre distinguished by its diversity, curiosity, and experimental impulses, Katrina O'Loughlin investigates not just how women in the eighteenth century experienced travel, but also how travel writing facilitated their participation in literary and political culture. She canvases a range of accounts by intrepid women, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, Lady Craven's Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople, Eliza Justice's A Voyage to Russia, and Anna Maria Falconbridge's Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone.

Travel writing and re-enactment: echotourism

Travel Writing and Re-Enactment: Echotourism explores the popular subgenre of travel narratives that re-enact historically prominent journeys. Through close readings of contemporary travel narratives this monograph considers the legacies of Lord Byron, Charles Darwin, Graham Greene, Mary Kingsley, and Ernest Shackleton, among others. Travel Writing and Re-Enactment examines the way literary re-enactment expresses, and sometimes confounds, the desire to find meaning through travel in the contemporary world.

The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing

To what extent do best-selling travel books, such as those by Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, Bruce Chatwin and Michael Palin, tell us as much about world politics as newspaper articles, policy documents and press releases? Debbie Lisle argues that the formulations of genre, identity, geopolitics and history at work in contemporary travel writing are increasingly at odds with a cosmopolitan and multicultural world in which 'everybody travels'. Despite the forces of globalization, common stereotypes about 'foreignness' continue to shape the experience of modern travel.

Bibliography of natural history travel narratives

The travel narratives listed here encompass all aspects of the natural world in every part of the globe, but are especially concerned with its fauna, flora and fossil remains. Such eyewitness accounts have always fascinated their readers, but they were never written solely for entertainment: fragmentary though they often are, these narratives of travel and exploration are of immense importance for our scientific understanding of life on earth, providing us with a window on an ever changing, and often vanishing, natural world.

Discover Italy through Dutch Eyes

The website Travelogues Netherlands – Italy offers a unique collection of over 300 Dutch-language books about Italy. From captivating novels and personal travel accounts to inspiring guidebooks, the selection lets you explore Italy in all its richness and variety.

The entire collection is freely available online and open access. It was created as part of a special research project at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome in 2017 and 2018. You can read more about the project here.

Be sure to explore the series of blogs inspired by standout titles from the collection. Browse the blogs here, or view a complete overview of all blogs and their related books here.

History of Travelling

Wanderers A History of Women Walking

Offering a beguiling view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing--of being--articulated by ten pathfinding women writers. This is a book about ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson's daughter Elizabeth Carter--who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England--to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed.

Dispelling the Darkness

T.H. Huxley (1887) Darwin is one of the most famous scientists in history. But he was not alone. Comparatively forgotten, Wallace independently discovered evolution by natural selection in Southeast Asia. This book is based on the most thorough research ever conducted on Wallace's voyage. Closely connected, but worlds apart, Darwin and Wallace's stories hold many surprises. Did Darwin really keep his theory a secret for twenty years? Did he plagiarise Wallace? Were their theories really the same? How did Wallace hit on the solution, and on which island? This book reveals for the first time the true story of Darwin, Wallace and the discovery that would change our understanding of life on Earth forever.

Freedom beyond confinement: travel and imagination in African American cultural history and letters

Using the paradox of freedom and confinement to frame the ways travel represented both opportunity and restriction for African Americans, Freedom Beyond Confinement examines the cultural history of African American travel and the lasting influence of travel on the imagination from post Reconstruction (ca. 1877) to the present.

Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook's Voyages Changed the World

This fascinating account offers a new understanding of Captain Cook's voyages and how they affected the European world view.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: noble encounters between Budapest and Transylvania

This book revisits the trajectory of one section of Patrick Leigh Fermor's famous excursion on foot from Holland to Constantinople in the 1930s. The highly regarded British travel writer and heroic wartime Special Operations Executive officer walked into Hungary as a youth of 19 at Easter and left Transylvania in August 1934. This intrepid traveler, "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene" as the New York Times obituary put it in 2011, published his experiences half a century later. In this book Michael O'Sullivan reveals the identity of the interesting characters in the travelogue, interviewing several of them eyetoeye.

We'll Always Have Paris

For much of the twentieth century, Americans had a love/hate relationship with France. While many admired its beauty, culture, refinement, and famed joie de vivre, others thought of it as a dilapidated country populated by foul-smelling, mean-spirited anti-Americans driven by a keen desire to part tourists from their money. We'll Always Have Paris explores how both images came to flourish in the United States, often in the minds of the same people.

