Art of Travel

First published in 1982. The Art of Travel is the first collection of critical essays to be devoted to British travel writing. It attempts to give a sense of the wealth of such writing to map some of its forms and conventions and implicitly to claim a place for travel writing in any revised definition of literature. For this collection travel includes sea voyages European tours commissioned enquiries into social conditions and urban writing; travel writing ranges from works such as Sea and Sardinia by D.H. Lawrence whose status as a novelist guarantees his travel books some attention through the essays and books of Victorian middle-class travellers into working-class London to the work of V.S. Naipaul a contemporary writer who has increasingly preferred the travel book to the novel.