travel writing

Published at the height of the imperial enterprise, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has a long and intricate backstory. It is, in fact, the result of centuries of British discovery of and disappointment with the world. One by one, naturalists, amateur anthropologists, merchants, soldiers, diplomats or missionaries from the British Isles discovered the world for the armchair travelers at home and built up their self-esteem by disfiguring countries and regions in writings, paintings, and lectures at the Royal Geographical Society.

We are seeking one or two chapters to fill out our edited collection Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace (already under contract with Routledge). Ideally the chapter(s) would provide a case study that addresses some intersection of economy (market, exchange) and religion (faith, sprituality) in medieval and/or early modern Africa. How did matters of faith enter the marketplace in a specific region of Africa? How did religion facilitate or provide resistance to the growing slave trade? How did religions adapt to changing markets? 

Please send inquiries and/or abstracts to Scott Oldenburg (soldenbu@tulane.edu)

CALL FOR PAPERS for Edited Volume with ISBN.

Native Voices from India: A Reminiscence

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.

"Narratives of Displacement" International Conference

6 November 2020 - Palma, Spain

organised by

London Centre for Interdisciplinary ResearchThe British and Comparative Cultural Studies Research Group (BRICCS), Unversity of the Balearic Islands, Spain

in collaboration with

Research Project RTI2018-097186-B-I00 and RED2018-102678-T (MCI/AEI/ERDF, EU)

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.

For centuries, the close ties between Britain and Germany have found expression not least on the level of personal travel. Travellers came from Britain to Germany for a host of occasions and with the most diverse aims, expectations, and preconceptions. This conference explores the reports produced about their experiences in German lands by travellers from England, Scotland, and Ireland since the Middle Ages.

Call for Papers for Critical Insights: Life of Pi (2020)

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED UNTIL MARCH 1, 2020

This is a call for chapter proposals for a forthcoming edited collection on the 2001 philosophical novel Life of Pi by Canadian author Yann Martel. This volume will be published in Fall 2020 by Salem Press as part of the following subseries of their Critical Insights collection: https://www.salempress.com/ci_works.

In line with the expectations of the Critical Insights series, I ultimately seek essays that:

Destination – the word itself concerns both journey and journey’s end. For this issue of Oxford Research in English, we invite articles that delve into arrival and setting forth in literature, as well as the textual, intertextual and extratextual ways one can examine literary places and spaces. “Destination” derives from the Latin dēstināre—to resolve, to determine, to destine— before journeying into French and arriving in English.

The William Dean Howells Society welcomes proposals for two sessions at the 31st annual conference of the ALA in San Diego, CA from May 21-24, 2020.

HOWELLS OUT WEST

Though born and raised in Ohio, William Dean Howells is often considered the prime shaper and protector of what Nancy Glazener terms the “northeastern urban bourgeoisie” because of his stewardship of the elite east coast literary magazines The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s. Inspired by our transition from Boston back to the West Coast for ALA 2020, for this panel we seek presentations on Howells’s equally important relationship with the American West, broadly construed.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

“Somewhere in Between: Borders and Borderlands”International Conference25 April 2020 – St. Anne’s College, University of Oxfordorganised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

The Lincoln Humanities Journal (ISSN 2474-7726) is requesting article submissions for its 8th special issue, to be published in December 2020, on the topic of Travel Narratives and Real-Life Fiction. Contributors are invited to examine specifically (a) the evolving forms of life-writings (biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, blogs, etc.) as they pertain to travel; (b) the intersection of fictional and factual travel narratives, and (c) the emotional, economic, socio-political, environmental, physiological, and literary aspects of travel (in reality and in fiction; by land, sea and air; on earth and in outer space).

“Queer Crossings, Unruly Locales, 1500-1800”  

University of California, Santa Barbara 

Conference Date: February 28-29, 2020 

Abstracts Due: December 5th, 2019 (Extended Deadline)