Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine

Foreword by M. Randal Owain Edited by Gary Fisher, David Robinson

Publication date:

07 September 2021

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

229x153mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781785278044

Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine is an anthology of travel accounts by a diverse range of writers and academics. Challenging conventional academic ‘authority’, each contributor writes, from memory during the Covid-19 lockdown, about a place they have previously visited, ‘accompanied’ by an historical traveller who published an account of the same place. As immobility is forced upon us, at least for the immediate future, we have the chance to reflect. Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine presents opportunities to approach a text as a scholar differently. We break with the traditional academic ‘rules’ by inserting ourselves into the narrative and foregrounding the personal, subjective elements of literary scholarship. Each contributor critiques an historical description of a place about which, simultaneously, they write a personal account.

Foreword; Acknowledgements; Introduction, David Robinson and Gary F. Fisher; Chapter One ‘Off-Stage, A War’: Wuhan, 1938, Jonathan Chatwin; Chapter Two Frederic Lees in Varese Ligure, 1911, Ross Balzaretti; Chapter Three ‘A Rude People Subjected to No Restraint’: In Tanimbar with Anna Keith Forbes, Henry Forbes and So’u Melatunan, Will Buckingham; Chapter Four Sent to Coventry: A Journey Home?, David Civil; Chapter Five Bedouin Is a Place: Freya Stark’s Travel with Nomads, EmmaLucy Cole; Chapter Six With Wilkie in the West: Reading Wilkie Collins’s Rambles beyond Railways from a Cornish Perspective, Tim Hannigan; Chapter Seven Picturing Rome: Walking the Eternal City with the Last Victorian, Tory Hayward; Chapter Eight Su e zo per i ponti; or, How History Does Not Help, David Laven; Chapter Nine A Town Called Entropy: Boom and Bust in Arnold Bennett’s Potteries, Gary F. Fisher; Chapter Ten Travelling towards Transculturalism? Statues, Remembrance and Mourning in Bloemfontein, South Africa, Kate Law; Chapter Eleven Recollections of the King’s House, David Robinson; Chapter Twelve Occupying Her Time: Ginette Eboué, France, 1940–42, Sarah Frank; Epilogue, David Robinson and Gary F. Fisher; List of Contributors; Works Cited.

“This captivating collection of personal, historical essays engages in a dialogue with the past through the shared experience of travel. Evocatively written, Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine raises questions about the relationship between time, space and belonging. Written in the context of lockdown due to the global pandemic, the authors grapple with the meaning of travel for themselves and the worlds beyond the locality that they are now prohibited from entering or passing through.”— Onni Gust, Professor, University of Nottingham, UK