Where Are We Going? Cross-border Approaches to Travel Writing

In academic terms travel writing has travelled. As an object of study it has crossed disciplines. Given its broader context, this is no surprise. Insights from sociology and cultural studies into the experience and consequences of travel are relevant to colleagues across a range of subjects, including Literature. The textual detail of travel writing itself, however, has now become the focus of scholars in many fields besides literary criticism. The editors and most of the contributors to a recent volume of essays, subtitled 'Reading Travel Writing', are geographers; ¹ as are the authors of two monographs on women travellers in Africa. ² The editors of another collection of essays subtitled 'Towards a Cultural History of Travel' are an art historian and a historian. ³ The editor of the definitive edition of Ralegh's Discovert e of Guiana is an anthropologist. ⁴ Contributors to the journal Studies in Travel Writing have been drawn from anthropology, history and sociology, besides American. Arctic. British, communications, comparative, cultural. English. French and Italian Studies. In large part this disciplinary crossing is a result of the crisis in the humanities of the 1970s and of shared interests in gender and in (post)colonialism.