Alternative Modernities in French Travel Writing: Engaging Urban Space in London and New York, 1851-1986

Ever since human beings first travelled, cities have constituted important material and literary destinations. While the city has formed a key theme for scholars of literary fiction, travellers’ modes of writing the city have been somewhat neglected by travel studies. However, travel writing with its attention to difference provides a rich source for the study of representational ’strategies’ and ’tactics’ in the modern city. Tracing spatial practices of French travel writers in London and New York from1851 to the 1980s, this book contributes to a body of work that analyses travel and travel writing beyond the Anglophone context, and engages a variety of travel writing in questions surrounding French modalities for negotiating and establishing a nexus of meanings for life in the modern city. One of the central tenets of the book is that, in the way its spaces are planned, encountered and represented, the city is operational in the formulation of identities and ideologies, and the book’s guiding question is how travel and travel writing allow for the exploration of urban modernity from a perspective of exchange. Bringing together the strands of theory, context and poetic analysis, this book examines travel writing as a spatial practice of the modern city, engaging urban space in questions of nationality, power and legibility and opening avenues for the exploration of urban modernity from a position of alterity, where alternative imaginative geographies of the city might emerge.

Gillian Jein is Lecturer in French Studies at Bangor University.