Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (Paperback)

~ (Author) "IN 1916 oranges, like other exotic things that had to travel by sea, were excessively rare in England..." (more)
Key Phrases: colored architecture, travel atmosphere, literary travelers, Robert Byron, Norman Douglas, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is the most interesting and insightful book that I have read on travel writing, and my students seem to agree."--Jonathan Smith, Texas A and M University

"Abroad is an exemplary piece of criticism. It is immensely readable. It bristles with ideas. It disinters a regal lost masterpiece from the library stacks. It admits a whole area of writing-at last!-to its proper place in literary history."--The New York Times Book Review

"What Fussell has done-brightly, wittily, with bravura display of critical methods-is to reclaim for travel writing a large measure of literary respectability."--Newsweek

"[Fussell's] book is a fitting substitute for the real thing; it is a journey in time and space, offering the serendipitous pleasure of the open road."--Time

"An absolutely dazzling continent of sociology, literary criticism, cultural history, biography and amusing anecdote, so borderlessly fused that we hardly realize what great intellectual distances we are covering."The New York Times

"[A] witty book that bristles with outrageous assertions....Fussell obviously enjoys the act of writing about his reading, which is what makes the book so lively."--The Tribune (London)

Product Description

A book about the meaning of travel, about how important the topic has been for writers for two and a half centuries, and about how excellent the literature of travel happened to be in England and America in the 1920s and 30s.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (June 17, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195030680
• ISBN-13: 978-0195030686
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #320,934 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Before travel became tourism..., March 19, 1998

By	Mark Miller (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

Time was when travel was as memorable an adventure as a stunning love affair, a divorce, a personal catastrophe. That time was between the wars -- the Great War and WW2 -- and no group of observers was better positioned to write of it than the great British travel commentators. You will think differently about the activity and meaning of travel after you read this captivating, if occasionally slow-going book by one of the finest observers of the 20th century at work today. And not least of all ABROAD takes you back into the world of T. E. Lawrence's time, when ships were the only way to cross the seas.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Metanalysis of British Travel Writing, August 8, 2007

By	Magalini Sabina "sabina" (Rome Italy) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Paul Fussell is universally famous for his extensive studies on the cultural impact of the Twentieth Century Wars. In this 1980 book instead he dedicates his attention to a topic that appears as a serene hiatus between massacres: British travel literature of the 20's-30's. Fussell has no shame in affirming that the books published in this period are the best travelogues ever written, since from the 1930's on "travel" degenerated into "tourism".
The reason of the escape from England of the young literate, witty people of the WWI generation, is identified on one hand in the loathing, disgust and angst due to the terrible experiences of those that had fought in the trenches and on the other of those that bore the meagre economical war situation and restriction of liberty at home. This imperative pulsion to fuge Fussell identifies in the phrase "I Hate it Here", which recurs often as the leitmotif of his work. What writers wanted to flee was England, home, the bad weather, the poverty, so the South and in particular the sunny Mediterranean was elected as a putative home for the body and soul. However travel in the Nineteenth Century was becoming more difficult due the introduction of some limitations, like the passport in the 20s, that posed a practical and psychological problem, forcing people to realize their age, aspect and economical status together with the passing of time due to the photographs always at hand. The "passport nuissance" was accompanied by the formal identifications of many before unrecognized and unmapped frontiers, that caused other problems and reasons for reflexion.
In a long chapter, which reads almost as a bitter moral essay, the Author decribes the evolution from the Nineteenth Century exploration, to travel and to modern tourism, and the influence of this passage on travel books. In this section Fussel's nostalgia of the past is palpable and somehow displeasing, because as all travel narrative addicts know, good books have been written also after the '30's. Following the analysis of the psychological conditions of the travel writers are the practical considerations of the cheapness and sexual freedom of living abroad, that must not be forgotten. Homosexuality, pederasty, irregular unions were a major drive to living abroad.
The following chapters are devoted to the indepth rereading of the Authors Fussell thinks the most influent of the period: the never forgotten and much cried over Robert Byron (this chapter owes much to Christopher Sykes' essay on Byron in "Four Studies in Loyalty"), the cultivated, perverse and irrequietous Norman Douglas, the sun-lover and place seeking and preposition plethoric D.H. Lawrence, the moral anomaly-searcher Evelyn Waugh. Ample excerpta are quoted and commentated to explain each Author's peculiarity and importance.
The conclusive remarks are on the structure and the literary value of travel books, diction which is preferred over "travelogues" or "travel logs". Actually Fussell points out how travel books were the only acceptable way at those times of getting essays (that had passed out of fashion as literary forms) published, together with a mixed bag of poetry, impressions, adventures and anedotes. Essays were not articles in the modern sense of the word, because they had a moral or opinionated connotation. In the travel literature of this period they are joined together with memoirs, comic novels, quest, picaresque and pastoral romance and served to an eagre "exotica" seeking public.
This book is truely a treasure trove. More that deserving to be read and enjoyed, I would say, it must be studied. Anyone loving British travel narrative must have it in his library. Analyzing such a wealth of material from that age it draws out the ideas that join together these Authors and explaining them to full degree consents us to enjoy with greater insight these marvelous works.
One small notation however I must make. British travel literature of the 20s-30s has the characteristic of researching esthetic accomplishment and often this reaches exquisite climaxes. Today we still read some of these books for their sheer beauty. Never in his extensive critique Fussell draws our attention to this not secondary aspect.
Enjoy above all!