Call for Proposals: Special Issue on Travel Writing and the Visual

Studies in Travel Writing, Taylor and Francis

Special Issue on Travel Writing and the Visual

Travelling and moving from one place to another have always been accompanied by some sort of need and desire to record experiences visually. According to McGrane, “To travel is to see – travel is essentially a way of seeing, a mode of seeing: it is grounded in the eye, in our visual capacity” (Beyond Anthropology).

It is through seeing that distant places, foreign people and objects seem to gain consistency. Through the years, sketches, watercolours, photography, film and digital media have framed and recorded every aspect of our movements and experiences of dislocation. What happens then when visual means and products (traditional and digital) come to influence or complement tales of displacement and mobility? In what way does the writing of present and past experiences of departure reflect and respond to visual images? How are issues of identity, gender, race and class expressed through the interlacing of words and images in travelogues? And how do the recording, display and narration of personal and collective experiences of travel provoke and encourage us to experiment with new ways of seeing and being?

We invite article proposals on visual elements of travel texts for a Special Issue of Studies in Travel Writing to be published in 2018. Articles will discuss the relationship between travel writing and visual media, within different geographical zones and historical contexts, in order to discuss and explore: how visual means evoke, engage with, comment on, or develop travel texts; in what way travel texts of any period respond to a visual aesthetic; how recent travel writing has engaged with new visual techniques (e.g. the DIGITAL CAMERA, new modes of image storage and processing etc.).

The following lines of enquiry are of particular interest (although other contributions are also welcome):

-       Representations of landscape; perceptions of urban and rural spaces;

-       Travel in extreme situations and hardship;

-       Written and visual narrations by people with disabilities and illnesses;

-       Children’s travels;

-       Women’s journeys;

-       Mystical and religious journeys;

-       Imagined journeys.

Proposals (in English and between 500-600 words) should be sent together with a brief biography to: giorgia.alu@sydney.edu.au, or sally.Hill@vuw.ac.nz by 16 December 2014.

Giorgia Alù (University of Sydney)

Sally Hill (Victoria University of Wellington)