Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing

Mobility at Large explores a unique trajectory of travel writing. Instead of focussing on best-selling travel texts by Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, Michael Palin, Alain de Botton and others, this book examines a strand of innovative contemporary travel writing wherein the authors experiment with form, content and the politics of representation. In this, innovative travel texts by a range of writers - from Michael Ondaatje and Caryl Phillips to Daphne Marlatt and Sam Miller - transform the genre by inscribing travel, migration, mobility and displacement within a variety of experimental textual strategies to work through questions of movement and the politics of personal identity in relation to the complex interlocutions of space, place and subjectivity. As a result, Mobility at Large challenges those critics who dismiss the genre as inherently conservative and inextricably bound up in a colonial, Eurocentric tradition. The book also documents a long and rich tradition of travel writing that existed well beyond the influence of Europe.

Justin D. Edwards is Research Professor in English at the University of Surrey and the author of Postcolonial Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature, 1840-1930 (University of New Hampshire, 2001). Rune Graulund is Lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde and co-editor (with Justin D. Edwards) of Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).