Description
Book Synopsis The 1930s were one of the most important decades in defining the history of the twentieth century. It saw the rise of right-wing nationalism, the challenge to established democracies and the full force of imperialist aggression. Cultural Encounters makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ideological and cultural forces which were active in defining notions of national identity in the 1930s. By examining the work of writers and journalists from a range of European countries who used the medium of travel writing to articulate perceptions of their own and other cultures, the book gives a comprehensive account of the complex intellectual climate of the 1930s.
Trade Review “These timely reconsiderations of European Travel writing from the 1930s reassert the oppositional primacy of subjective translations and disavow hermetic notions that travel should or even can be divorced from socio-political or cultural contexts.” · Journeys
"Cultural Encounters offers a rich, varied and yet impressively coherent collection of essays on the meanings and practices of travel writing in 1930s Europe. Carefully building on theoretical interest in travel writing of recent years, the essays follow written journeys to Graham Greene's Liberia and Lorca's Cuba, to Fascist Italy's Greece and France's Indochina, and many more. Throughout, texts and authors are shown to be alive with hybrid constructions of self and of ideological, national and colonial identity. What is more, the book provides compelling reasons for seeing 1930s travel writing as being of particular fascination, lying on a cusp between the Depression, totalitarianism, colonialism and modernism, and the seeds of mass tourism, post-colonialism and globalization." · Re-reading German literature since 1945, Robert Gordon, Cambridge University
Table of ContentsAndrew Thacker (Ulster), 'Journey with Maps: Travel Theory, Geography and the Syntax of Space', Charles Forsdick (Glasgow), 'Sa(l)vaging Exoticism: New Approaches to 1930s Travel Literature in French', Derek Duncan, 'Travel and Autobiography: Giovanni Comisso's Memories of the War', Mayte Gomez, 'Bringing Home the Truth about the Revolution: Spanish Travellers to the Soviet Union in the 1930s', Jo Labanyi (Birkbeck), 'The Politics of the Everyday and the Eternity of Ruins: Two Women Photographers in Republican Spain (Margaret Michaelis 1933-37, Kati Horner 1937-38)', Charles Burdett, 'Signs of Roman Rule: Italian Tourists and Travellers in Greece and Egypt', Helmut Peitsch (Cardiff), 'Tradition and Modernism in Gustav Rene Hocke's Travel Books, 1937-39', Sarah Wright (Hull), 'Dramatic Encounters: Federico Garcia Lorca's Trip to Cuba (1930)', Naomi Segal (Reading), 'Gide in Egypt 1939', Howard Booth (Birkbeck), 'Making the Case for Cross-Cultural Exchange: Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana', Nicola Cooper (Sussex), 'Investigating Indochina: Travel Journalism and France's Civilizing Mission', Loredana Polezzi (Warwick), 'Aristocrats, Geographers, Reporters...: Travelling through "Italian Africa" in the 1930s'.
