STACY BURTON. Travel Narrative and the Ends of Modernity.

Abstract

Stacy Burton’s book Travel Narrative and the Ends of Modernity provides a sweeping overview of twentieth-century travel writing in the Anglo-American tradition. This clearly and often elegantly written study maps a vast number of travel books unto a conceptual grid anchored by the terms of nostalgia, authenticity, wartime, and—most importantly—modernity. Burton’s introduction alone is worth the price of the book. She provides a magisterial overview of the major trends in recent scholarship on travel writing, citing all significant studies published since the inception of travel writing as a scholarly sub-field in the 1990s. In a field increasingly crowded and competitive—if not tapped out—Burton is at pains to delineate her own argument and to shore up its originality and significance with regard to others’ work: ‘Scholars have yet to examine thoroughly how the genre of the travel narrative changed in the twentieth century, or to theorize why these changes occurred. No existing study considers these questions in detail. No study examines the genre’s development in the context of the century’s profound geopolitical changes, from world wars and the decline of European empires to globalization, or considers how these changes have played a role in the revival that travel narrative has enjoyed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ (p. 2). This is a tall order, and we shall see how successfully it is in fact fulfilled. Not only does Burton give a concise and respectful synopsis of all major scholarly works that examine Anglophone travel narratives (full disclosure: she approvingly cites my own book Radicals on the Road), but she also marshals thinkers from the wider arena of cultural theory (Mary Louise Pratt, Edward W. Said, etc.) as well as theorists of narrative like Walter Benjamin and, especially, Mikhail Bakhtin. Burton utilizes these sources to illuminate her claim that twentieth-century Anglophone travel narrative reflects a ‘turn to the subjective consequences of war, violence, postcolonial transformation, and Western decline’ (p. 18). But the book is an exercise in literary criticism rather than critical theory, and Burton produces close readings of vast numbers of travel texts to develop the master narrative of the genre’s progressive subjectivization, a subjectivization that results, paradoxically, from vast, impersonal forces such as globalization and the drumbeat of ‘modernity’.