Appel à contribution: Travel / Writing and the Media: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives Edited by Barbara Korte and Anna Sennefelder (University of Freiburg)

Appel à contribution

DL: 1er Août 2019

 Travel / Writing and the Media: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives

Edited by Barbara Korte and Anna Sennefelder (University of Freiburg) 

Travel writing is a flourishing genre with a long history. Since the 1990s, it has been attracting increasing scholarly interest, and its publication output is vast. However, little attention has been paid to the ways in which travel writing responds to media change, how travel is represented in media other than print, and how such representation has, and has always had, both an intermedia and transmedia dimension. These are urgent questions for the current cultural landscape, which is witnessing the practice and experience of travel itself converging with—and being transformed by—new media affordances (such as Google maps, online guides and booking platforms).

Travel writing has also been absorbed by the new media, most notably in the form of the travel blog, and these media enable new audiovisual forms of representation. The study of the specifics of such new forms has only just begun. At the same time, current change invites us to revisit earlier periods of travel writing and explore its media history, including the ways in which contemporary forms are prefigured by earlier ones: How are travel blogs related to travel diaries? How is contemporary intermediality, for example in vlogs, anticipated in forms of illustrated travel writing?

In addition to questions of transperiod and transmedia interest, the volume will address specific media forms. While some recently emerging forms are gaining popularity (such as graphic travelogues), there are older forms that, although they are significant for the communication of travel to large audiences, have attracted limited scholarly attention to date (such as articles in the periodical press, radio reportage, TV documentary, and others).

We invite chapters on:

- traditional and emerging/new media forms of travel writing and audio-visual representation; while chapters should work with specific examples, their main focus should be on mediality and how it shapes the communication of travel practice and experience;

- investigations of intermediality in traditional and new forms of travel representation;

- comparisons of new and traditional forms of travel representation.

The proposal with selected chapters will be submitted to Routledge to be considered for the Routledge Studies in Cultural History series.

Please send an abstract of 300 to 500 words and a short bionote to: anna.sennefelder@neuesreisen.uni-freiburg.de by 1 August 2019.