Industrial Landscapes and British Travel Writing

What is it about?

Focusing on both British and German travel writers, this essay argues that following the First World War, the travelogue as a literary genre, and the process of travelling as a performative act, functioned as vehicles for renegotiating ideas of space – a phenomenon that surfaced especially during encounters with and perceptions of industrial landscapes. Struggling between nostalgic notions of a pre-industrial countryside and the coming-to-terms with the new places of modernity, landscapes became

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Why is it important?

The article offers a perspective on a rather neglected form of landscapes as they are represented in travelogues. It follows the ideological framing of industrial spaces and their appropriation at a time, when notions of essentialised national identity were rather found in the countryside, i.e. were connected to notions of pastoral landscapes.