Modernist Travel Writing

"This is an incisive study showing the instrumental role of travelling and travel writing in the late phase of modernism. Whether it is Wyndham Lewis in Morocco. Rebecca West In the Balkans, E.E. Cummings in [Soviet] Russia, or Ezra Pound in France - in each case, travelling was productive of an awareness and a formal repertoire germane to the writer's respective literary project. David Farley's book is part of an ongoing reassessment of modernism's vital historical, cultural, and political contexts." - Bernard Schweizer, author of Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s. As the study of travel writing has grown in recent years, scholars have largely ignored the literature of modernist writers. Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad, by David Farley, addresses this gap by examining the ways in which a number of writers employed the techniques and stylistic innovations of modernism in their travel narratives to variously engage the political, social, and cultural milieu of the years between the world wars. Modernist Travel Writing argues that the travel book is a crucial genre for understanding the development of modernism in the years between the wars, despite the established view that travel writing during the interwar period was largely an escapist genre - one in which writers hearkened back to the realism of nineteenth-century literature in order to avoid interwar anxiety. Farley analyzes works that exist on the margins of modernism, generically and geographically, works that have yet to receive the critical attention they deserve, partly due to their classification as travel narratives and partly because of their complex modernist styles. The book begins by examining the ways that travel and the emergent travel regulations in the wake of the First World War helped shape Ezra Pound's Cantos. From there, it goes on to examine E. E. Cumming's frustrated attempts to navigate the "unworld" of Soviet Russia in his book Eimi, Wyndham Lewis's satiric journey through colonial Morocco in Filibusters in Barbary, and Rebecca West's urgent efforts to make sense of the fractious Balkan states in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. These modernist writers travelled to countries that experienced most directly the tumult of revolution, the effects of empire, and the upheaval of war during the years between World War...