Memory, Place and Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine: Travels in Isolation

Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine is an anthology of travel accounts by a diverse range of writers and academics. Challenging conventional academic ‘authority’, each contributor writes, from memory during the Covid-19 lockdown, about a place they have previously visited, ‘accompanied’ by an historical traveller who published an account of the same place. As immobility is forced upon us, at least for the immediate future, we have the chance to reflect. Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine presents opportunities to approach a text as a scholar differently. We break with the traditional academic ‘rules’ by inserting ourselves into the narrative and foregrounding the personal, subjective elements of literary scholarship. Each contributor critiques an historical description of a place about which, simultaneously, they write a personal account.

After a long career in the business world, David P. Robinson completed his PhD in History in 2020. His research interests have been, predominantly, concerned with how British travel in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries helped to shape a British liberal-bourgeois identity.

Gary F. Fisher is an inter-disciplinary teacher and researcher in the Liberal Arts tradition, with interests ranging from the history of education to twentieth-century literature.