Description:
Traveling Bodies analyzes the central role bodies have in the experience and mediation of travel. Presenting Asian, European, and American perspectives, the case studies focus on historical and contemporary travel narratives, (new) media (e.g., film, travel apps), surf culture, and tattoo art.
Review Quotes:
This volume makes an important contribution to the emerging critical literature on travel and the body. Its essays trace historical developments in the ways that travel is experienced as an embodied practice, and offer a thought-provoking range of perspectives and approaches. Traveling Bodies shows how productive interdisciplinary conversations in the field of travel can be, with the study of travel writing enriched by attention to other forms of creative and cultural practice that explore bodies on the move. It is a book that couples broad and wide-ranging discussion of key ideas with detailed and thoughtful analytical work with particular examples and case studies, and will no doubt stimulate new journeys of exploration.
Zoë Kinsley, Associate Professor in English Literature, Liverpool Hope University, UK
Up until today, matters of the body have not gained as much attention by international travel studies as they deserve. Therefore, the interdisciplinary essay collection Traveling Bodies can be considered a groundbreaking contribution to the field: It presents a wide range of new insights concerning (European, North American, and Japanese) travel literature and culture from the Age of Enlightenment to the present and offers innovative theoretical perspectives which will prove extremely productive for future work on the subject area. A highly recommended, almost indispensable read for scholars and students in travel studies around the world!
Stefan Hermes, Senior Lecturer in German Literature, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
...an academic volume concerned first and foremost with the mutual entanglements of body (politics) and travel as well as travel writing is indeed a well-timed intellectual project that is bound to be in growing demand. The concept and methodology of Traveling Bodies merit praise. The authors and editors have made it their goal to address a relatively scant researched tenet of travel writing: its intersections with body/ embodiment studies. The works collected in the volume investigate the centrality of the body in traveling practices, approaching the issue from a variety of perspectives, thus fostering a true inter-/ and trans-/ disciplinary endeavour, provoking impulses and incentives for fresh directions in future research.
Julia Szoltysek, Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland: Review of International American Studies