The Modernist Traveler considers figures whose writing about travel rebelled against a literary tradition of exoticism, adventure stories, and novelistic travelogues. Instead these writers initiated a modernist strain in travel writing and a shift in the literary establishment and the culture at large. Kimberley J. Healey focuses on those French writers and thinkers who traveled in order to experience a displacement of both the inner self and the physical body while writing against the prevalent tradition of travel literature. ø The modern self, modern time, colonial spaces, and the physical body are Healey?s concerns as she reads works by Victor Segalen, Paul Morand, Blaise Cendrars, Henri Michaux, Saint-John Perse, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Nizan, Albert Londres, Andre Malraux, Valäry Larbaud, and Isabelle Eberhardt. This book shows how, in the field of French literature, these texts about travel best capture the modernist experience of being alone in a world of new technologies, cultural diversity, and anxiety about the self.

As the study of travel writing has grown in recent years, scholars have largely ignored the literature of modernist writers. Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad, by David Farley, addresses this gap by examining the ways in which a number of writers employed the techniques and stylistic innovations of modernism in their travel narratives to variously engage the political, social, and cultural milieu of the years between the world wars. Modernist Travel Writing argues that the travel book is a crucial genre for understanding the development of modernism in the years between the wars, despite the established view that travel writing during the interwar period was largely an escapist genre—one in which writers hearkened back to the realism of nineteenth-century literature in order to avoid interwar anxiety. Farley analyzes works that exist on the margins of modernism, generically and geographically, works that have yet to receive the critical attention they deserve, partly due to their classification as travel narratives and partly because of their complex modernist styles. The book begins by examining the ways that travel and the emergent travel regulations in the wake of the First World War helped shape Ezra Pound’s Cantos. From there, it goes on to examine E. E. Cummings’s frustrated attempts to navigate the “unworld” of Soviet Russia in his book Eimi,Wyndham Lewis’s satiric journey through colonial Morocco in Filibusters in Barbary,and Rebecca West’s urgent efforts to make sense of the fractious Balkan states in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. These modernist writers traveled to countries that experienced most directly the tumult of revolution, the effects of empire, and the upheaval of war during the years between World War I and World War II. Farley’s study focuses on the question of what constitutes “evidence” for Pound, Lewis, Cummings, and West as they establish their authority as eyewitnesses, translate what they see for an audience back home, and attempt to make sense of a transformed and transforming modern world. Modernist Travel Writing makes an original contribution to the study of literary modernism while taking a distinctive look at a unique subset within the growing field of travel writing studies. David Farley’s work will be of interest to students and teachers in both of these fields as well as to early-twentieth-century literary historians and general enthusiasts of modernist studies.

Through close readings of works from Henry James to W. E. B. Du Bois, and from Virginia Woolf to Jean Rhys, this book discusses how fictional travelers negotiate and adapt various tropes of travel (such as quest, expatriation, displacement, and exile) as models for their own journeys. Specifically, Peat considers the ethical dimensions of modernist travel from two distinct vantages. The first focuses on the relationship between the secular and the sacred in modernist travel literature, arguing that the recurrent narrative of secular travel is haunted by a desire for spiritual transcendence. The second posits modernist travel fiction as a potentially positive example of transcultural relations, consciously arguing against the received notion that travel during an imperial era is always by nature itself imperialist. Throughout, particular attention is paid to the transnational nature of modernism and the various global flows traced by modernist literature.

Invaluable advice for anyone considering taking a holiday.