Description
Book SynopsisMobility at Large explores a unique trajectory of travel writing. Instead of focussing on best-selling travel texts by Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, Michael Palin, Alain de Botton and others, this book examines a strand of innovative contemporary travel writing wherein the authors experiment with form, content and the politics of representation. In this, innovative travel texts by a range of writers – from Michael Ondaatje and Caryl Phillips to Daphne Marlatt and Sam Miller – transform the genre by inscribing travel, migration, mobility and displacement within a variety of experimental textual strategies to work through questions of movement and the politics of personal identity in relation to the complex interlocutions of space, place and subjectivity. As a result, Mobility at Large challenges those critics who dismiss the genre as inherently conservative and inextricably bound up in a colonial, Eurocentric tradition. The book also documents a long and rich tradition of travel writing that existed well beyond the influence of Europe.
Trade ReviewClear, interesting, provocative and well-argued ...I believe this is – surprisingly – the first book-length study of experimental travel writing. It deserves to be considered in the company of the most important critical works on contemporary travel writing.
Alasdair Pettinger
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Travel Revisited
- 1. Travelling with the Ondaatje Bros.
- 2. Amitav Ghosh and Caryl Phillips: Global Travel, Then and Now
- 3. Unhomely Travels; or, the Haunts of Daphne Marlatt and W. G. Sebald
- 4. The World, My City: Home Grounds and Global Cities
- 5. Travel Histories – From Kuala Lumpur to Istanbul and Beyond Postscript: Still Mobile
- Bibliography
- Index
