This chapter posits that domesticity played a central role in Ginsberg’s life and work. Although images of mobility recur in his work, reflections on his childhood home and his adult apartment life recur as well. The first section of the chapter interprets Ginsberg’s needs for both travel and a homelife as a nexus rather than a binary opposition. The second section provides an account of his discordant childhood home, a midlife pivot in his sense of the domestic, and the varying circumstances of his apartment existence in the East Village of Manhattan. The final section analyzes the role that home, neighborhood, and his “Jewish-enough” identity played in his poems, including “Manhattan May Day Midnight,” “Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters,” and “My Kitchen in New York.” In Ginsberg's later poems, home is an arena of presentness and a harbor of writing.

Bowen’s letters, novels, and short stories all attest to her love of Italy, a country that she visited often and one where she experienced excitement, love, grief, sorrow, and occasionally boredom. The country provided the location for significant events in her life: the breaking off of an engagement; the shared experiences of a country providing solace when she and her lover, Charles Ritchie, were apart; facing both the potential and actual loss of her family home, Bowen’s Court; or mourning the deaths of Humphry House, her former lover, and her husband, Alan Cameron. Like many of her characters in her novels and short stories, Bowen’s response to, and relationship with, Italy is multi-layered and nuanced, the result of her experiences, both physical and emotional, over many years. This chapter draws on those experiences in Italy, placing Bowen’s writing – in letters, essays, selected early short stories, novels, and her ‘travelogue’, A Time in Rome – within their biographical, bibliographical, and geographical contexts.

This chapter examines Pablo Neruda’s deep and complex relationship with the Soviet Union, as reflected in his memoirs Confieso que he vivido: Memorias (I Confess That I Have Lived: Memoirs, 1974). It explores the poet’s encounters, reflections, and evolving perceptions of the country, its people, and their connections to Chile. It analyzes Neruda’s initial fascination with Soviet socialism and communism and his gradual disillusionment with certain aspects of the regime under Stalin’s leadership. The chapter delves into the complexities of the poet’s political and personal allegiances reflected in his encounters with the prominent figures of the Soviet intelligentsia, such as Ilya Ehrenburg. The comparative analysis of Neruda’s memoirs and poetry allows us to shed light on the intertwined histories of Chile and the Soviet Union, highlighting the enduring impact of Neruda’s Soviet odyssey on his literary work and political convictions.

Across her fiction and non-fiction, Elizabeth Bowen is consistently intrigued by hotels. From the grand Italian Riviera establishment of her debut novel, The Hotel, to the series of dingy ‘back rooms in hotels … with no view’ occupied by Portia Quayne and her mother in The Death of the Heart, many of Bowen’s characters occupy, however briefly, the transitory, impermanent space of the hotel. Although characters move through hotel space, they are never left unmarked by it. Portia’s teacher observes her ‘hotel habits’, which she cannot shake. This chapter explores Bowen’s preoccupation with the space of the hotel in her writing, and demonstrates her acute sense not only of its unique spatiality, but also of the intricacies of hotel temporality. More specifically, I argue that Bowen is a writer who is profoundly sensitive to the relationship between people and the spaces they occupy, and this sensitivity comes to the fore in the hotel phenomenologies of her characters.

This chapter examines significant gay American travel writers from the nineteenth century to the present who mine the political, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of travel writing to interrogate the experience of non-heteronormative life. From Herman Melville’s Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) to Robert McAlmon’s time in Paris in the 1920s and Edmund White’s landmark account of travel in the US (published in 1980), the chapter traces how experiences of exoticism, exile, and home have conditioned the representation of gay masculinity.

In the first part of Chapter 5, Goodman considers some basic affinities of Emerson and Montaigne that are evident even before Emerson published “Montaigne, or the Skeptic”: their use of the essay form to register spontaneity and contingency, their critique of books and travel, their discussions of the play of moods, their attention to themselves. The second part of Chapter 5 considers the shape of Emerson’s Montaigne essay, which has its own moods and its own architecture, and which concludes by taking what the critic Barbara Packer calls “a miraculous act of levitation” outside the play of moods to the moral sentiment that “outweighs them all.” In evaluating this leap, Goodman deploys Emerson’s own skepticism against his more metaphysical and dogmatic tendencies. “Why so talkative in public,” he writes, “when each of my neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute?”

This chapter looks at the connection between travel and narrative fiction in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It shows how writers of novels borrowed from, expanded on, and reimagined accounts of actual voyages and descriptions of faraway places. Authors such as Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift took details and ideas from travelers such as William Dampier, Woodes Rogers, and James Cooke. Well-known novels, including Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), reflected on and reconsidered England’s relationship to the wider world beyond Europe and the creation of the British Empire – at times critically, at times enthusiastically. The purpose of travelers, for the most part, was to say what they saw and did. It was the prerogative of writers of fiction to digest these facts and reflect on what they meant.

