Travel and Imagination

The imagination has long been associated with travel and tourism; from the seventeenth century when the showman and his peepshow box would take the village crowd to places, cities and lands through the power of stories, to today when we rely on a different range of boxes to whisk us away on our imaginative travels: the television, the cinema and the computer. Even simply the notion of travel, it would seem, gives us license to daydream. The imagination thus becomes a key concept that blurs the boundaries between our everyday lives and the idea of travel. Yet, despite what appears to be a close and comfortable link, there is an absence of scholarly material looking at travel and the imagination. Bringing together geographers, sociologists, cultural researchers, philosophers, anthropologists, visual researchers, archaeologists, heritage researchers, literary scholars and creative writers, this edited collection explores the socio-cultural phenomenon of imagination and travel. The volume reflects upon imagination in the context of many forms of physical and non-physical travel, inviting scholars to explore this fascinating, yet complex, area of inquiry in all of its wonderful colour, slipperiness, mystery and intrigue. The book intends to provide a catalyst for thinking, discussion, research and writing, with the vision of generating a cannon of scholarship on travel and the imagination that is currently absent from the literature.

Garth Lean, Russell Staiff and Emma Waterton are all at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.

chapterP1 Prelude Transit, Simone Lazaroo; Chapter 1 Reimagining Travel and Imagination, Garth Lean, Russell Staiff, Emma Waterton; Part 1 Mobile Identities; Chapter 2 Embodied Travel: In Search of the Caribbean Self in Tropical Places and Spaces, Jennifer D. Adams; Chapter 3 The Jealous Imagination: Travels in my Mind and out of my Body, Harriet Bell; Chapter 4 Travel-as-Homemaking, Gordon Waitt, Patricia Macquarie; Part 2 Tales of the Imagination; Chapter 5 The Imagination in the Travel Literature of Xavier de Maistre and its Philosophical Significance, Guy Bennett-Hunter; Chapter 6 The Prominence of the Railroad in the African American Imagination: Mobile Men, Gendered Mobility and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown, Michael Ra-shon Hall; Chapter 7 Tourist Imagination and Modernist Poetics: The Case of Cees Nooteboom, Odile Heynders, Tom van Nuenen; Chapter 8 Making Spain: The Spanish Imaginary in Travel Writing since the Second World War, Steve Watson; Part 3 Visual, Media, Representation; Chapter 9 'Where all the Lines of the Map Converge': Werner Herzog's Ekstatic Imagination and Performative Thresholds, Gabriella Calchi-Novati; Chapter 10 Toys on the Move: Vicarious Travel, Imagination and the Case of Travelling Toy Mascots, Shanna Robinson; Chapter 11 MT Promises: Science Fictional Travel Technologies and the Making and Unmaking of Corporeal Identity, Sean Williams; Part 4 Unsettling Imaginations; Chapter 12 'It's Still in Your Body': Identity, Place and Performance in Holocaust Testimonies, Steven Cooke, Donna-Lee Frieze; Chapter 13 Ready for Takeoff? Lacerated Fantasies of Caribbean Paradise in the Décollage Art of Andrea Chung, Marsha Pearce; Chapter 14 Venice, Desire, Decay and the Imagination: Travels into the 'Dark Side', Russell Staiff; Part 5 A Final Word; Chapter 15 Travel and Imagination: An Invitation, Garth Lean, Emma Waterton;