‘In the beginning there was the coal pit’: discovering industrial landscapes in interwar Britain and Weimar Germany in the travel-writings of H.V. Morton, J.B. Priestley and Heinrich Hauser

Abstract

Focusing on both British and German travel writers, this essay argues that following the First World War, the travelogue as a literary genre, and the process of travelling as a performative act, functioned as vehicles for renegotiating ideas of space – a phenomenon that surfaced especially during encounters with and perceptions of industrial landscapes. Struggling between nostalgic notions of a pre-industrial countryside and the coming-to-terms with the new places of modernity, landscapes became not only narratively framed as contested spaces, but, moreover, discursive fields in which ideological struggles of belonging, progress and social order were fought out.