The early modern period witnessed an expansion of global trade that accelerated the movement of people, goods, and technologies, as well as cultural practices, languages, tastes, and ideas. This chapter examines the representation of commodities in the period by focussing on an illustrative example, coffee in early modern England, and the various literary forms to which it gave rise. It charts the passage of coffee from the Ottoman Empire to western Europe, the parallel circulation of textual material on coffee across works of travel, natural history, and natural philosophy, and the emergence of the coffeehouses and the new modes of literary sociability they produced. In doing so, it reveals the importance of this commodity to some of the most significant developments in the literary and intellectual culture of the period, including shifting conceptions of taste, fraught debates about identity and assimilation, and the invention of new forms of fiction.

Chapter 3 turns to the location of work, examining the spatial dimensions of work on various scales. It begins by looking at regional differences and the contrasts between rural and urban work. The former were remarkably muted, but rural–urban differences are clear. The importance of travel and types of transport is considered as an important element of work largely neglected in existing studies. The final part of the chapter examines workspaces, quantifying inside and outside work and considering the dimension of privacy.

Pre-modern globalism differs substantially from the globalisation of modern eras, in terms of its territorial range, scale, speed, material conditions, technologies, categories of analysis, methods of naming, and implications. Though humans traversing the world on dhows or in caravans might iconise pre-modern globalism to many, early globalism might also not involve travelling humans at all. Globalism may inhere in how a global religion, like Islam, arrives in West Africa, and reshapes local and regional lives, transforming human relations at many levels.

Voyages of discovery and their accounts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have rarely been considered in the context of periodising ideas of ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’. Though once such voyages are read not with the hindsight of the twenty-first century but from within the tradition of prior travel, the newness of the New World emerges as a modern construct with limited historical purchase. Texts and maps that verbalise voyages beyond the boundaries of what was known are situated as much in individual experience as in collective perspective; they are often more invested in their own reception than in measurable objects and dateable events.

This chapter explores the ways in which the Sofia plain’s hydrothermal wealth influenced the local human communities and their relationship with the natural and built environments. How did the abundance of thermal water impact the daily routine of life on the plain? How did the ubiquitous presence of springs shape the locals’ perceptions of settled and wild space? In a city whose center was designated by a hot spring and occupied by bathing facilities, to what extent did participation in the rituals and practices rooted in the use of thermal water lead to the formation of a sense of place? What was the place of thermal waters and public baths in Ottoman and foreign observers’ perceptions of Sofia’s urban form and space? Taking issue with the confused, stereotyped, and biased popular idea of Ottoman Sofia’s built space, this chapter attempts to localize the bathing facilities in the city’s historic center and at least partially reconstruct the area of the thermal spring. The chapter sheds light on the roles that Sofia’s baths played as pillars of urban culture, key constituent parts of the image of the city, and important anchors for the achievement of a sense of place.

This chapter explores logbooks by non-elite seafarers as a hybrid mode that combines the model of the ship’s official log with the practice of the ordinary terrestrial diary – a form that flourished throughout the nineteenth century. Bringing together original archival research into sea journals with critical approaches to the diary stemming from life writing studies, the analysis reframes the logbook beyond its traditional categorisation as a document of work, in order to position it as a more personal text that allowed for the maintenance of bonds of family and kinship across oceans. The chapter proposes that logbooks were linked to the terrestrial world in other ways too, emerging as a popular literary motif from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, through to fictions by Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad in the late Victorian period. Tracing their evidentiary and narrative potential, logbooks – both real and fictive – are positioned as circulating objects that travelled across social, spatial, and generic borders.

This chapter foregrounds Liverpool’s first European Cup win against Borussia Mönchengladbach in Rome as the starting point for discussion of the self-styled Europeanisation of the club and, above all, its supporters in the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing heavily on oral history, it analyses Liverpool’s emergence as an international cultural phenomenon, via supporters’ clubs, samizdat publications, fashion, television, and cheap travel.

Most religious traditions and movements have majorities of women, but most are led by men and are based on deeply embedded patriarchal assumptions. That underlying reality is played out in multiple different Christian traditions and shapes the subsequent contests for power, representation, and influence. This chapter is animated by a primary question from which other questions naturally flow: What are the characteristics of the religious networks constructed by women and to what extent do they function differently from those built largely by men? In attempting to answer that question, I identify five different kinds of networks representing different varieties of female leadership and participation. It is important to state that this typology should not be read as either an ascension or declension narrative about women’s agency and the role of patriarchy in shaping that agency.

This chapter focuses on “imaginary space” – literary spaces without a real-world referent. The question of how detached fantasy worlds like C. S. Lewis’ Narnia came to be thinkable in the twentieth century frames the chapter, which argues for fantasy space as a strategic response to the alienations produced by twentieth-century capitalism. Weaving together a history of exploration with a history of different types of imaginary space, the chapter traces the emergence of works like Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia out of earlier forms of imaginary space. Types of space reviewed include the settings of the traveler’s tale (e.g., Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West), Thomas More’s Utopia, and the Romantic atopias of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and William Wordsworth’s Prelude. The chapter draws on the theories of Yi-Fu Tuan, Fredric Jameson, Henri LeFebvre, and Michel Foucault to explain the distinctions between different formations of imaginary space. It concludes with a reading of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi as a text reflecting the changing value of fantasy space in the twenty-first century.