Course Resources Archive

The module will introduce students to a range of fictional and non-fictional texts that explore the boundaries of ‘travel writing’ from the nineteenth century to the present.

The module will consider ways in which travel writing exploits fictional modes and techniques, and the ways in which it incorporates fictions of space, place, and self. We will explore the travel narrator’s imaginative construction of city-scapes, landscapes, and open spaces; the hybridity between travel writing, the novel, autobiography, and other literary genres. Within these areas, topics of study may include missionary literature; the foreign city and its spaces; the lone traveller; past and present; conservation and decay; the politics of tourism.

A student passing this module should be able to demonstrate that they have achieved the following:

1. Gained an informed knowledge and understanding of travel writing texts across the module’s range and its critical concepts,
2. Engaged in close textual reading and evaluation of a range of texts using critical vocabulary appropriate to level 6;
3. Awareness of wider social implications of foreign travel and its aesthetic and cultural representations, and where appropriate connecting this understanding to the wider world
4. An ability to employ intertextual and, where appropriate, interdisciplinary modes of understanding
5. Gained complex skills in analytic reasoning and to use these confidently, and eloquently, in both writing and seminar discussion
6. An ability to conduct independent research and organised inquiry, using academic resources, in order to produce sustained pieces of work for assessment

The Library Catalogue contains full details of the current reading list for this module. Further details may also be found in the Module Guide.