AustLit

'In 1762, the philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Emile (1979) that we are blind half our lives because of what we miss during the night. The notion that the night can offer a broader experience and understanding of people, culture and place is one that is particularly relevant to travel writing and travel writers, though it is a perspective that has not been widely studied. As such, this paper will explore the development of nocturnal travel writing. This awareness begins with the influence of the flâneur in Paris and London. The immersed perspective of the street wanderer inspired many writers, including Charles Dickens, who later wrote Night Walks in 1861 of his nocturnal London walking. While technology and security diminished the writers’ fascination of the night in the later 19th and 20th centuries, it has re-emerged as an important subgenre of contemporary travel writing. There is a range of diverse examples of nocturnal travel writing in the 21st century focusing on nature, social and cultural lives and non-English speaking countries. These examples present an opportunity to push the authentic boundaries of the travel writing form in an era of gimmicks and unimaginative storytelling. As a form which draws influence from the flâneur, psychogeography and the literary pedigree of writers such as De Quincey and Dickens, nocturnal travel writing offers the reader a new and imaginative rendering of the ‘other’ within different places, cultures and temporal zones.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper examines literary tourism in light of self-educational aspects of the European Grand Tour recorded by writers across four centuries. It considers travellers’ developing notions of literary travel along with developing municipal understandings of literary tourist destinations. It goes on to apply ideas about literary tourism to travel undertaken by writers themselves, seeking to provide analysis and advice for writers visiting places of literary significance.' (Publication abstract)

‘What’s that smell?’

'My seven-year-old keeps asking this, from her middle-seat in the back of the inevitable family four-wheel-drive. No one knows what the smell is, or will admit to owning it. I like to think of it as the intangible odour of youth – a mixture of sweat, anxiety and optimism – it smells like ‘what’s next?’, ‘are we there yet?’, or ‘has anyone got phone coverage yet?’ It is, more practically, the scent of clothes that haven’t been washed recently, of food still uneaten from hours ago, of perfumes and colognes that haven’t yet been grown into. It’s also the scent of us – our family – the smells that mingle and collectively characterise our present while reminding us of our past, and hint of our future.' (Introduction) 

'In a Californian spiritualist’s home in Mexico I am instructed to be grateful for things. Sunlight. Creativity. My strong body. Words written in the guidebook in the guesthouse where she’s running from her country and her grief, a trauma the yellow highlighted passages in Living Now and Buddhist Enlightenment and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet in her bookshelf cannot relieve. I am grateful for Amaretto flavoured tequila. That assholes sometimes lose. I’m grateful my body is not hostage to anything – a person, a drug, a past – cravings and desire so etched in they strip the fat. I am grateful I saw the middle aged ex-pat woman with the pinched face and skinny arms eating an enormous mound of ice cream alone in a noisy restaurant after the second sitting – for how sad she was or maybe angry and how the ice cream didn’t seem to make any difference. I am grateful for stray dogs who sit on my feet in cafes and how I let them, trying not to think about fleas and ticks and tiny spiders and the dust of San Miguel crawling up my legs and lodging deep inside me. I am grateful the waiters let it go and let me take photos but chase the dogs out after I’ve paid but before I’ve left the building. I am grateful I don’t experience the world from a thousand-dollar hotel rooms and still argue about stray margaritas on the bill. I am glad the set of my shoulders and the tone and volume of my voice is not a certain kind of American … or Australian … or German. I’m grateful for Mexican children, born into an endless sea. Sleeping in the front seats of pick-ups while their dads sell mangoes and coconut strips to tourists, curling into their grandmother’s laps on street corners sucking on blankets casually as if they are the children of that New York family I visited on 5th Avenue propped up on a bulbous white couch watching Netflix.' (Introduction)

