Travel and Modernist Literature : Sacred and Ethical Journeys

Title: Travel and Modernist Literature : Sacred and Ethical Journeys
Author: Alexandra Peat
ISBN: 0415872332 / 9780415872331
Format: Hard Cover
Pages: 210
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2011
Availability: In Stock

Tab Article

Through close readings of works from Henry James to W. E. B. Du Bois, and from Virginia Woolf to Jean Rhys, this book discusses how fictional travelers negotiate and adapt various tropes of travel (such as quest, expatriation, displacement, and exile) as models for their own journeys. Specifically, Peat considers the ethical dimensions of modernist travel from two distinct vantages. The first focuses on the relationship between the secular and the sacred in modernist travel literature, arguing that the recurrent narrative of secular travel is haunted by a desire for spiritual transcendence. The second posits modernist travel fiction as a potentially positive example of transcultural relations, consciously arguing against the received notion that travel during an imperial era is always by nature itself imperialist. Throughout, particular attention is paid to the transnational nature of modernism and the various global flows traced by modernist literature.

Tab Article

Acknowledgements
Introduction : The Spiritual Ethics of Modernist Pilgrimage

Chapter 1 :
Initiatory Pilgrimage : The Female Pilgrim Comes of Age in Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond, E.M. Forster's A Room with a View and Virginia Woolf's THe Voyage Out
Chapter 2 : Acquisitive Pilgrimage : Renouncing the Quest in Henry Jame's The American and The Ambassadors and E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Passage to India
Chapter 3 : Wandering Pilgrimage : Mobile Expatriatism in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and Claude McKay's Banjo
Chapter 4 : Imaginary Pilgrimage : Home and Exile in Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark, Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, Joyce Cary's To Be a Pilgrim and Virginia Woolf's The Years

Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index