Abstract
Travelling is always a travelling in traces – looking for traces of past cultures or following the traces of previous travellers. These traces can be material or textual, visual, performative or mnemonic. In some of the best of 20th travel writing, such quests for traces do, however, take an inward and self-reflective turn in which travel writing becomes a form of self-writing and self-staging. In my essay, I will survey this development from the eighteenth century to the present, beginning with Grand Tour accounts of journeys to Italy to then focus on modernist and postmodernist travel writing. This will take us not only to Etruscan Places with DH Lawrence or Patagonia with Bruce Chatwin, to Asia Minor on Alexander’s Path with Freya Stark or to the Caribbean with Amryl Johnson but back into these writer’s lives, their deepest memories and desires. What should emerge in my readings is how writing the ‘Other’ can become a way of writing the Self
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