I was delighted to be invited by James Smith to contribute a chapter on travel writing to his edited volume, The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s, my contributors' copies of which arrived today. Ever since my former colleague Stan Smith asked me to supply an essay on Auden's travel writing for his The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden (2006), I have been fascinated by 1930s' travel writing. Among the works that interest me most are those that expose the fallibility of generalisations, admit the limitations of their point of view, and experiment with form in order to find a fit between representation and subject.
I have contributed a chapter on 'British and North American Travel Writing and the Diary' to the volume The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life edited by Batsheva Ben-Amos and Dan Ben-Amos and published by Indiana University Press this month. Focusing on examples from the late eighteenth century onwards, my essay considers not only the travel diary but the uses of the diary in other forms of travel narrative, for example to provide a sense of authority, authenticity or immediacy. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the volume and to thinking further about the subject for future work.
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Tim Youngs
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