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1Twenty-First Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing reads as a defence of travel writing and an attempt at capturing the rainbow-like nature of a literary genre that eludes definition through a series of case-studies of British travel writing from the 18^th to the 21^st centuries. This carefully edited collected volume brings together the French tradition of travel writing studies–initiated by Jean Viviès and the SELVA (Société d’Études de la Littérature de Voyage du monde Anglophone), and exemplified here by contributions from senior and junior academics–and the British one, that found its impetus with the foundational work of Tim Youngs. The book thus takes part in the multi-layered decentring of travel writing studies and opens the reader’s eyes to the importance of the traveller’s body and sensibility as well as to the space s/he travels in and its flora and fauna. Its subtitle, Decentring Epistemologies, provides a strong guideline for the 15 chapters: organised in a chronological way, they provide an original take on travel writing through various conceptual frameworks (gender studies, postcolonial studies, intermedial studies, food studies, ecocriticism, etc.) that result in this very decentring and in stimulating readings of neglected texts as well as well-known ones.

2In the opening chapter, Tim Youngs expands on the lingering prejudice against travel writing–a genre still associated with the leisured classes–although numerous publications on the subject have seen the light of day since the 1990s and travel writing studies have been expanding as postcolonial, gender studies, and cultural studies in general have developed, followed more recently by decolonial and ecocritical perspectives. While highlighting the shortcomings of current studies that may not reach out to the general public, Youngs calls for more interdisciplinary work, travel writing cutting across periods, countries and disciplines, and traces new avenues for future research, underlining both the necessity of decentring British travel writing and pursuing research on the genre, its diversity and its neglected areas. This is exactly what the chapters that follow undertake to do.

3The next five chapters address texts that challenge in various ways the expectations of the reader of travel writing. Nathalie Bernard first shows how Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (1766) does so through its original form that verges on epistolary writing and hovers between fiction and reality, its blend of subjectivity and objectivity in documenting places, and its use of satire. Shifting the focus from travel writing dedicated to the Mediterranean to texts of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries about Northern Europe written by women, Stéphanie Gourdon argues that in their respective writings on Scandinavia, Russia and the Baltic provinces, Mary Wollstonecraft, Martha and Catherine Wilmot, and Elizabeth Rigby play with Borealism, assert “women’s ability to experience the sublime” (55)–which Burke limited to men–and experience travelling as a mentally and physically liberating process. Chapters 3 and 4 similarly examine women’s travel writings and point more specifically at the productive ambiguities of the genre. Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding brings together postcolonial theory and ecocriticism to read Louisa Anne Meredith’s travelogues as expressions of a coloniality that includes the “appropriation of unfamiliar environments” (60) while displaying some form of environmental awareness. Meredith’s Eurocentric gaze over Australia is exposed together with her role as a British colonial woman in “taming the exotic” (75) through domestic activities, which helped to shape the empire and connected its agenda with ecological concerns in a very intricate and ambiguous way. Julia Kuehn discusses Ella Sykes and her travelogue about Persia (1898): travelling off the beaten track on horseback in a Persia yet untouched by modernity, this staunch supporter of imperial Britain is sensitive to the freedom this way of travelling gives her and the affective relationship it allows with the world, especially the local fauna. Kuehn is interested in the “affective realism” of a text where description vies with impression–a conflict inherited from the Romantic and the Victorian literary traditions that may be intrinsic to the hybrid genre of travel writing. Attentive to the relation between space and literary form, Julia Gay adopts in the next chapter a geopoetic approach to the adventure travel writing of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad, whose keen awareness of the importance of geography and space, according to her, steered their travel writing away from the former reliance of the genre on time. For these writers, maps were both sites of accuracy and opportunities for creative flights of their imagination, that is, a way of challenging the boundaries between reality and fiction as well as the codes of travel writing.

