The contributors to Methods for Teaching Travel Literature and Writing: Exploring the World and Self discuss how and why they have integrated travel literature and writing into their courses. Subjects range from the study of travel literature granting insight into how travel authors, such as Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux, convince readers to "buy into" their worlds and reflect the readers' positions in society, to contemplating the meanings of the words "traveler" and "tourist." Other chapters examine how actual traveling can shape students' writing and vice versa, whereas still others address how the study of the genre and actually writing it promotes interdisciplinarity.
Although Robert Louis Stevenson was a late Victorian, his work--especially Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde--still circulates energetically and internationally among popular and academic audiences and among young and old. Admired by Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges, Stevenson's fiction crosses the boundaries of genre and challenges narrow definitions of the modern and the postmodern. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," provides an introduction to the writer's life, a survey of the criticism of his work, and a variety of resources for the instructor. In part 2, "Approaches," thirty essays address such topics as Stevenson's dialogue with James about literature; his verse for children; his Scottish heritage; his wanderlust; his work as gothic fiction, as science fiction, as detective fiction; his critique of imperialism in the South Seas; his usefulness in the creative writing classroom; and how Stevenson encourages expansive thinking across texts, times, places, and lives.
This book presents critiques about African American authors and poets, as well as a composer, who have contributed towards social change, namely Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Terence Blanchard, Ann Petry, and Rita Dove. It also discusses Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American writer, and his novel The Sympathizer.
Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding is an insightful, expert-led book which provides tourism students with a practice-based approach to producing researched literary travel writing on an urban destination, using the writing process as a research tool in itself. The book is scientifically supported with full academic references for researchers. On a global basis, city councils and destination managers are seeking new ways to commission and sponsor professional content authors as part of place-branding projects for tourism development. Given the increasing prevalence of such content within the tourism industry, this book provides a cohesive overview of literary travel writing, presenting it as an enquiry process that can be applied by writer-researchers to spaces that have value to them. Travel writing is presented as a methodological practice that researchers can learn and apply to their own projects, both in academic settings and in commercial city branding. Examples of literary travel writing are carefully examined throughout and their affects refracted through further work. Enriched with a wealth of case studies, chapters are presented in such a way that readers can take the work as a model for their own projects. This informative and practical volume will be of great interest to students of tourism marketing, destination marketing, place branding and travel writing, as well as current creators of commercial tourism marketing content.
Keywords for Travel Writing Studies draws on the notion of the ‘keyword’ as initially elaborated by Raymond Williams in his seminal 1976 text Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society to present 100 concepts central to the study of travel writing as a literary form. Each entry in the volume is around 1,000 words, the style more essayistic than encyclopaedic, with contributors reflecting on their chosen keyword from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The emphasis on travelogues and other cultural representations of mobility drawn from a range of national and linguistic traditions ensures that the volume has a comparative dimension; the aim is to give an overview of each term in its historical and theoretical complexity, providing readers with a clear sense of how the selected words are essential to a critical understanding of travel writing. Each entry is complemented by an annotated bibliography of five essential items suggesting further reading.
Fast Cars and Bad Girls: Nomadic Subjects and Women's Road Stories explores the road narratives of women and the various ways their work re-maps American space. Moving from Mary Rowlandson's famous captivity narrative to the frontier texts of the American West to the postapocalyptic novels of postmodern experience, Fast Cars and Bad Girls interrogates the intersections of nomadic theory and contemporary feminism. What would happen, the text queries the reader, if Jack Kerouac had gone on the road with a baby in the back seat? Women's road texts are different, insists author Deborah Paes de Barros; notions such as resistance to the West, the revision of the natural world, mother-daughter relationships, avant-garde angst, and feminist utopias construct this discussion of women travel writers.
′It is scarcely possible to imagine a truly educated person who cannot read well. Yet it is not clear how or even if courses in literature actually work. How can teachers of English help students in their developmental journey toward becoming skillful readers and educated persons? This is the complex question that Chambers and Gregory address in Teaching and Learning English Literature. The authors consider practical matters such as course design and student assessment but do not shirk larger historical and theoretical issues. In a lucid and non-polemical fashion - and occasionally with welcome humor - Chambers and Gregory describe the what, why, and how of "doing" literature, often demonstrating the techniques they advocate. Veteran teachers will find the book rejuvenating, a stimulus to examining purposes and methods; beginning teachers may well find it indispensable′ - Professor William Monroe, University of Houston ′The transatlantic cooperation of Ellie Chambers and Marshall Gregory has produced an outstanding book that ought to be on the shelves of anyone involved in the teaching of English Literature, as well as anyone engaged in the scholarship of teaching and learning in general or in any discipline. As they say, "the teaching of English Literature plays a central role in human beings′ search for meaning" although others in other disciplines may make this claim for theirs too. If so, they will still learn a great deal from this book; anyone looking for no more than a means of satisfying the demands of governments that look for simplistic quality measures and economic relevance, let them look elsewhere. This is a book for now and for all times′ - Professor Lewis Elton, Visiting Professor, University of Manchester, Honorary Professor, University College London This is the third in the series Teaching and Learning the Humanities in Higher Education. The book is for beginning and experienced teachers of literature in higher education. The authors present a comprehensive overview of teaching English literature, from setting teaching goals and syllabus-planning through to a range of student assessment strategies and methods of course or teacher evaluation and improvement. Particular attention is paid to different teaching methods, from the traditional classroom to newer collaborative work, distance education and uses of electronic technologies. All this is set in the context of present-day circumstances and agendas to help academics and those in training become more informed and better teachers of their subject. The book includes: - how literature as a discipline is currently understood and constituted - what it means to study and learn the subject - what ′good teaching′ is, with fewer resources for teaching, larger student numbers, an emphasis on ′user-pay′ principles and vocationalism. This is an essential text for teachers of English Literature in universities and colleges worldwide. The Teaching & Learning in the Humanities series, edited by Ellie Chambers and Jan Parker, is for beginning and experienced lecturers. It deals with all aspects of teaching individual arts and humanities subjects in higher education. Experienced teachers offer authoritative suggestions on how to become critically reflective about discipline-specific practices.
