Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine

Description

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.

After a long career in the business world, David P. Robinson completed his PhD in History in 2020. His research interests have been, predominantly, concerned with how British travel in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries helped to shape a British liberal-bourgeois identity. Gary F. Fisher is an inter-disciplinary teacher and researcher in the Liberal Arts tradition, with interests ranging from the history of education to twentieth-century literature.

"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 "Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention: here the immobility imposed by the global Covid pandemic has birthed a set of fascinating, thought-provoking and genre-blurring essays. Spanning the local and the remote, the seemingly humdrum and the supposedly exotic, Robinson and Fisher's volume raises compelling questions about the multiple, intricate layerings and interweavings - of self, place and other, of past and present, of imagination, history and empirical experience - that inevitably shape both travel and travel writing." - Carl Thompson, Reader in English Literature, University of Surrey, UK