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7 - Beaten Track
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- By Sharon Ouditt, Nottingham Trent University.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 19-21
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Summary
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term ‘beaten’ as ‘struck or pressed by frequent feet; trodden; worn hard, bare or plain by repeated passage’, and notes that it is often to be found in figurative phrases, of which ‘beaten track’ or ‘path’ would be central to travel writing. The definition suggests that repetition, familiarity, imitation and, potentially, meaninglessness might arise from adhering to the beaten track. Travel writing criticism has played with these negatives often concluding that the travelled road is prized by the ignorant tourist rather than the sensitive traveller, but conversely suggesting that the tourist/traveller distinction is deceptive, or that in the fertile imagination the familiar can generate an original response.
James Buzard's The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to ‘Culture’ 1800–1918 (1993) provides the best starting point for a discussion of the term. Buzard sets up the (derogatory) grounds on which the tourist is pitted against the traveller: ‘The tourist is the dupe of fashion following blindly where authentic travellers have gone with open eyes and free spirits’ (1). Thence springs a number of associations: tourists are products of the leisure industry, easily herded, lacking judgement, eager to be told what to see and what to like. The beaten track, waymarked by travel companies, guide books, hotel chains and transport links, is where those tourists feel most secure and least challenged.
The Grand Tour of Europe, typically undertaken by the sons of aristocrats in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, laid down a track through France, Switzerland and Italy that was to be much followed. After the Napoleonic Wars and aided by Thomas Cook, Baedeker, Murray and their kind, nineteenth-century tourists sought social and cultural accreditation by embarking on journeys once available only to the elite. Guidebooks construed roads, steamer routes and railway lines through European towns and cities into manageable excursions, and helped to democratize travel by reducing fear of the unknown, of unanticipated expense and of lacking the language in which to appreciate art and architecture. There were travellers, though, who explicitly sought to remove themselves from the crowds of Cook's tourists in reaction to the vulgarizing, urban values that they seemed to represent. Robert Louis Stevenson's canoe trip in inland France and his travels with a donkey to the Cevennes provide examples of this from the later nineteenth century.
78 - Slowness
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- By Sharon Ouditt, Nottingham Trent University.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 229-231
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Summary
The concept of ‘slowness’ in travel writing is best understood in its relation to ‘slow travel’, a branch of the increasingly popular ‘slow’ movement. The slow food movement was initiated in 1986 by the Italian activist Carlo Petrini in opposition to the opening of a McDonald's by the Spanish Steps in Rome. It celebrates localism, regional products, time spent with fellow humans and ecological concerns. For slow travellers these values translate as abjuring the jet engine; paying attention to one's immediate environment rather than to tourist attractions; obtaining local produce from local producers rather than from globalized outlets. Slow travel, then, is not just about reducing speed, it is about doing less harm to the planet, to communities and – by extension – to those encountered on the journey.
Taken literally the term ‘slow travel’ could take us back to the earliest travel narratives. Reliance on sail power rather than steam for the nautical voyager might have meant weeks in static observation awaiting the right kind of wind. Pilgrimages – pagan, medieval, Christian or Islamic – were undertaken on foot. Even the Grand Tour was measured in years rather than weeks, although it assumed a perspective of social superiority, a level of capital accumulation and the practice of extracting art and artefacts from their local environments that is antithetical to the politics of the slow movement. Perhaps the pedestrian tours of the nineteenth century provide the earliest examples of the values we now associate with slow travel: avoiding the display of wealth or rank, accepting hospitality locally where it is offered and actively contemplating the minutiae of the landscape free from the prophylactics of speed, screen or elevation (see pedestrianism). Translated to the present day, this might manifest as travel by foot, bus, barge or ferry; slow train possibly (especially if one is engaging with local travellers) or even car, if highways are ignored in favour of back roads. The implied traveller here, of course, is Western and affluent. The ‘sacrifice’ of air travel or high-speed railways could only be a culturally relative choice.
