Odysseys / Odyssees: Travel Narratives in French / Recits de voyage en francais

The volume explores diverse aspects of French-language travel writing. Arranged chronologically by topic, the essays cover the medieval Anglo-Norman story of the Irish traveller Saint Brendan’s fantastical visit to hell; the sixteenth-century French expeditions to Florida; the seventeenth-century Dernieres decouvertes dans l'Amerique septentrionale de M. de la Sale mises au jour par le chevalier Tonti, 1697; the eighteenth-century Histoire generale des voyages by l'abbe Prevost; the eighteenth-century Impressions d’ Orient et d'Arabie written in French by the Polish count Waclaw Seweryn Rzewuski; nineteenth-century tales of travel in Algeria by the orientalist painter Eugene Fromentin; early twentieth-century travel narratives by the modernist Blaise Cendrars; the 1936 visit to the Soviet Union by Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Andre Gide, odyssean thematics in the late twentieth-century work of Nobel prize winner Patrick Modiano; the thematics of nomadism in the twentieth-century writing of Albert Memmi, and the thematics of travel in works by Bernard Ollivier, Rachid Bouchareb, Fatou Diome, Christine Montalbetti, Marie Ndiaye and Emmanuel Lepage.