'Despite the continued popularity of travel blogs, there is a lack of contemporary criticism concerning the literal and figurative meanings of ‘wandering’ in the genre of online travel writing. One only has to trawl through the blogosphere to notice the number of female travellers who refer to themselves as ‘wandering’ women. However, female wandering has received little to no study in travel writing scholarship. In other words, what a ‘wandering woman’ is exactly – for example, why she wanders and how, as well as what constitutes an act of wandering – is yet to be widely theorised. Furthermore, the subversive tendency of female wandering to disrupt not only circular journeys but also stable conceptualisations of home has not been deeply explored. This paper argues that female wandering is a complex mode of travel that is characterised by the coupling of literal and figurative movement, and therefore it cannot be conceptualised through canonical understandings of departure and return. In the travel blogs presented for analysis, the authors construct non-linear narratives that are marked by boundlessness, continuity, and self-reflexivity. In this way, the blogs themselves are ‘wandering’ texts that marry the physical wandering of the body with the abstract wondering of the mind. As a result, wandering is not only the content of the blog but the defining characteristic of the text itself. When female bloggers cast themselves as wandering women, they resist the Romantic equation of wandering with suffering, and instead construct wandering as a shared reprieve rather than an individual burden. This representation of female wandering as a positive and productive endeavour is interesting given literary representations of male wandering as a curse or punishment.'

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'In 2013, the Oxford Dictionary declared ‘selfie’ the word of the year, defining this phenomenon as ‘a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media’ (BBC News, 2013). Instagram and personal travel blogs seem to be some of the most popular platforms enabling travel writers to express themselves through selfies, aka travel selfies. Many studies revolving around the culture of travel selfies have been conducted to better understand tourist behaviour, tourist marketing and consumer habits. However, there is a lack of interdisciplinary research surrounding this complex socio-cultural phenomenon. Travel selfies, although popular, often spark controversy and in some places, travel selfies are prohibited for safety reasons or to show respect at memorial sites. Selfies are often considered narcissistic and therefore, sometimes frowned upon by society. In this paper, I explore the larger socio-cultural complexities of travel selfies and explore what a travel selfie may contribute to a writer’s travel account by investigating how the rise of the travel selfie has shaped the travel writer’s personal vision that usually evolves throughout the writing process.' (Publication abstract)
 

'This article discusses the intersection of ethnographic, reflexive and anecdotal styles in travel writing produced out of contemporary international volunteer tourism, and analyses the impact of volunteer tourism on the production of a narrating subject and on the representation of host communities. The comparison of a primary work in Spanish (Herminia Esteban’s 2004 Un viaje solidario) with one in English (Cate Kennedy’s 2005 Sing, and Don’t Cry) allows us to better understand the specific historical, cultural and linguistic dimensions of different routes and encounters, as well as travel writing’s potential – and its limitations – in expressing a broader critique of global inequality. The texts are analysed to foreground the quotidian aspects of mobility and degree of authorial transparency regarding the terms under which volunteer activities take place. Extending from this analysis of the authors’ reflexivity, awareness and expression of critical engagement, the article explores the nature of representation in the narration of encounters between privilege and poverty, and frames these in relation to the ethical dimensions of contemporary practices of solidarity-based volunteer travel.' (Publication abstract)

'Encounters with the historical and contemporary materiality of travel may occur objectively and/or imaginatively, as the traveller moves by air, land or water, passes streets, squares, buildings, enters rooms, museums, palaces, crosses bridges, mountains, canyons. Even other people can present as material entities, encapsulating the shock of difference, the flesh and odours of lived reality, the impossibility of possession. However prepared for a journey by reading, thinking, and research, in the end, for the writer as traveller, it is the act of travel while writing itself which becomes the heuristic enterprise, the experiment which leads to a solution, an understanding or a new question that may never be definitively solved. This discussion explores the representability of travel writing as material engagement and as a creative endeavour of scholarly inquiry. The presentation will take the form of a framed auto/narrative which follows a sequence of journeys undertaken by the author, in reverse order that speak to questions of authenticity and illusion across space and time.' (Publication abstract)