Masculinity and danger on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour

This book explores how the Grand Tour shaped elite British masculinity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on letters and diaries, Sarah Goldsmith reveals that dangerous experiences — from scaling mountains to navigating war zones — were seen not as disruptions but essential rites of passage. Far beyond polite society, the Tour became a transformative journey, forging the next generation of Britain’s leaders through challenge, hardship, and honor.

Cities of the Grand Tour: the British in Italy, c.1690-1820

How did eighteenth-century travelers experience, describe and represent the urban environments they encountered as they made the Grand Tour? This fascinating book focuses on the changing responses of the British to the cities of Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice, during a period of unprecedented urbanization at home. Drawing on a wide range of unpublished material, including travel accounts written by women, Rosemary Sweet explores how travel literature helped to create and perpetuate the image of a city; what the different meanings and imaginative associations attached to these cities were; and how the contrasting descriptions of each of these cities reflected the travelers' own attitudes to urbanism. More broadly, the book explores the construction and performance of personal, gender and national identities, and the shift in cultural values away from neo-classicism towards medievalism and the gothic, which is central to our understanding of eighteenth-century culture and the transition to modernity.

Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

This book retraces the steps of five intrepid "lady travelers" who ventured into the geography of the New World--Mexico, the Southern Cone, Brazil, and the Caribbean--at a crucial historical juncture, the period of political anarchy following the break from Spain and the rise of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. Traveling as historians, social critics, ethnographers, and artists, Frances Erskine Inglis (1806-82), Maria Graham (1785-1842), Flora Tristan (1803-44), Fredrika Bremer (1801-65), and Adela Breton (1849-1923) reshaped the map of nineteenth-century Latin America. Organized by themes rather than by individual authors, this book examines European women's travels as a spectrum of narrative discourses, ranging from natural history, history, and ethnography. Women's social condition becomes a focal point of their travels. By combining diverse genres and perspectives, women's travel writing ushers a new vision of post-independence societies. The trope of pilgrimage conditions the female travel experience, which suggests both the meta-end of the journey as well as the broader cultural frame shaping their individual itineraries.

To the ends of the earth

At sunset in Kommos, Crete, one can still imagine the proud ships of four thousand years ago gliding into the bay — vessels from Ugarit, a major Bronze Age port in what is now Syria. These mariners from the Levant, Egypt, and Anatolia were part of a thriving network of sea trade. Ugarit, a cosmopolitan city with a strong harbor and rich forests, was a hub of maritime commerce. Though the exact mechanics of trade remain unclear, evidence shows that royal palaces, especially in Ugarit, played a central role in organizing long-distance exchange, securing power by distributing goods and resources in an unpredictable world.

The Last Blank Spaces

At the start of the nineteenth century, the interiors of Africa and Australia remained the “last blank spaces” on British imperial maps. This book traces the journeys of the explorers who sought to fill them — driven by science, adventure, and national ambition, but often met with confusion, hardship, and failure. Adopting methods from earlier seaborne exploration, they treated these continents like uncharted oceans, only to find that survival relied more on local knowledge than imperial science.
Dane Kennedy reveals a more complex reality: expeditions shaped as much by indigenous peoples and their agendas as by British aims, with outcomes that were often ambiguous or unexpected. A rich study of collision, collaboration, and contested knowledge on the imperial frontier.

Travel Stories

An Ottoman Traveller

Evliya Celebi was the 17th century's most diligent, adventurous, and honest recorder, whose puckish wit and humor are laced throughout his ten-volume masterpiece. This brand new translation brings Evliya sparklingly back to life .

Sunken Lands

From Stone Age lands that slipped beneath the English Channel to the rapid inundation of New Orleans, Gareth E. Rees explores stories of flooded places from the past - and those disappearing before our eyes. Their uncertain features emerge to haunt us, briefly, when the moon draws back the tide to reveal a spire or a tree stump. And, imbued with myths and warnings from the past, these underwater worlds can also teach us important lessons about the unavoidability of change, the ebb and flow of Earth's natural cycles, and the folly of trying to control them.

Rock and Roll Tourist

An insider's trip into the secret world of touring musicians, this chronicle follows the author as he travels the world--from places such as Memphis and Nashville to Amsterdam, Reykjavik, and Brussels--to experience the lifestyle of performers and their fans. His journey takes him across continents as well as backstage to hang out with Franz Ferdinand, Anthrax, B.B. King, Jerry Lee Lewis, and many others. These musicians' stories, travel tales, and minor and major mishaps are brought to life in this witty memoir that embodies the thrill of being in the audience as well as what life's like on the road.

