Travel and Modernist Literature: Sacred and Ethical Journeys (review)

Traveling the roads of Southern France in the summer of 1912 and feeling both mentally and physically exhausted by the time he reached Chalus, Ezra Pound gleaned an important truth about the spiritual lives of the troubadours. He felt that the difficult material conditions of travel during the middle ages were enough to cause them to envision the landscape of the afterworld, salvation for oneself and hell for one's enemies.¹ That spirituality during this earlier religious age had real, lived conditions as its source was significant for Pound, for whom travel was such an important part of his subsequent poetic development.

The connections between movement, modernism, and spirituality are likewise at the center of Amanda Peat's fine new book, Travel and Modernist Literature. By attending to the real conditions of the modern world evinced through travel, she suggests, we can trace the contours of a spirituality that has been eclipsed by the secularism of modernity. Peat focuses in particular on the trope of the pilgrimage as it appears in various modernist novels. Whether these pilgrimages are real or imagined, whether this spiritual stance is sincere, nostalgic, or ironic, Peat provides us with a fresh vocabulary, taken from travel studies, that helps us read these works anew and think again about the ways in which lived conditions and representation inform one another.

Peat's analysis of the pilgrimage motif derives from E. Alan Morinis's taxonomy of the pilgrimage from his 1992 collection Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage.² She starts off by putting Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, and Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond into conversation in the context of the "initiatory pilgrimage," showing how by focusing on female travelers these authors rewrite and critique the gendered nature of the traditional pilgrim narrative. This revision and critique ultimately resists the conventional teleology of the pilgrimage. Such resistance is evidenced again in the second chapter, in which Peat looks at Forster again, this time A Passage to India, and Henry James's The American and The Ambassadors, seeing these works as evidence of the "acquisitive pilgrimage." In Morini's terminology, "acquisitive" connotes a modern consumerism that emerges in the context of the rise of the tourist industry, and Peat argues convincingly how these authors substitute for the act of acquisition the holier act of renunciation. In the third chapter, Peat examines Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, and Claude MacKay's Banjo, focusing on the concept of the expatriate through the lens of the "wandering pilgrimage." She shows how this "mobile expatriatism" illuminates questions of nationality, individual identity, and community, arguing that the expatriate experience doesn't simply replicate a Eurocentric cultural hegemony overseas but acts as a site where cultures collide in ultimately redemptive ways. Finally, Peat looks at Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark, Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, and Joyce Cary's To Be a Pilgrim, as well as Woolf's The Years as "imaginary pilgrimages," where the concept of "home" in the context of empire is interrogated and ultimately transformed in "the postcolonial moment" (132).

Although Peat builds her book on a borrowed terminology, this allows her to engage issues and critical approaches that are germane to both modernist and travel studies. Central to her argument about the initiatory pilgrimage, for instance, is a discussion of the role and concerns of women travelers in the traditionally gendered genres of travel writing and the bildungsroman, and in her section on the acquisitive pilgrimages she draws on critical work on the rise of the tourist industry and the figure of the tourist. If this study seems more about spirituality than about actual travel and the lived conditions of modern travel, for Peat the former cannot be rightly understood without reference to the latter.

In stating her goals, Peat urges us to see travel fiction as a...