Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle, and Displacement

The increased attention now devoted to studying travel writing and theory follows on the heels of a growing critical interest in autobiography (a genre closely aligned to travel writing); commentary on multiculturalism, nationalism, colonialism, and post-colonialism; and in spectacle and visual culture. The essays collected here address these diverse impulses and focus provocatively on issues of colonialism/post-colonialism, empire, identity, culture, spectacle, pilgrimage, map theory, narrative theory, diaspora, and displacement, and discuss 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, Walter Benjamin, Constance Fredericka Gordon Cumming, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bowen, Kurt Vonnegut, Dorothy Richardson, Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, and Doris Lessing.