travel writing

The travel memoir offers an opportunity to examine a number of issues in terms of creative non-fiction. Travel stories focus on individuals who become strangers to themselves when they exile themselves from the environmental and cultural factors that have defined them thus far in service of self-discovery. They link up with the grand Odysseus-like impulse of traditional and modern literature that can profoundly alter identity when they travel and write about their experiences. Topics to consider would include a discussion of three particular aspects of this kind of storytelling. First, we must discuss the idea of fiction vs. fact and try to decide how much of each is essential in terms of crafting biographical material.

The conference seeks to explore the narratives of displacement and to demonstrate the validity of a cross-disciplinary approach which brings together the historical, cultural, social and literary expertise in the handling of text. The conference will particularly focus on time and space representations and on treatment of the theme of cultural ambivalence and identity conflict. The subject of displacement will be regarded as both a migration, voluntary or forced, and a sense of being socially or culturally “out of place”.

Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

What is the place of unwilling travel(er)s in travel studies? What are the costs of travel? This roundtable considers travels that are not undertaken strictly by choice. We welcome proposals from any field or period on topics such as: climate-related relocations, internal/political migrants, self-liberation from slavery or captivity, literal/figurative boundaries, eco/animal movements, borderlands/crossings, economic exigencies that require travel, narratives of new beginnings.

Submissions invited for the inaugural issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies. The Journal is being launched from this year to commemorate the Birth Centenary of legendary English Professor Late P. S. Sastri (Nagpur University). It’ll be published thrice a year and shall cover interdisciplinary research in all forms and genres of literature, art, and culture such as fiction, folklore, film/ theatre, travel writing, popular culture, translation, gender and sexuality studies, ecocriticism, globalization and urban studies, race, ethnicity, subaltern and Dalit studies, and all related areas.

The Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will hold its 2020 conference October 23-24 at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, NH.

The Travel Studies Area of NEPCA invites paper proposals on the subject of travel and tourism, broadly conceived.  Paper proposals may include (but are not limited to) analysis and critical perspectives on topics such as: