Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity

Notes

Notes introduction 1. Ironically, this increase in travel and apparent freedom came at a cost, according to James Buzard, who argues, “The greater freedom to travel, offered to a greater number, was real, but it was gained only by reconstructing ‘freedom’ within an infrastructural and cultural network that limited the actual field of choices” (47). 2. For information on southerners traveling north, see John Hope Franklin’s A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North. 3. For Susan-Mary Grant, this voice has been ignored in studies of American nationalism because of its predominance: “The northern ideology survived—albeit in a changed form—and because it survived, it has been ignored. It is too obvious, it is allpervasive , it is America” (18). 4. Still, the critical work of postcolonial critics has been useful for understanding this relationship; two useful collections of essays have been Ashcroft et al.’s The Post-Colonial Studies Reader and Williams and Chrisman’s Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory : A Reader. 5. Marlon B. Ross points to a similar disruption in the growth of nationalist sentiment : “Whereas growth, both temporal and spatial, implies natural continuity and preformation, like the predestined movement from birth to maturity or the form of the body predetermined by the enlargement of the cell, change and expansion are inherently discontinuous and disruptive. . . . [C]hange and expansion are distressing phenomena, disrupting the relation between past and present, between internal and external, between native and exotic” (56). 6. Studies of the culture of travel and tourism have also increased dramatically in recent years. See, for instance, John Urry’s The Tourist Gaze or Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, edited by Chris Rojek and Urry. 7. Two signs of the critical attention travel writing currently enjoys are worth mentioning . One is the creation of the International Society for Travel Writing, which hosts a biannual conference devoted exclusively to travel writing. The second is the sheer volume of essay collections on and studies of travel and travel writing. Many of these collections focus on modern or contemporary travel literature; two of the more noteworthy include Travellers’ Tales, edited by George Robertson et al., and Temperamental Journey, edited by Michael Kowaleski. On the other hand, Travel Writing and Empire, edited by Steve Clark, covers a vast time span, including essays on travelers from Hakluyt to Bill Bryson. Other useful recent studies not described elsewhere in this introduction include Dennis Porter’s Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing; 200 notes to introduction Tourists with Typewriters, by Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan; Lynne Withey’s readable Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours; and Casey Blanton’s Travel Writing: The Self and the World. Two texts that address travel itself more than travel writing but that nonetheless are useful guides are Hosts and Guests, edited by Valene Smith, and Travel Culture: Essays on What Makes Us Go, edited by Carol Traynor Williams. And Eric J. Leed, in The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, provides a useful overview of the figure of the traveler in his or her various journeys and manifestations throughout Western societies. 8. Certainly, other texts that looked at travel literature had been published prior to these. For instance, Foster Rhea Dulles published Americans Abroad: Two Centuries of European Travel in 1964. Like Dulles’s book, however, these earlier texts are generally more historical studies than sustained critical investigations. 9. For more information on the impact that travel literature, especially the literature of exploration, has had on American literature, see William Spengemann’s The Adventurous Muse; according to Spengemann, his book analyzes the “complex interrelations among New World travel-writing, European literature, and Romantic aesthetics on the development of American fiction” (3). 10. In contrast, James Buzard argues in The Beaten Track, “It should be clear that for the rhetorical purposes involved in distinguishing tourists and travellers, negative value did not attach so much to any particular form of transport, but rather to whichever form seemed at that moment to threaten the older ways, which then retroactively assumed positive value” (37). Buzard’s work provides an especially informative analysis of these terms. 11. For additional analysis on travel literature’s role in imperialism, see David Spurr’s excellent and thorough The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. 12. Several scholars have also written important studies on “travel theory” and on the connections among travel, writing, and theory. See especially Edward Said’s...