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The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic imposed immobility on large sectors of the world’s population, with confinement becoming an everyday reality. The lives of those who previously enjoyed the privileges of being ‘fast castes’ ground to a halt, while at the same time the displacement of more vulnerable populations along well-established migration corridors has been radically reduced. The result has been a recalibration of the scale of journeying, with travellers slowing down their journeys and readjusting their relationship to the proximate and nearby. This situation has provided an opportunity for those who study travel and travel writing to rethink their objects of study and approaches to them. This volume explores and historicizes the phenomenon of ‘microtravel’, designating slower journeys within a limited radius which allow, and sometimes necessitate, new forms of experiencing the world.
Notes on Contributors; Microtravel: An Introduction ; Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester; Section 1. Confinement and Immobility; How to Travel in Monastic Confinement: An Imaginary Journey to the New World; Joëlle Weis; The Nile, Immortality and the Body in Lucy Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt; Sally Abed; A Slow Boat to Indochina: Immobility and Micro-movements on the Road to Indochina; Gábor Gelléri; No Going Back: Interrupted Journeys and Identity Crisis in Marie Ndiaye ; Carole Delaitre; Section 2. Deceleration and Pedestrianism; Friedrich Engels Travels in a Chimney; Jayson Althofer; ‘I Wanted to Think, Write, Stay or Move on at My Own Speed and Unencumbered’: Pedestrian Rites of Passage in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts; Béatrice Blanchet; ‘Foot foundered and broken down’: Painful Pedestrianism in John Clare’s ‘Journey out of Essex’ ; Zoë Kinsley; Section 3. Palimpsestic Travel; Elegy for the Living: Travels in Guyana with Michael Swan and Wilson Harris; Patricia Murray; Back to Base: Palimpsest Travel in the Black Country Geopark; R. M. Francis; Observed and Reflected: Women Tourists, Microtravel and Souvenirs, 1750–1830 ; Emma Gleadhill; Section 4. Microspection and Microsound; ‘This Is a Place Where We Should Like to Have Lived’: The Garden As ‘Dwelling Place’ in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Travel Writing; Kathryn Walchester; In a Sound World: On Microaudition As a Mode of Microtravel; Charles Forsdick; ‘The echo of great spaces traversed’: Microaudition and Vertical Travel in In Search of Lost Time; Eleanor Lischka; Index