Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Keirstead, Christopher M.

Titel

Dickens, travel disorientation, and the emergence of the modern literary travel essay: or, "A Flight" (and "Night Walks") on flight

Ist Teil von

• Studies in travel writing, 2015-10, Vol.19 (4), p.340-357

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This essay draws on the sociological concepts of travel disorientation and transient community in order to illustrate some of the specific historical, technological and cultural factors that helped to give rise to the literary travel essay as a form as it was pioneered by Charles Dickens in his weekly journals Household Words and All the Year Round. Inhabiting the same periodical format intended to conduct readers effectively from individual, household spaces to more global and collective ones, the literary travel essay provided a vehicle for rapid yet critical, imaginative and immersive engagement with the cognitive and social disorientation induced by modern high-speed mass transit. Attending also to the ethical dilemmas posed by the class-based exclusivity of such travel, "A Flight" and "Night Walks", taken together, embody not just the range of modes or speeds open to the travel essayist but serve to illustrate the form's ideological horizons and challenges. At Dickens's hands, the literary travel essay, even as it came into being and sustained itself through these new systems of communication and transportation, would strive to map alternate, interrupted itineraries and fashion new forms of transient community between author, reader and traveller across national and class boundaries.