Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing

The first extensive survey of contemporary travel writing, Tourists with Typewriters offers a series of challenging and provocative critical insights into a wide range of travel narratives written in English after the Second World War. The book focuses in particular on contemporary travel writers such as Jan Morris, Peter Matthiessen, V. S. Naipaul, Barry Lopez, Mary Morris, Paul Theroux, Peter Mayle, and the late Bruce Chatwin. It examines some of the reasons for travel writing’s enduring popularity, and for its particular appeal to readers-many of them also travelers-in the present.

The book maps new terrain in a growing area of critical study. Although critical of travel writing’s complacency and its often unacknowledged ethnocentrism, the book recognizes its importance as both a literary and cultural form. While travel writing at its worst emerges as a crude expression of economic advantage, at its best it becomes a subtle instrument of cultural self-perception, a barometer for changing views of other (i.e., foreign, non-Western) cultures, and a trigger for the information circuits that tap us into the wider world.

Tourists with Typewriters gauges both the best and worst in contemporary travel writing, capturing the excitement of this most volatile-and at times infuriating-of literary genres. The book will appeal to general readers interested in a closer examination of travel writing and to academic readers in disciplines such as literary/cultural studies, geography, history, anthropology, and tourism studies.