The Fateful Journey

Bold, headstrong, and fabulously wealthy, Dutch traveller Alexine Tinne (1834-1869) made several excursions into the African interior, often accompanied by her mother, at a time when very few European women traveled. The Fateful Journey follows her trip with German zoologist Theodor von Heuglin, which took them through Egypt and Sudan in search of adventure and unknown regions in Central Africa. Drawing upon four years of research in the Tinne archives, and including never before published correspondence, photographs, and other documents, Robert Joost Willink presents a compelling account of their journey and its tragic ending.

To the Diamond Mountains

This compelling and engaging book takes readers on a unique journey through China and North and South Korea. Tessa Morris-Suzuki travels from Harbin in the north to Busan in the south, and on to the mysterious Diamond Mountains, which lie at the heart of the Korean Peninsula's crisis. As she follows in the footsteps of a remarkable writer, artist, and feminist who traced the route a century ago--in the year when Korea became a Japanese colony--her saga reveals an unseen face of China and the two Koreas: a world of monks, missionaries, and smugglers; of royal tombs and socialist mausoleums; a world where today's ideological confrontations are infused with myth and memory.

Taking the Risk

Taking the Risk - engaging memoir about serendipitous adventures in travel and publishing from a travel industry trail-blazer. Hilary Bradt looks back on 50 years of escapades, surprises, mishaps, disasters... and success. Contains stories from six decades of hitchhiking, tour leading and living in the USA, South America, the Falklands and Africa.

Crossing the Kingdom

With vivid descriptions and moving personal narratives, Crossing the Kingdom takes us across the Kingdom, from the headquarters of Saudi Aramco, the country's national oil company on the Persian Gulf, to the centuries-old city of Jeddah on the Red Sea coast with its population of undocumented immigrants from all over the Muslim world. He presents detailed portraits of a young woman jailed for protesting the ban on women driving, a Sufi scholar encouraging Muslims and Christians to struggle together with love to know God, and an artist citing the Quran and using metal gears and chains to celebrate the diversity of the pilgrims who come to Mecca.

The traces: an essay

The Traces is a ranging inquiry into the seductions of memory and travel, the fragile paradox of desire, and the art of making meaning from a life. Mairead Small Stead's debut is a work of memoir and criticism that explores the nature of happiness in art, literature, and philosophy, structured around a season spent in Italy and a reading of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Poised between plummeting depressions, the author considers the intellectual merits of joy and the redeeming promise offered by the beauty, both natural and manmade, that surrounds her. Traveling from Florence to Rome to Capri, The Traces draws on the fields of physics, history, architecture, and cartography, spurred by thinkers from Aristotle and Montaigne to Cesare Pavese and Anne Carson

The Voyage of the Beagle

The riveting firsthand account of the historic voyage that led to the theory of evolution; When the HMS Beagle set sail in 1831, the science of biology was not far removed from the Dark Ages. When the ship returned to England nearly five years later, Charles Darwin had the makings of a theory that would revolutionize our understanding of the natural world; From volcanoes in the Galapagos to the coral reefs of Australia, The Voyage of the Beagle documents the young naturalist's encounters with some of the earth's most stunning features. Darwin's observations of the people, places, and events he experienced make for compelling reading and offer a fascinating window into the intellectual development of his ideas about natural selection. A brilliant travelogue and a revealing glimpse into the Victorian mindset, The Voyage of the Beagle is an indispensable companion volume to On the Origin of Species.

Journals: Captain Scott's last expedition

Captain Scott's own account of his tragic race with Roald Amundsen for the South Pole thrilled the world in 1913. This new edition of his Journals publishes for the first time a complete list of the changes made to Scott's original text before publication.

"For God's sake look after our people." Scott's harrowing account of his expedition to the South Pole in 1910–12 records his party's optimistic departure from New Zealand, the hazardous voyage of the Terra Nova to Antarctica, and the trek with ponies and dogs across the ice to the Pole — and the heartbreaking struggle for survival on the return journey.

