Author: Di Giovine, Michael A.

Source: Journeys, Volume 10, Number 2, Winter 2009 , pp. 109-118(10)

Publisher: Berghahn Journals

Abstract:

It has become a Structuralist truism in the social sciences to state that individuals define themselves by what they are not. It has equally become evident that travel—and particularly the voluntary, temporary, and perspectival type that we call tourism—is predicated on interaction with the Other. Travelogues are particularly salient “social facts” in this regard, for they both index such processes of identity formation, as well as contribute to them. Two edited volumes, Rolf-Hagen Schulz-Forberg's Unraveling Civilisation: European Travel and Travel Writing (2005) and John Zilcosky's Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey (2008) provide compelling examples of how the multifarious and complementary processes of travel and travel writing not only index, but construct, European identity.

Keywords: EUROPEAN IDENTITY; OTHER; ALTERITY; TOURISM; TRAVEL; TRAVELOGUES

Document Type: Review article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/jys.2009.100206

Publication date: 2009-12-01

More about this publication?

• Travel writing and other representations of journeys as cultural practice and product are engaging the attention of scholars and commentators in a wide range of disciplines and its study is becoming recognized as an important academic field. The remit of Journeys is to reflect the rich diversity of travels and journeys as social and cultural practices as well as their significance as metaphorical processes. It is a broad-based interdisciplinary journal of particular interest for those interested in the studies of travel writing from the perspectives of, for example, anthropology, social history, religious studies, human geography, literary criticism and cultural studies.
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