Writing Mobile Lives, 1500–1700

This Element explores the connections and entanglements between early modern travel writing and life-writing.

Eva Johanna Holmberg (Author)

9781009507431, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 April 2024

84 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1 cm, 0.26 kg

This Element develops and showcases a new methodological framework in which to study the connections between early modern travel writing and life- and self-writing. Turning the scholarly focus in the study of travel writing from eye-witnessing and proto-ethnography of foreign lands to the 'fashioned' and portrayed selves and 'inner worlds' of travellers – personal memory, autobiographical practices, and lived yet often heavily mediated travel experiences – it opens up perspectives to travel writing in its many modes, that extend both before and after 'lived' travels into their many pre- and afterlives in textual form. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

1. Introduction
2. Mediating experience: the (Ailing) body, emotions, and senses of the traveller
3. Recording material mobile lives
4. Afterlives of travel: memory studies and travel memoirs
5. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]