Save me from the waves: an adventure from sea to summit

Save Me from the Waves is the remarkable true story of Jessica Hepburn — the first woman to swim the English Channel, run the London Marathon, and climb Mount Everest. Once an “arty, not sporty” person, she turned to endurance challenges to heal from heartbreak. This inspirational journey from sea to summit is powered by music, resilience, and the belief that adventure can save us — wherever we are in life.

Tourism

Sustainable Space Tourism

This book explores the relationship between space tourism and the discourse in sustainability and futures research. It offers comprehensive information on the current understanding of the space tourism industry and assesses the possible impacts of space tourism on the environment, economics, legislation and society. The volume aims to encourage more dialogue and critical examinations of aspects of space tourism related to future sustainability. From data gathered from empirical research, it provides a vision for the future of sustainable space tourism. It will be of interest to students and researchers in tourism, sustainability and futures studies, as well as individual space tourist 'hopefuls', space tourism industry operators and tourism policy regulators.

Adventure tourism: environmental impacts and management

Combining their own first-hand experience and research with extensive literature review the authors present several popular adventure tourism destinations from across the globe, including the Arctic, the Himalayas, Africa, Australia and Scotland as case studies. Chapters cover the particular challenges faced by each region: including impacts on animals and birds; the spread of invasive plant species and diseases; trail impacts on vegetation; impacts on geological, historical and archaeological sites and pollution and waste issues.

Locating Imagination in Popular Culture

Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an increasingly ubiquitous nature of multi-media. Centred around the concept of imagination, the authors demonstrate how popular culture and media are becoming increasingly important in the ways in which places and localities are imagined, and how they also subsequently stimulate a desire to visit the actual places in which people's favourite stories are set.

Great Expectations

The negotiation of expectations in tourism is a complex and dynamic process - one that is central to the imagination of cultural difference. Expectations not only affect the lives and experiences of tourists, but also their hosts, and play an important part in the success or failure of the overall tourism experience. It is for this reason, the authors argue, that special attention should be given to how expectations constitute and sustain tourism.

Why we travel

Why We Travel is a smart-thinking travel book, which uses travel as a window into human motivations. It explores what we can gain from venturing out into the world. It threads together reflective memoir, evocative travelogue, research, conversation, advice and big ideas. Some of the travels are epic adventures; others are closer to home; and some are journeys of internal exploration. Each journey is a window into one of 12 motivations for travel: Curiosity, Inspiration, Happiness, Creativity, Serendipity, Hardship, Service, Healing, Wonder, Empathy, Eroticism, and Hope.

The Youth Tourist

Author Anna Irimiás maps out the heterogenous segment of the 'Millennial' market to help illustrate the rich diversity of youth tourist motivations and behaviours. Drawing on theories found in social psychology, media, and communication and consumer behaviour to describe youth tourists on family holidays, on study and working abroad programs, and participating in pilgrimages, festivals, and media-induced tourism events, Irimiás adds significant detail to youth tourist travel patterns in light of current societal changes. She also analyses future trends in youth tourism and addresses the implications of current challenges such as climate change and digitalization, and the potential changes to the industry in light of the pandemic.

Driving with Strangers

At a time of climate crisis, isolation and social breakdown, Driving with strangers is a manifesto to alter how we think about our place in the world. Veteran hitchhiker and lifelong aficionado of hitchhiking culture, Purkis journeys through the history of hitchhiking to explore the unique opportunities for cooperation, friendship, sustainability and openness that it represents. Join Purkis on the kerbside, in search of Woody Guthrie as he examines the politics of the travelling song, deep on a Russian hitch-hiking expedition, or considering the politics of travel and risk on the 'Highway of Tears' in British Columbia, Canada.

On Holiday

Löfgren takes us on a tour of the Western holiday world and shows how two centuries of "learning to be a tourist" have shaped our own ways of vacationing. We see how fashions in destinations have changed through the years, with popular images (written, drawn, painted, and later photographed) teaching the tourist what to look for and how to experience it. Travelers present and future will never see their cruises, treks, ecotours, round-the-world journeys, or trips to the vacation cottage or condo in quite the same way again. All our land-, sea-, and mindscapes will be the richer for Löfgren's insights.

Polar Tourism and Cummunities

This book fills the gap in literature on Polar tourism and communities. Through several examples encompassing both the Arctic and Antarctica, it examines how both the industry and communities' impact and influence each other from economic, sociocultural, political and environmental perspectives. The contents deliver both a general perspective with regard Polar tourism and chapters focusing on problems and/or experiences of the communities that are related to tourism both in the Arctic and the Antarctic .

