Cultural Encounters

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

Charles Burdett is lecturer in Italian at the University of Bristol and co-editor of European Memories of the Second World War (1999). He is currently working on representations of Africa in fascist Italy.

Andrew 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'.