Cross-Cultural Travel: Papers from the Royal Irish Academy Symposium on Literature and Travel, National University of Ireland, Galway, November 2002

Cross-Cultural Travel presents the proceedings of a major international conference on literature and travel held in November 2002 at the National University of Ireland, under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy. The contributors, including such leading scholars as Joep Leerssen and Luigi Monga, illustrate the remarkable scope and vitality of work currently undertaken in the field. Cross-Cultural Travel is a multidisciplinary crossroads where literature, cultural studies and history engage with a variety of other disciplines. Topics range from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century and from constructions in fiction and poetry to the testimonies of explorers, diplomats, servants of Empire, journalists, artists, tourists, or established writers. Among the authors featured are Rousseau, Heine, Hugo, Sand, Svevo, Cela, Ingeborg Bachmann, Barthes, Tabucchi, Chatwin, Allende, and Sebald. Taken together, these fifty essays illuminate the processes of identity formation, whether the great lines of national identity or the personal edges of awareness. They explore over time differing relationships to the physical world, experiences of cultural difference, and the interplay between the subject’s mobility and its textualization.