Road Movies

Thelma and Louise Live!

This insightful study investigates the initial reception and ongoing impact of this landmark film. The writers consider Thelma & Louise from a variety of perspectives, turning attention to the film's promotion and audience response over time; to theories of comedy and the role of laughter in the film; to the film's soundtrack and score; to the performances of stars Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis; to the emergence of Brad Pitt as a star and male sex object; and to the film's place in the history of road and crime film genres.

Open Roads, Closed Borders

This is the first collection of essays about French-language road movies, a particularly rich yet critically neglected cinematic category. These films, the contributors argue, offer important perspectives on contemporary French ideas about national identity, France's former colonies, Europe, and the rest of the world. Taken together, the essays illustrate how travel and road motifs have enabled directors of various national origins and backgrounds to reimagine space and move beyond simple oppositions such as Islam and secularism, local and global, home and away, France and Africa, and East and West.

Time travel in world literature and cinema

Time travel is an important theme in literature and other arts. This excellent collection introduces readers to some of the most innovative and influential works and offers insightful discussions of works from different literary traditions and in different forms, both famous classics and new discoveries.

The Ultimate Star Wars and Philosophy

Does it take faith to be a Jedi? Are droids capable of thought? Should Jar Jar Binks be held responsible for the rise of the Empire? Presenting entirely new essays, no aspect of the myth and magic of George Lucas's creation is left philosophically unexamined in The Ultimate Star Wars and Philosophy. Topics explored include Stoicism and the Jedi Order, the nature of the Dark Side, Anakin and Achilles in a nihilism face-off, feminism and being chained to a giant slug, cloning, de-extinction, fatherhood, Wookiees, loyalty, betrayal, guardians, terrorism, civic duty, friendship, family, and more!

Lost highways, embodied travels: the road movie in American experimental film and video

Often identified as one of the most genuine and enduring American film genres, the road movie has never been explored in the context of experimental filmmaking. This book provides a study of over eighty unique and often obscure films and videos and situates them within the corporeal turn in American avant-garde cinema, so far mostly associated with body genres and sexually explicit films. Drawing on unpublished archival materials, the book offers a fresh take on both past and current practices of the experimental film community for scholars, students, makers and film buffs.

No Country for Old Men

In No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film, scholars offer varied approaches to both the novel and the award-winning film. Beginning with several essays dedicated entirely to the novel and its place within the McCarthy canon, the anthology offers subsequent essays focusing on the film, the adaptation process, and the Coen Brothers more broadly. The book also features an interview with the Coen brothers' long-time cinematographer Roger Deakins. This entertaining and enriching book for readers interested in the Coen Brothers' films and in McCarthy's fiction is an important contribution to both literature and film studies.

Talkies, road movies and chick flicks: gender, genre and film sound in American cinema

Offers a detailed and innovative discussion of film sound and gender in mainstream US cinema. The representation of gender in film remains an intensely debated topic, particularly in academic considerations of US mainstream cinema where it is often perceived as perpetuating rigid, binary views of gender, and reinforcing patriarchal, dominant notions of masculinity and femininity. Case studies include Mildred Pierce, Aliens and The Deer Hunter.

Journeys in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema

Many South American films that use the popular road movie format to examine regional culture and attitudes, especially in Argentina and Brazil. Pinazza performs a careful cultural analysis of the films and investigates how road movies deal with narratives on nationhood whilst simultaneously inserting themselves in a transnational dialogue.

The French Road Movie

The traditionally American genre of the road movie has been explored and reconfigured in the French context since the later 1960s. Comparative in its approach, this book studies the inter-relationship between American and French culture and cinemas, and in the process considers and challenges histories of the road movie. It combines film history with film theory methodologies, analysing transformations in social, political and film-industrial contexts alongside changing perspectives on the meaning and possibilities of film.

Driving Visions

From the visionary rebellion of Easy Rider to the reinvention of home in The Straight Story, the road movie has emerged as a significant film genre since the late 1960s, able to cut across a wide variety of film styles and contexts. Yet, within the variety, a certain generic core remains constant: the journey as cultural critique, as exploration beyond society and within oneself. This book traces the generic evolution of the road movie with respect to its diverse presentations, emphasizing it as an "independent genre" that attempts to incorporate marginality and subversion on many levels.

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Subjects: Faculty of Medical Sciences