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.

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.

Focusing on the significance of travel in Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, Robert Burden shows how travel enabled a new consciousness of mobility and borders during the modernist period. For these authors, Burden suggests, travel becomes a narrative paradigm and dominant trope by which they explore questions of identity and otherness related to deep-seated concerns with the crisis of national cultural identity. He pays particular attention to the important distinction between travel and tourism, at the same time that he attends to the slippage between seeing and sightseeing, between the local character and the stereotype, between art and kitsch, and between older and newer ways of storytelling in the representational crisis of modernism. Burden argues that the greater awareness of cultural difference that characterizes both the travel writing and fiction of these expatriate writers became a defining feature of literary modernism, resulting in a consciousness of cultural difference that challenged the ethnographic project of empire.

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.

Combining theoretical arguments with close reading, this text traces how twentieth-century writers have reinvented travel narrative for new purposes.

Focusing on the significance of travel in Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, Robert Burden shows how travel enabled a new consciousness of mobility and borders during the modernist period. For these authors, Burden suggests, travel becomes a narrative paradigm and dominant trope by which they explore questions of identity and otherness related to deep-seated concerns with the crisis of national cultural identity. He pays particular attention to the important distinction between travel and tourism, at the same time that he attends to the slippage between seeing and sightseeing, between the local character and the stereotype, between art and kitsch, and between older and newer ways of storytelling in the representational crisis of modernism. Burden argues that the greater awareness of cultural difference that characterizes both the travel writing and fiction of these expatriate writers became a defining feature of literary modernism, resulting in a consciousness of cultural difference that challenged the ethnographic project of empire.

Introduction: Works for other times -- Rescue work: innovation and continuity in modernist fiction -- Character and identity -- What chronology demands of us -- Needing to narrate -- Modernism today, or, The author becomes a character