Sultry Climates: Travel And Sex - Softcover

Littlewood, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0306812215 ISBN 13: 9780306812217

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2003

Synopsis

Here, said the reviewer for Salon.com, is a book that is "lively and accessible and erudite...the perfect companion for anyone who wouldn't be caught dead with an airport paperback-though I wouldn't want to wager which one provides more juice." Historically, the sexual motives of travel have rarely been spelled out in travel guides and brochures. Sultry Climates is an alternative history of tourism, made up of precisely the details that usually go unmentioned. As Ian Littlewood demonstrates with dazzling elegance and wit, if we want to make sense of the celebrated "Grand Tour" of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, it's as important to take account of travelers' visits to Dresden streetwalkers and Venetian courtesans as it is to reckon with their visits to the Dresden picture gallery and the Doge's Palace. From Byron in Greece to Isherwood in Germany, from American expatriates on the Left Bank to Orton in Morocco and right up to the present day, what emerges from these experiences is a continuing motif of tourism, previously neglected or ignored-"a breathless book, a Grand Tour in and of itself" (Los Angeles Times).

About this title

Review:

Travel can mean travail, risk, even danger. Given all that, why have so many people over the course of history taken the trouble to take themselves out of their familiar surroundings and wander off to distant, unfamiliar places?

Well, the rewards for the adventurous traveler are many, writes literary historian Ian Littlewood, among them the promise of self-discovery, of education, of broadening one's horizons. But, more elementally, there's another lure: the prospect of landing in a strange new bed with an exotic partner somewhere far from home. "Travel," Littlewood neatly observes, "tends to undermine moral absolutes." And so many travelers have found out for themselves: Oliver Goldsmith, for instance, who concluded of Italy, "sensual bliss is all the nation knows"; James Boswell, who filled his diaries of travels to the continent with "sultanesque fantasy" and some sultanesque fact; and Lord Byron, who, "having left England in a blaze of scandal ... took full advantage of the sexual privileges of exile."

Littlewood's learned but engaging study takes a fresh look at the cultural history of journeying from a fly-on-the-bedroom-wall point of view, and fans of literary travel will find much of interest in his pages. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

Ian Littlewood is the author of literary companions to both Paris and Venice. He has taught at universities in the United States, France, and Japan, and now teaches at the University of Sussex.

About this edition

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0306812215
• ISBN 13: 9780306812217
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248