Barbara Korte

English Travel Writing From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations

Introduction: Travelling Pleasure - Reading Pleasure Charting the Genre Paths to the Real World: Travel Writing in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period Paths to the Self: Accounts of the Grand Tour The Home Tour: From the Informative to the Picturesque Account Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century Womens Travel Writing British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century Postcolonial Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Against Busyness: Idling in Victorian and Contemporary Travel Writing

The Idle Traveller (2012) by Dan Kieran is a twenty-first century book of advice for ‘the art of slow travel’, as its subtitle proclaims. The jacket of the original edition sports the image of a traveller in relaxed mode — laid back and dozing while facing an idyllic bay which he or she seems to have reached on foot since there is no car or other means of transportation in sight. Kieran has promoted slow travel, which to him is far more than an issue of speed, in the British press and enjoys a reputation for having crossed England in a fifty-year-old electric milk float.1 The blurb of his book promises that its author ‘calls on us all to reassess how and why we travel’ and that it is ‘full of inspiration for making the journey itself more meaningful and fun’. An introduction was written by Tom Hodgkinson, an ardent promoter of an idle lifestyle2 and editor of the The Idler magazine,3 for which Kieran served as co-editor for a while. Hodgkinson muses about the connection between idleness and travel, an apparent contradiction at first glance since one tends to associate the idler with rest rather than mobility: And yet, and yet … despite the obvious inconveniences of travel, the idler can be stirred to leave his room. The idler is also a wanderer, a meanderer, an observer of life, and some of the greatest idlers have also been the greatest travellers, and travel writers.

Developments and trends in the Rhetoric of Science

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century

Since many forms of travel which inspired earlier accounts have become virtually impossible, the travel book has often been declared dead in the twentieth century. Evelyn Waugh laments over this death in When the Going Was Good (1946): My own travelling days are over, and I do not expect to see many travel books in the future. When I was a reviewer, they used, I remember, to appear in batches of four or five a week, cram-full of charm and wit and enlarged Leica snapshots. There is no room for tourists in a world of ‘displaced persons.’ Never again, I suppose, shall we land on foreign soil with a letter of credit and passport (itself the first faint shadow of the great cloud that envelops us) and feel the world wide open before us. (p. 11)

Touched by the Pain of Others: War correspondents in contemporary fiction. Michael Ignatieff, Charlie Johnson in the Flames and Pat Barker, Double Vision

The televised wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have established the war correspondent as a prominent cultural presence. This prominence—and in some cases even celebrity—of men and women like Peter Arnett, Christiane Amanpour, Kate Adie and John Simpson has not only attracted the attention of scholars and sparked reflection in the media themselves; it has also led to a conspicuous surge of reporters’ memoirs and autobiographies as well as an increased appearance of war correspondents in fictional representation. War correspondents figure in popular television programmes, in feature films and, as the ensuing discussion will show, in novels. While academic study of war reporting focuses on factors that determine the professional field (like political and military strategies of media ‘‘management’’, media ownership or new technologies that make instant reporting possible), fictional representation tends to emphasise different facets: it exploits the aura of adventure and heroism with which the profession is endowed in popular perception or, when of a more serious nature, shows the predicament of individual correspondents torn between professional ideals and the human values in which they believe. Arguably, such emphasis on the war reporter’s human dimension has been encouraged by the way correspondents have appeared on television and presented themselves in books since the 1990s: as professional observers and commentators, of course, but also as individuals positioned in scenarios of war that threaten their own

Being Engaged: The War Correspondent in British Fiction

Abstract Live satellite reporting has made war correspondents immediately visible as actors in the theatre of war, and despite the alleged techno and video nature of recent conflicts, the war reporter as a personal mediator of war has not become obsolete. As audiences are flooded with images of war, the correspondent appears to gain particular importance precisely because of his or her humanity. Fiction, and particularly literary fiction, has the best potential to show this humanity and to explore what the reporters engagement may mean in human terms. As a matter of fact, it has done so since the profession came into being in the middle of the nineteenth century. The novels to be discussed, Rudyard Kiplings The Light That Failed (1891), Graham Greenes The Quiet American (1955) and Pat Barkers Double Vision (2003), all emerge from the British context, i. e. a background with a long and important tradition of war reporting since the famous William Russell of The Times, and a context in which enduring myths about the profession originate.

The Promotion of the Heroic Woman in Victorian and Edwardian Gift Books

As a theme with high cultural visibility, the heroic was represented in all media of the Victorian and Edwardian years. Barbara Korte investigates 50 years of gift books showing how the genre reflected gender ideology aimed at initiating readers into the dominant beliefs and values of Victorian and Edwardian society. Targeting young female readers, the books examined show narratives and visual illustrations of exemplary heroism performed by women, as well as peritext (prefaces and introductions) that made their didactics explicit. While they compromise with the hegemonic understanding of femininity as domestic, these books also demonstrate that women can have an agency as extraordinarily heroic as that of a man, pointing to new gender models emerging.

John Lanchester’s Capital: financial risk and its counterpoints

ABSTRACT John Lanchester’s Capital (2012) reads London as a space in which risk and chance are complexly entangled – for ‘native’ Londoners as well as people who come to it from all parts of the world and for various reasons: as businessmen, economic migrants, political refugees or talent from the Global South. Capital comes across as a ‘social novel’ in the nineteenth-century sense: as a panorama of social types and narrative trajectories. It is precisely this conventional mode of presentation (and its tradition of social critique) that enables Lanchester’s novel to trace what risk, with both its positive and negative implications, means for the various characters whose lives before and after the 2008 crash it follows. Capital thus exposes reckless capitalism but also explores many other meanings that risk and risk-taking can have in globalised urban settings of the twenty-first century. It personalises and humanises ‘risk’, and it demands an ethical positioning of the readers as it juxtaposes the irresponsible risk-taking of the finance world with the risk-taking and resilience of individual people who find themselves in different forms of precarious life.

Historical Edutainment: New Forms and Practices of Popular History?

Korte and Paletschek start from the observation that more people encounter history as “edutainment” today than through formal education. Represented or performed in all media, often mixing fact and fiction, popular-history products entertain as much as they instruct. The chapter asks how new this phenomenon actually is and points to antecedents in the nineteenth century. It also surveys the various concepts and theoretical frameworks with which popular history has been approached in different academic traditions and claims that popular history has evolved into a truly interdisciplinary field. The chapter finally uses the 2014 centenary of the outbreak of World War to show how popular history ties in with academic reinterpretations of the war.

Victims and Heroes Get All Mixed Up: Gender and Agency in the Thriller

The thriller is concerned with threat to the security of individuals and the social order, and thus with the ability or non-ability to resist such threat. The genre can therefore serve as a site where concepts of the heroic, and especially the relationship between heroes, victims and perpetrators, are negotiated. For some recent examples of the genre, notably novels by Ken Follett and Val McDermid, Korte shows how this negotiation implies an engagement with the gendering of agency. While this gendering may confirm stereotypes, the more intriguing examples such as McDermid’s Cross and Burn use the disturbing elements of the thriller to unsettle orthodox assumptions about heroism and gender.