The Art of Travel: Essays on Travel Writing - Paperback

by Philip Dodds (Author)

First published in 1982. The Art of Travel is the first collection of critical essays to be devoted to British travel writing. It attempts to give a sense of the wealth of such writing, to map some of its forms and conventions and, implicitly, to claim a place for travel writing in any revised definition of literature. For this collection, travel includes sea voyages, European tours, commissioned enquiries into social conditions, and urban writing; travel writing ranges from works such as Sea and Sardinia by D.H. Lawrence whose status as a novelist guarantees his travel books some attention, through the essays and books of Victorian middle-class travellers into working-class London, to the work of V.S. Naipaul, a contemporary writer, who has increasingly preferred the travel book to the novel.

Author Biography

Philip Dodd is the editor of the journal Prose Studies and of a volume of essays on Walter Pater, and the author of a number of essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. He is currently working on a study of English Autobiography, 1870-1940.