ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The chapter examine the intersection in travel writing between the personal and the political and the dialectic between mobility and stasis, testing the claims of Lisle, Smethurst and others through an analysis of specific cases across geographical and historical boundaries. It examines how the traveler's personal and political perspective influences the narrative representation of mobility and stasis. It focuses on how issues of "Gender and Sexuality" intersect with personal identity, political reality, and the traveler's mobility and examines tensions between the personal and political, between mobility and stasis, as they relate to issues of "Race, Ethnicity and Otherness". The chapter explores issues of "Empire" in relation to the volume's themes. Jonathan S. Burgess examines the connections between Homer's Odyssean stories and Ionian political realities and contains essays treating personal and political mobility in the context of increasing globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.