Traveling Bodies Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Traveling as an Embodied Practice

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

1. Traveling Bodies: An Introduction

Nicole Maruo-Schröder, Sarah Schäfer-Althaus, and Uta Schaffers

I: The Body as Concept and Metaphor

2. The Scientist-Traveler and the Woman-as Land: Sexual Topographies in A New Description of Merryland (1741)

Sarah Schäfer-Althaus

3. From Facts to Physicality: Body Concepts in German Travel Writing Around 1800

Sonja Klein

4. Motherhood and the Embodied Traveler in Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Elizabeth Zold

II: Other Bodies

5. Beasts on Board: Traveling Animals and Pacific Voyages in the First Two Ages of Exploration

Mira Shah

6. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Body of her Letters, or: The Traveler Lost and Found in Scandinavia

Michael Meyer

7. "The most dirtiest children": Spectacles of Otherness on the American Frontier

Nicole Maruo-Schröder

III: Crossing Borders: The Body and its Liminal Zones

8. "My condition gets worse day by day": Controlling Traveling Bodies on the Move in Edo-Period Japan

Andreas Niehaus

9. "The ‘Food Question’ is said to be the most important one for all travelers": Eating in Travel Writing

Uta Schaffers

10. Going Undercover? Female Bodies and Clothes under Scrutiny in Travel Literature

Sofie Decock

IV: Mobility, Perception, Experience

11. Surfing Wanderlust: Surf Tripping Bodies as Cultural Bearers

Anne Barjolin-Smith

12. Traveling Bodies in Film: Embodied Encounters and Negotiating Selves

Anne von Petersdorff-Campen

13. Tattooed Cartographies and the Displaced Body in an Age of Political Conflict

Karly Etz

14. Strolling through the City on a Self-Guided Tour: Embodied Engagement with the Urban Space

Index

Biography

Nicole Maruo-Schröder is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Koblenz, Germany. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature, material (food) culture, travel writing, intersectionality, and visual culture. Publications include co-edited collections on Literature and Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America (2014), Space, Place, and Narrative (2016), and Issues in Contemporary Young Adult Dystopian Fiction (2018) as well as a monograph on Spatial Concepts in Contemporary American Literature (2006). A current book project focuses on literature and consumption.

Sarah Schäfer-Althaus is Lecturer in Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Koblenz, Germany. Her research centers on women, gender, sexuality studies, and medical humanities. She is the author of The Gendered Body: Female Sanctity, Gender Hybridity and the Body in Women’s Hagiography (2016) and co-editor of Transient Bodies in Anglophone Literature and Culture (2020) and Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture (2023).

Uta Schaffers is Professor of German Literature and Didactics at the University of Koblenz, Germany. Her main research areas include travel writing (various articles and the co-edited volume (Off) the Beaten Track? Normierungen und Kanonisierungen des Reisens; 2018) with special focus on Japan (Konstruktionen der Fremde. Erfahren, verschriftlicht und erlesen am Beispiel Japan; 2006) and the Swiss travel writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (see the editions of Schwarzenbach’s works), traveling bodies, and East-Asia in literature, as well as economics and literature.

This volume makes an important contribution to the emerging critical literature on travel and the body. Its essays trace historical developments in the ways that travel is experienced as an embodied practice, and offer a thought-provoking range of perspectives and approaches. Traveling Bodies shows how productive interdisciplinary conversations in the field of travel can be, with the study of travel writing enriched by attention to other forms of creative and cultural practice that explore bodies on the move. It is a book that couples broad and wide-ranging discussion of key ideas with detailed and thoughtful analytical work with particular examples and case studies, and will no doubt stimulate new journeys of exploration.

Zoë Kinsley, Associate Professor in English Literature, Liverpool Hope University, UK

Up until today, matters of the body have not gained as much attention by international travel studies as they deserve. Therefore, the interdisciplinary essay collection Traveling Bodies can be considered a groundbreaking contribution to the field: It presents a wide range of new insights concerning (European, North American, and Japanese) travel literature and culture from the Age of Enlightenment to the present and offers innovative theoretical perspectives which will prove extremely productive for future work on the subject area. A highly recommended, almost indispensable read for scholars and students in travel studies around the world!

Stefan Hermes, Senior Lecturer in German Literature, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

…an academic volume concerned first and foremost with the mutual entanglements of body (politics) and travel as well as travel writing is indeed a well-timed intellectual project that is bound to be in growing demand. The concept and methodology of Traveling Bodies merit praise. The authors and editors have made it their goal to address a relatively scant researched tenet of travel writing: its intersections with body/ embodiment studies. The works collected in the volume investigate the centrality of the body in traveling practices, approaching the issue from a variety of perspectives, thus fostering a true inter-/ and trans-/ disciplinary endeavour, provoking impulses and incentives for fresh directions in future research.

Julia Szołtysek, Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland: Review of International American Studies