4Kevin Cristin’s chapter initiates a somewhat new approach in the volume. He contributes to the volume’s decentring perspective on travel writing by focusing on the writings of Scottish engineers Robert Louis Stevenson and his uncle, David Stevenson, who both specialised in the construction of lighthouses and travelled for that purpose in Scotland. Cristin shows there is no conflict between technological knowledge and the personal account typical of travel writing: mystery and literary emotion, technical details and digressions can easily combine. Cristin opens new avenues here for travel writing, including as he does technical writings and proposing to go further and incorporate professional letters, notebooks and technical treatises. The next chapters follow suit and further open the genre to visual media and intertextuality or forms of bodily involvement that create aesthetic and sensory experiences. Floriane Reviron deals with Isabella Bird’s photographs in her late nineteenth-century travel writings about Korea and China conceived as visual, immediate and accurate records certifying her experience and women’s travel accounts. She assesses the aesthetic value of Bird’s photographs, the way they relate to her narrative and create iconotexts, their respect for and departure from the conventions of colonial travel writing, thus acting as imperial tools or, on the contrary, conveying empathy for the photographed subject. The next two chapters focus on Patrick Leigh Fermor. Anne Rouhette explores the continuum between fiction and travel writing in Mani (1958) which resonates, according to her, with Tristram Shandy, be it only through its taste for digression and its love of movement. Movement also gives the impulse to Isabelle Keller-Privat’s reading of Fermor. Basing her argument on recent work by Marielle Macé, François Jullien and Jean-Claude Pinson, she claims that for Fermor movement is synonymous with migratory birds whose nomadic freedom he shares, which helps him to develop a new relationship to the landscape. In chapter 10, Virginia Terry Sherman presents the travel writing of three British women writers born in the 1910s–Sybille Bedford, Elizabeth David and Patience Gray–who turn to food narratives to capture their post-World War II experience of foreign lifestyles in mostly Mediterranean countries. Each in their own way challenges male travel writing by playing with the genre and developing their own tastescapes. In these chapters, travel writing is thus delineated as including new archives, ranging from the technical to the visual and the eatable. The genre is significantly enlarged and acknowledged as a source of rich sensory experience, one that is truly immersive in nature.

5The decentring experience travel writing provides takes on new contours in the last chapters. Christian Gutleben reads Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) as exemplifying, through its humorous play on the familiar and the unfamiliar, and its metaphorical and parodic use of the topos of the journey, the subversion and re-enchantment of travel writing. Pauline Amy de la Bretèque delves into Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers (2005) and examines its critical appraisal of colonial botanical expeditions–in this case, in the Himalayan region–and the way they modelled landscapes all over the world as well as knowledge itself. Françoise Besson deals with the mountaineering and travel writings of Henry Russell and Kev Reynolds–both of British origin and born in the South of France, in the 19^th and 20^th century–and shows, by adopting an ecocritical lens, how they decentre our perception of the world through their close bond with the non-human world. Jan Borm focuses on British travel writer Colin Thubron’s The Amur (2021) where the history of Sino-Russian relations is centre-stage, even if the encounter with the human other remains paramount. Finally, Jaine Chemmachery deals with Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place (2023) and shows how travel writing about British places can turn into a narrative where affects and memory prevail, the author’s own traumatic past in Pakistan haunting her travelling experience in Britain while highlighting its freedom. Transgressing national space and identities, Masud renews the way travellers relate to space. These last chapters emphasise how colonial history endures but also how contemporary travel writers offer glimpses of hope through (non)human encounter and transnationality.

6On the whole, this very rewarding volume certainly decentres our gaze and our knowledge of travel writing. The genre appears as ever more inventive, through its various forms of hybridization, subversions, and ambiguities, which continually renew it. Adopting different theoretical frameworks combined with close reading, most chapters offer new perspectives on well-known travel writings or tackle recent or neglected ones in a productive way. The chronological structure chosen by the editors certainly helps the reader but a few subdivisions could have indicated how the various chapters connect, which readers have to find out for themselves, as the present reviewer has tried to do here. Although most authors set their subjects in their historical context, setting the works themselves in perspective would have been welcome, through brief comparisons of the studied travel writings with others dealing with the same country or type of travelling. For instance, Through Persia on a Side-Saddle could be set against Vita Sackville-West’s later Twelve Days in Persia (1928) or Henry Russell’s relation to the non-human could be compared with more famous Victorian travel writings such as Leslie Stephen’s. Such a method would help to further enlarge the map of travel writing and may provide food for thought for a future volume.