Borders and Crossings

Scholarship of travel writing has seldom paid proper attention to questions of how and why readers engage with the genre – an oversight which, as Robin Jarvis (2016) has noted, at times leads to negative generalizations about travel writing’s presumed audience. This article examines this issue, and considers ways of recovering actual reader responses – through surveys of online reviews, and qualitative interviews. The article outlines findings from a structured group discussion with six regular readers of travel writing. Particular attention is paid to the way these readers respond to the possible inclusion of fictional elements in notionally non-fictional travel books, with the discussion revealing a broad conservatism on this point, and a general rejection of fictionalisation as a travel writing practice. This finding is contrasted with ideas voiced during the author’s interviews with notable travel writing practitioners, revealing a significant tension between the production and rec...

NOTE: Due to a possible editorial conflict of interest the author did not participate in the editing/publishing process of this issue of the journal.This paper sets out to examine a specific body of fictional narratives featuring tourists as protagonists. It is the experience of tourists that determines the plot development, dynamics and denouement of these narratives, and the present paper focuses in particular on Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Hotel (1927) and Tennessee Williams's The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950). The representation of tourists in fiction contradicts what most theories within tourism study posit, as these fictional tourists are placed outside their comfort zone and, additionally, perceived as individuals, not part of a homogeneous mass. Such placement outside a circumscribed world, as the analysis of the two novels shows, is achieved by heterotopian spatiality which the texts construct, whereby the concept of heterotopia relies on Michel Foucault's writing. The asp...

The aim of this paper is to present the term 'city' both as a constructive element and a key to interpreting the same-named novel. The paper is focused on the term’s etymology and contemporary definitions, and on the novel’s interpretations in the postmodern framework. In order to understand all the layers, the intertextual and intermedial theories are also important. Gould and his governess Shatzy Shell are the main characters of the novel. Gould is a teenager who has been recognized as a genius, which has brought him loneliness and desire to achieve success. That loneliness could be compared to some descriptions of postmodern cities, and on the other hand the cities could be compared to postmodern literature. The novel’s most important city is Closingtown – a city that does not appear on any map. It is a town in the West where the time has stopped. The town is compared to a fragmented postmodern literary work and this novel, as Baricco said, is a representation of what a city might b...

In this paper, I examine representations of Croatian identity in contemporary Croatian film through their links with the theme of travel. In particular, I look at practices of displacement as a specific element of travel writing, which “emerge as constitutive of cultural meanings rather than as their simple transfer of extension (Clifford 3; emphasis in the original). I argue that, following the emergence of physical borders after the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Croatianness may be defined through the encounters with different types of travelers within the “complex and pervasive spectrum of human experiences” (Clifford 3). Their presence highlights not only “the discovery of places but also … their creation” (Bishop 143), demonstrates that the imaginative geography of the country becomes “less a matter of physical geography than a qualitative assessment” (Bracewell and Drace-Francis 343), and turns its territory into a field for articulation of “different imaginative practices...

The White Guard, an epic narrative on the Russian Civil War, is also an urban novel based on the author’s personal experiences in Kiev during the tumultuous years of the Revolution and Civil War. Following the traditions established by F. Dostojevsky and I. Bunin, Bulgakov introduces the City, Kiev, not only as the setting of the novel, but as one of the main protagonists – one that changes, develops and takes part in the lives of the other protagonists. The city is thus transformed into a psychological dimension where the violence of war and the mental world of the characters are reflected onto the city itself. As intertextuality is one of the main characteristics of Bulgakov’s style, he employs numerous allusions to the Book of Revelation when describing the events in the novel and when constructing the image of the city. Following his typical ambivalence, Bulgakov depicts Kiev as a place of beauty, light, and happiness, similar to the New Jerusalem from the Revelation, and as a plac...

Invisible Cities, Calvino's novel, or rather antinovel, is about very many things. It is actually one of the few literary attempts that have managed to palpably approach the realization of Mallarmé's ideal Book, into which the entire world would collapse. Consequently, it has attracted all kinds of interpretation, including sociological, urbanist, even political. Such practices have contributed to bypassing what Invisible Cities is in the first place: a linguistic artifact. Once appreciated as such, the (anti)novel starts opening up as language on language, and as literature on literature, which, according to the author of the article, is the novel's prime concern. Its self-referentiality is presented so condensedly and thoroughly (despite the modest size of the book) that the initiated reader will have made his journey through the fifty-five cities, woven together (precisely as a textus!) by the narrator's voice and the conversations between a fictional Marco Polo and an equally such ...