“The reader can never be sure what’s going to come next”: political reflexivity, ethics and queer affiliations in Oswell Blakeston’s 1950s travel writing/guide books

Abstract

ABSTRACT Oswell Blakeston’s four now largely forgotten travel books, Portuguese Panorama (1955), Isle of St. Helena (1957), Sun at Midnight: Finland Holiday (1958), and Thank You Now: An Exploration of Ulster (1960), warrant the attention of contemporary scholars of travel writing. This article outlines how Blakeston’s writing about his travels, or holidays, further illuminates contemporary historical explorations of the continuum, rather than categorical opposition, between tourist guidebooks and travel writing. Blakeston's travel writing also exhibits a degree of what Debbie Lisle describes as “political reflexivity”. Related to this, his work narrates ethical interactions with new friends encountered on his journeys, while also dramatising some of the inevitable limitations this entails. Analysis of Blakeston’s travel writing also highlights links between the preoccupations detailed above and his queer modernist cultural lineage. This article therefore expands our historical understanding of the diversity of queer British travel writing during the twentieth century.