In his travel diary for his 1886-87 tour of Europe and Africa, Frederick Douglass reveals the racialized context of his travels abroad. Douglass’s comments on race, slavery, and the presence of his black body in various spaces disrupt the conventional capitalist and dominant narratives about tourism, travel, and leisure. Early in the trip, he notes that other passengers on the transatlantic voyage do not seem “disturbed” by his or his white wife Helen’s presence, and on board a steamer bound for Egypt, he expresses gratitude that, born a “slave marked for life under the lash,” he is “abroad free and privileged to see these distant lands so full of historical interest.” Douglass’s attention to his and others’ racialized relationship to various kinds of spaces, histories, and labor emphasizes the ways in which nineteenth-century black travelers reframe conventional ideas about mobility and leisure.

Edith Wharton’s representation of the natural world offers new insights about how nature and art inform female authority and women’s roles as cultural producers. Her distinctive representation of both the bonds and disconnections between art or culture and nature suggests women’s continuity with nature and also reveals how nature influences the relationship between women and culture through institutional power dynamics and ideologies of domination. An ecocritical approach to Wharton’s work illuminates how her deep knowledge of art coincided with her representation of the natural world and provides new insights into her understanding of women’s lives as both enhanced and limited due to their relationship to nature.

Usages of the term ‘transport’ that align with travel appeared in English in 1483 as a verb meaning to ‘carry, convey, or remove from one place or person to another’, and in 1694 as a ‘means of transportation or conveyance’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Michael Kowalewski (1992b, 3) notes that various forms of transport such as ‘railroads, automobiles, and airplanes have all placed new demands on travellers’ eyes, nerves, and viscera’, emphasizing, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1986) argues in his study of railroad travel, how new modes of transportation influence us mentally, emotionally and socially. Travellers’ experience of different forms of transport changed as they became more familiar, meaning, as Kowalewski (1992b, 3) points out, that they can also become routine. In the early days of the automobile, while first-time drivers were too consumed with navigating the road to notice anything else, Kris Lackey (1997, 70) notes that those drivers who have the luxury of being chauffeured noticed more of the passing scene. Theodore Dreiser (1997, 25) provides a compelling example of the mental effects of such a chauffeured experience when he asserts in 1916 that automobiling ‘supplies just that mixture of change in fixity which satisfies me – leaves me mentally poised in inquiry’.

The rise of travel by rail and ship in the nineteenth century greatly facilitated travel and tourism, and the experience of travelling with others on a train or ocean liner eventually gave way to the more individualistic experience of travel in a car or motorcycle. The slow, reflective experience of a transatlantic voyage also contrasts with the experience of shooting the car through ravines and across hills, as in Dreiser's (1997, 475–76) effusive description of travel in Indiana's picturesque mountain regions. These developments in forms of transport were not just linked to the rise of tourism, however, for, as Helen Carr (2002, 70) reminds us, ‘[i] mprovements in transport were fanned by, and helped to fan, the empire building, trade expansion and mass migrations of the late nineteenth century’.

Women travellers also document the effects of different forms of transport. Anne Morrow Lindbergh's aviation narrative North to the Orient (1935) reveals her understanding, as Halia Koo (2003, 32) observes, that airplane travel represents ‘a new way of seeing the world’ and that female pilots, in particular, are unique representatives of this new mode of transport.

‘Velocity’, as a reference to ‘swiftness’ or ‘speed’, entered English in the mid-sixteenth century, but it was not until 1847 that the term appeared in scientific use to refer to ‘speed together with the direction of travel, as a vector quantity’ (Oxford English Dictionary). As faster travel technologies developed, travel writers described how these new modes of transport influenced the travel experience. In turn, the interest in velocity influenced the form and content of travel narratives.

The speed of transatlantic travel increased dramatically during the nineteenth century. Crossing the Atlantic in the packer ship New York, Ralph Waldo Emerson notes in a journal entry on 9 September 1833, ‘The road from Liverpool to New York, as they who have travelled it well know, is very long, crooked, rough, and eminently disagreeable.’ This voyage took thirty-four days, but on his second transatlantic trip, he sailed from Boston to Liverpool in only seventeen (Mott 2014, 24–25). In the twentieth century, Charles Lindbergh's first solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927 took thirty-three and a half hours, and Amelia Earhart's 1932 solo flight from Newfoundland to Ireland (a distance just over half that of Lindbergh's journey) took fifteen. The introduction of jet-powered aircraft in the 1950s reduced the time of a transatlantic crossing to six to seven hours, similar to what we are familiar with today.

In the early days of the automobile, its speed was celebrated in events such as coast to coast US journeys sponsored by automotive manufacturers to promote the speed and durability of their new products (Shaffer 2001). The joy of speed is also paired with the threat of violence, which Filippo Tommaso Marinetti expresses through what Enda Duffy (2009, 247) terms the ‘crash wish’ at the beginning of Marinetti's (1909) Futurist Manifesto. Edith Wharton records her initial surprise at the automobile's speed in her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), where she describes her first car ride in 1903 from Rome to Caprarola to see the villa of her friend, George Meyer, American ambassador to Rome.

The term ‘technology’, referring to the ‘branch of knowledge dealing with the mechanical arts and applied sciences’, first appeared in English in 1787, with usage as an ‘application of such knowledge for practical purposes’ appearing in 1829 and its definition as a ‘product of such application’ (machinery or equipment) or a ‘process, method, or technique’ following in 1898 (Oxford English Dictionary). In the field of travel writing, the application of technological knowledge and its resulting products influence the travel experience and, thus, the form and content of travel narratives.

New technologies allow us to view and experience differently the landscapes and cultures through which we travel. In 1909, describing his view of streetlamps through a car window, F. T. Marinetti notes the disorienting new visual experiences of automobile travel (40) while, in a more positive light, Mary Suzanne Schriber (1991, xxiv) compares Edith Wharton's perspective from within the car a few years earlier to a camera lens that allows her to approach a town ‘panoramically, as if with a wide angle lens […] and then to zoom in, by contrast, for a close-up’. In A Motor-Flight through France (1908), Wharton also highlights the sometimes problematic relationship between the traveller's gaze and technology. The car takes her to historical sites she would otherwise be unable to access but it also is a harbinger of increasing traffic. Similarly, in In Morocco (1920), she worries about how new highway infrastructure and an attendant influx of tourism will impact Morocco's ancient culture, emphasizing that her travel narrative offers a view of the country that is disappearing in the face of this technological change.

Considering the relationship between humans and technology, posthumanist theory suggests the role of travel technologies as prostheses. Cary Wolfe (2010, xxv) observes that the human ‘is a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality’. Of the automobile, Kris Lackey (1997, 4) notes that it quickly ‘assumed the neutrality of a prosthesis’ and has become ‘so well fitted to the human mind and body that it all but disappears’ (5). This phenomenon can sometimes take an ominous turn, as in the way that car culture co-opts women's bodies and subjectivity through advertising (Clarke 2007).