Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing

Rating:
Summary: Imaginative Passages
Review: Writes of Passage is a wide-ranging collection of scholarly essays, which while very theoretically informed and quite current, still manages to be very accessible. Anyone interested in the intensely interesting study of travel narratives and what they tell us about cultural assumptions will find essays of interest. Although Michael Brown's article on Neil Miller's Gay travel seemed a bit overwhelmed by the theory, this was the exception. The others balanced theory and historical background very nicely. Derek Gregory's "Scripting Egypt" was worth the price of the book alone. Laurie McMillin's "Enlightenment Travels" made some lovely connections between the British search for personal enlightenment in Tibet and Romanticism's interest in mountains, bring in interesting connections with Kipling's Kim. If you are working in the study of travel narratives, check this collection out--the introduction gives one of the best overviews of scholarly issues in travel writing I have seen.