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Lee, Min Young (2005) Voyages of cultural encounters and the self: a critical, comparative, structural and historical analysis of modern British and American travel literature. Doctoral thesis, London Metropolitan University.
This thesis explores the genre of contemporary American and British travel literature, as it argues three major analytical points.
The first argument expresses the notion that the modern travel book has become a much more subject-oriented type of writing. This means that the modern genre is not only concerned with providing a storyline about the environment and conditions of travel - like information pertaining to foreign peoples and places - but it also considers the persona of the travel writer. Thus, this thesis will scrutinise different modern texts, both by American and British travel writers, to demonstrate the idea that the modern travel book has become more focused on the displaced subject. Furthermore, this thesis will show that the movement towards a subject-centred travel book has created certain circumstances which have allowed the commodification of the travel writer. In this case, the travel writers themselves are marketed and sold as commodified personalities.
The second argument proposes that the modern travel book has made this shift into a more author-centred narrative, because the travel genre has traditionally adopted devices and techniques from other systems of writing. Thus, the modern travel book is a hybrid genre. In order to provide evidence for this idea, this thesis will consider the different critical discourses about the genre, as well as provide a historical survey of the genre's structure and content. It will also analyse primary sources as proof that the modern travel book incorporates bits and pieces from other types of representation.
By comparatively reading contemporary American and British travel writings about one another's culture, the third argument addresses the idea that two particular diverging images consistently appear between the two national bodies of writings. The iconic image of Britain fashioned by American travel books has been a figure of a timeless past; that of the 'Old World'. British writing about US travels, on the other hand, has ambiguously constructed North America as the future of Western modernity. At the heart of this difference is the question of liberalism, and the question of how a post-Enlightenment liberal state should be organised within the spirit of modernity. Thus, when comparatively examining the two national bodies of modern travel books about one another, a central discourse emerges which asks, 'what is the model liberal state in a post-millennium world?'
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