Unlike the slow food movement and participating slow cities, slow travel is not an institution with membership, policy statements and criteria for certification. It does, however, have a manifesto by travel writer Nicky Gardner, which was published in the online magazine Hidden Europe in 2009.
82 - Sublime
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- By Sharon Ouditt, Nottingham Trent University.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 241-243
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Summary
The term ‘sublime’, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) tells us, means ‘lofty’, ‘high up’ or ‘elevated’. More specifically it applies to ‘that quality in nature or art’ ‘that fills the mind with an overwhelming sense of grandeur or irresistible power’ (OED). In travel texts the sublime is often associated with an encounter with a natural phenomenon that stretches the observer's powers of imaginative comprehension to their very limits. As Philip Shaw (2006, 2) puts it, ‘[W] henever experience slips out of conventional understanding, whenever the power of an object or event is such that words fail and points of comparison disappear, then we resort to the feeling of the sublime.’ Majestic mountain scenery, limitless oceans and vast, solitary deserts invoke the sublime, particularly in the Romantic period when the response of the individual traveller was often seen to be a marker of the authenticity of the journey. In the present day awe and wonder remain part of the traveller's currency, although they are often reformulated into a postmodern take on sublimity.
Although the term had been present since ancient times (see, e.g., Chard 1999, 111), it was in the eighteenth century that Edmund Burke (1958) gave it the aesthetic dimension with which we continue to associate it. He proposed that the aesthetic emotion engendered by an encounter with the sublime in nature is astonishment held in suspension by a degree of horror that precludes all other rational activity: ‘In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other’ (57). This state of being, associated with silence, melancholy, power and strength, is to be distinguished from the languorous pleasantness of beauty in nature, and from the picturesque, which lacks the terror associated with the sublime. These terms were central to the perceptions of travellers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the implied gendering is not to be underestimated: the masculine connotations of the sublime were inextricable from the image of the indefatigable, questing male.
The Romantic travellers most associated with these qualities are Byron, Coleridge, Shelley and Wordsworth. To these we might add Captain Cook, Joseph Banks and the ‘visionary’ traveller and collector William Beckford. Wordsworth is perhaps the most determined to articulate the effect of the sublime, not just on the mind of the traveller but also on the consciousness of the poet.
Chapter 21 - Kathleen Dayus
- Edited by John Goodridge, Nottingham Trent University, Bridget Keegan, Creighton University, Omaha
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- Book:
- A History of British Working Class Literature
- Published online:
- 04 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 27 April 2017, pp 339-351
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10 - Myths, memories, and monuments: reimagining the Great War
- from Part III - Postwar engagements
- Edited by Vincent Sherry, Tulane University, Louisiana
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 03 January 2005, pp 245-260
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Summary
When considering the legacy of the Great War, one is inevitably drawn to consider why that war is so frequently reimagined by modern writers. What is to be gained, after nearly a century, from resurrecting the stories embedded in the work of Owen, Sassoon, and Graves? Why does this war haunt the English cultural imagination? And why, specifically, is it the story of the infantry officer on the Western Front that is told and retold by writers as diverse as Stuart Cloete, Susan Hill, and Jennifer Johnston, by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and the writers of Blackadder Goes Forth, and, in the 1990s, by Sebastian Faulks, Pat Barker, and Kate Atkinson?
There are, of course, exceptions to and variations on the theme of subaltern disillusion, some of which are included in the work of writers named above. And there are alternative perspectives – those of women, of the colonial regiments, of the working classes, and of the other fronts on which the war was fought. Even in the 1920s and 1930s, when the rash of memoirs emerged that seemed to solidify the subaltern’s story, its universality was questioned. Douglas Jerrold, for instance, objected to what he called the “anti-war” stance as unrepresentative of the young men who experienced the war positively, in terms of adventures and action hitherto unknown. The narrative of bitter disillusionment, according to him, was not the only story.