Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing: Decentring Epistemologies

Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing evidences the evolution of travel writing studies over the last two decades and points to innovative ways to study this heterogeneous genre. This volume seeks to build bridges between the study of travel writing and disciplines of sciences and human sciences so that the analyses of travel texts, images, and objects lead to interdisciplinary enrichment. This volume revisits the complicated relationship between fact and fiction, science and literature, and the world and the word through transdisciplinary approaches. Through case studies of British travel writing from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the contributors provide illustrations of the fruitful intersection of travel writing studies with other methodologies, such as literary studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, visual studies, areal studies, engineering studies, food studies, animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, and geocriticism.

Samia Ounoughi is a senior lecturer in English linguistics at Université Grenoble Alpes. She is a member of LIDILEM (Linguistique et Didactique des Langues Étrangères et Maternelles). She is also a member of LABEX ITTEM (Laboratoire d’Excellence Innovations et Transitions Territoriales en Montagne) where she works with geographers, cartographers, and historians. She was the vice-president of SELVA from 2019 to 2023. Her research deals with the relations between language and space, and she specialises in corpus discourse analysis of mountain travel writing. She has co-edited Exceptions and Exceptionality in Travel Writing with Anne-Florence Quaireau (Studies in Travel Writing, 2020). Her other publications tackle the process of mountain nomination (“Referential Conventions as Compromise,” in Reference: From Conventions to Pragmatics, John Benjamins, 2023). She is the co-editor of Writing on the Move with Tim Hannigan (forthcoming: 2025).

Emmanuelle Peraldo is Professor of British literature at Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, and Director of the CTELA (Centre Transdisciplinaire d’Épistémologie de la Littérature et des Arts vivants, UPR6307). From 2019 to 2023, she was the president of SELVA, a French learned society devoted to the study of travel literature in English. Her PhD, obtained in 2008, was on Defoe and the writing of history (Champion, 2010). Since then, she has been working on the link between geography and literature in the eighteenth century (which was the title of her habilitation to supervise research), and more particularly in Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. Her interests lie in the field of travel writing, novels of the eighteenth century, ecocriticism, geocriticism, and animal studies. Her most recent publications include an article on “Animal Fridays in Robinson Crusoe and its Afterlives” in The Nordic Journal of English Studies (2024) and the co-edition of a special issue of Viatica on Patrick Leigh Fermor (2023).

Anne-Florence Quaireau is an Associate Professor of British literature and translation at the University of Angers and a member of the research team CIRPaLL (Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur les Patrimoines en Lettres et Langues). She specialises in nineteenth-century women’s travel writing and has published several articles and chapters on the subject. Her PhD dissertation on Anna Jameson's travel writing in Canada was awarded the SELVA Doctoral Prize in 2013. Her monograph Le Féminin en partage: le récit de voyage d’Anna Jameson au Canada (Sorbonne Université Presses, 2022) was finalist for the 2023 Joint Book Prize of the French Society for the Study of English (SAES) and French Association for American Studies (AFEA). She has co-edited a special issue of Studies in Travel Writing on exceptions and exceptionality with Samia Ounoughi, and has co-written three textbooks for students on travel in literature, L'ici et l'ailleurs (Atlande, 2015),Voyage, parcours initiatique, exil (Atlande, 2016), and Voyages et migrations (Atlande, 2020). From 2019 to 2023, she was the secretary for SELVA, a French learned society dedicated to the study of travel literature in English.