'In 2014, Juliet McKenna wrote ‘The genre debate: Science fiction travels farther than literary fiction’ (McKenna 2014). This title aligns literature and genre with travel, but she also resorts to place-based metaphors to establish the distance between specific types of writing. ‘Speculative fiction’, she suggests, ‘prompts the reader to pay so much more attention, looking for the details that make sense of this strange world. Reading speculative fiction isn’t arriving in Manchester. It’s finding yourself in Outer Mongolia with no help from Lonely Planet or a rough Guide’. Cli-fi is notoriously difficult to locate generically, but thinking about it in relation to travel may assist in understanding how it works to develop contemporary identities. This paper therefore examines specifically Australian cli-fi, predominantly from the 21st century and its use of concepts familiar from travel writing. These include touristic alienation/authenticity, destination image perception as it relates to revisit intention, and mental time travel. This enables us to highlight local Australian literature in a global context in relation to cli-fi and travel. We argue that travel concepts as they are engaged in non-narrative travel literature enables an engagement with cli-fi that moves beyond debates about its generic or literary status to deeper more existentially relevant understandings of what it means to be human in the 21st century.'

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'Travel writing has changed over the past fifty years to reflect the fact, as Jan Morris has said, that ‘nearly everyone has been nearly everywhere’ (Morris 2009). In the 21st century, travel writing has become a medium for authors to investigate their own lives as much as to explore exotic destinations. Examples of this ‘recording [of] the experience rather than the event’ (Morris 2009) in travel writing include: John Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996) and Into Thin Air (1997), Pico Iyer’s Global Soul (2001), Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2013) and Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path (2018). The switch to a more character-focused, experiential-based style of travel writing reflects the genre’s roots in one of the world’s oldest story structures, namely the journey narrative. It is through this connection that we can identify some of the universal structures behind successful contemporary travel writing; the ability to look objectively at life by placing oneself in a liminal space (Turner 1964, Mahdi 1987), and the fact that travel and narrative is in all of us through our ancestral memories of Homo sapiens’ seventy-millennia long history of migration around the globe (Harari 2011, Mithen 2005, Tattersall 2008).' (Publication abstract)

'Authenticity is a much-debated concept across fields as diverse as tourism to philosophy. In the tourism and travel arena, authenticity is primarily viewed through the lens of the tourist rather than the experience of the travel writer. One way in which existential authenticity is realised in tourism experiences is through the evocation of feelings, emotions and states of being in both travel communication and the actual tourism activity. This article looks at how themes from literature and subsequent adaptions into popular culture via film and television are appropriated by tourism communicators to portray an authentic tourism experience. It will examine examples of tourist locations that are appropriated and mediated into literary-based storytelling by travel writers in order to attract visitors. These case studies include the adoption of Tolkien in New Zealand and Shakespeare in Italy. The article also considers how these inter-media adaptations transform and extend the shelf-life of tourism communication campaigns.' (Publication abstract)

'Miller (2008) writes that auto-ethnographical writing is a form of knowing and discovery, allowing the auto-ethnographer to explore themselves and their topic. The travel documentary film expands upon this notion, allowing audiences to become privy to the discovery process; viewers are active participants in the journey, often discovering new knowledge alongside the presenter. Audience and presenter inhabit a shared liminal space, embarking on an educational and physical journey, together. The presenter combines didactic and personable discourses to bridge the gap between complex knowledge and accessible language. New experiences are imprinted on both the presenter and viewer’s consciousness, evoking participatory experiences and creating ‘prosthetic memories’ – synthetic recollections appended to our actual lived experiences. The illusion of participation is further conjured through visual elements; animated cine-maps create geospatial awareness, allowing audiences to feel ‘in the know’, becoming actively involved in the journey progression. The construction of a simulacrum, through representations of the countries and experiences, creates a staged authenticity, allowing viewers to project themselves into the journey. This article deconstructs visual and verbal elements of Joanna Lumley’s In the Land of Northern Lights (2008) for the purpose of adaptation into a multimodal, static form. Narration is studied for adaptation into the written word, and visual devices for adaptation into illustration, peritext, marginalia and ephemera. The possibilities for these adaptations are explored through a practice-led approach, with these discoveries offering static-based alternatives to animation and tracking maps, then introduces ephemera and marginalia as a means of in-formalising language. Furthermore, the process of adapting form, rather than content, is unpacked – a technique currently underrepresented in scholarship. Consequently, this article provides an insight into both the process and practice of adapting form.'

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