Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s

Author:   Bernard Schweizer (Assistant Professor of English, Long Island University, Brooklyn)
Publisher:   University of Virginia Press
ISBN:  

9780813920696


Pages:   240
Publication Date:   30 November 2001
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
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Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s


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"In the 1930s, the discourse of travel furthered widely divergent and conflicting ideologies - socialist, conservative, male chauvinist and feminist - and the major travel writers of the time revealed as much in their texts. Evelyn Waugh was a declared conservative and a fascist sympathizer; George Orwell was a dedicated socialist; Graham Greene wavered between his bouregois instincts and his liberal left-wing sympathies; and Rebecca West maintained strong feminist and liberationist convictions. Bernard Schweizer explores both the intentional political rhetoric and the more oblique, almost unconscious subtexts of Waugh, Orwell, Greene and West in his study of travel writing's political dimension. """"Radicals on the Road"""" demonstrates how historically and culturally conditioned forms of anxiety were compounded by the psychological dynamics of the uncanny and how, in order to dispel such anxieties and to demarcate their ideological terrains, 1930s travellers resorted to dualistic discourses. Yet any seemingly fixed dualism, particularly the opposition between the political left and the right, the dichotomy between home and abroad, or the rift between utopia and dystopia, was undermined by the rise of totalitarianism and by an increasing sense of global crisis - which was soon followed by political disillusionment. Therefore, argues Schweizer, travelling during the 1930s was more than just a means to engage the burning political questions of the day: travelling, and in turn travel writing, also registered the travellers' growing sense of futility and powerlessness in an especially turbulent world."

Full Product Details

Author:   Bernard Schweizer (Assistant Professor of English, Long Island University, Brooklyn)
Publisher:   University of Virginia Press
Imprint:   University of Virginia Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.517kg
ISBN:  

9780813920696


ISBN 10:   0813920698
Pages:   240
Publication Date:   30 November 2001
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

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Reviews

Radicals on the Road covers a period and a body of production that has been ignored in most of the previous critiques of travel writing. Schweizer's study neither blindly endorses the postcolonial perspectives of predecessor critiques, nor is it inconsistent with them--enabling new possibilities by complicating a body of literary criticism that has largely divorced postcolonial perspectives from the muddled and ebbing imperialist ideology of the inter-war years.</p>--Patrick HollandUniversity of Guelphco, author of <i>Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing</i>


Radicals on the Road covers a period and a body of production that has been ignored in most of the previous critiques of travel writing. Schweizer's study neither blindly endorses the postcolonial perspectives of predecessor critiques, nor is it inconsistent with them--enabling new possibilities by complicating a body of literary criticism that has largely divorced postcolonial perspectives from the muddled and ebbing imperialist ideology of the inter-war years.--Patrick HollandUniversity of Guelphco, author of Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing


<p>Radicals on the Road covers a period and a body of productionthat has been ignored in most of the previous critiques of travel writing.Schweizer's study neither blindly endorses the postcolonial perspectives ofpredecessor critiques, nor is it inconsistent with them -- enabling newpossibilities by complicating a body of literary criticism that has largely divorcedpostcolonial perspectives from the muddled and ebbing imperialist ideology of theinter-war years.--Patrick HollandUniversity of Guelphco, author of Tourists withTypewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary TravelWriting


Radicals on the Road covers a period and a body of production that has been ignored in most of the previous critiques of travel writing. Schweizer's study neither blindly endorses the postcolonial perspectives of predecessor critiques, nor is it inconsistent with them--enabling new possibilities by complicating a body of literary criticism that has largely divorced postcolonial perspectives from the muddled and ebbing imperialist ideology of the inter-war years.--Patrick HollandUniversity of Guelphco, author of Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing Radicals on the Road covers a period and a body of production that has been ignored in most of the previous critiques of travel writing. Schweizer's study neither blindly endorses the postcolonial perspectives of predecessor critiques, nor is it inconsistent with them enabling new possibilities by complicating a body of literary criticism that has largely divorced postcolonial perspectives from the muddled and ebbing imperialist ideology of the inter-war years.--Patrick HollandUniversity of Guelphco, author of Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing


Bernard Schweizer is adept at teasing out the covert and contradictory political implications of individual works, whether pointing out Orwell's nervousness about his complicity with an imperial system he both despised and represented, or noting that Waugh could be both an entertaining satirist (with a devastating rhetorical 'sting') and an insensitive bigot who willfully diminished the worth of foreign countries. This is an incisive and fair-minded study of English travel writing of the thirties. --Michael Kowalewski, Carleton College, editor of Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel Radicals on the Road covers a period and a body of production that has been ignored in most of the previous critiques of travel writing. Schweizer's study neither blindly endorses the postcolonial perspectives of predecessor critiques, nor is it inconsistent with them--enabling new possibilities by complicating a body of literary criticism that has largely divorced postcolonial perspectives from the muddled and ebbing imperialist ideology of the inter-war years. --Patrick Holland, University of Guelph, coauthor of Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing


Author Information

Bernard Schweizer, who works as an independent scholar in New York, is currently completing a book-length study of Rebecca West.

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