Modes of Transport: Travel Writing and Form, 1780-1914
King’s College London, 26 & 27 May 2011
Speakers include:
Mary Beard
Simon Goldhill
Dane Kennedy
Clare Pettitt
Alison Chapman, Peter Garratt, Anne Green, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Muireann O’ Cinneide, Matthew Rubery & Carl Thompson
There has always been a certain amount of unease and anxiety about how best to mould the quotidian, often repetitious, experience of travel into a digestible, literary narrative. The travel writer cannibalises other modes of literary, geographical and scientific writing, while simultaneously forging experimental, innovative and dynamic forms in the struggle to represent the heterogeneous and often chaotic experience of travel. It is the aim of this two-day conference to bring academic researchers and travel writers together in order to explore the relationship between travel writing and formal innovation in a variety of media across the long-nineteenth century. As Franco Moretti has suggested, ‘new space gives rise to a new form’, and the period 1780-1914 saw the rise of both new technologies of movement and new categories of traveller. We are specifically interested in how the new perspectives, networks, and markets enabled by these developments impacted upon literary and media form and how these narratives in turn affected the ways in which people travelled.
Topics will include:
Journals and Letters
Ephemera
Guidebooks
Travel in Verse
Transport and Literary Form
Mobile Reading
Tourism and Visual Culture
Literary Pilgrimage
Illustration
Maps
Journals and Letters
Ephemera
Guidebooks
Travel in Verse
Transport and Literary Form
Mobile Reading
Tourism and Visual Culture
Literary Pilgrimage
Illustration
Maps
Special Workshop: The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) historical collection
Registration and further details at: http://travelconference.blogspot.com/
Or contact Mary Henes and Brian Murray at travelconference@gmail.com
Supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Institute (King’s College London) and the Cambridge Leverhulme Victorian Studies Group