Abstract
My essay tests Hans Enzensberger's notion of travel as an act of revolt: what he called a ‘critique of that from which it withdraws’ (Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘A Theory of Tourism’, New German Critique 68 (Spring-Summer 1996), p. 135). Via a study of travel writing on the Balkans, I explore the links between inter-war styles of travel and the modernist current within Anglo-American literature which, with its profound misgivings about modern civilisation, had come to view abroad as a place of revelation and escape. At the same time, the essay looks at how the self-constructions of travel writers had come to reflect the new identity positions that were being explored in canonical modernism. In contrast to the imperial masculinities so often displayed by the Victorians, inter-war travellers presented an alternative Englishness, one that was worldly, artistic, sensitive to spiritual and cultural experiences, practised in alien customs and, with its frequent deployment of self-reflexive and impressionistic styles of writing, proficient in innovative literary technique.
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