ABSTRACT
The introduction to this volume argues for the importance that the body has for the experience of traveling and travel writing. Since travelers are always ‘traveling bodies’, bodies on the move, our mobility, perceptions, and experiences strongly depend on the body's condition and functioning. With the help of Ella Maillart's travelogue written about her journey from Switzerland to Afghanistan, Nicole Maruo-Schröder, Sarah Schäfer-Althaus, and Uta Schaffers explore various aspects of the traveling body, ranging from the sense-based experience of mobility (means of travel, comfort, speed, etc.) and unknown places (e.g., climate, landscapes, smell) to the condition of the body (pain, hunger, exhaustion) and its encounter with the so-called ‘other’ (in terms of foodways, appearance, clothes, or language). As can be seen in Maillart's use of certain images and rhetorical strategies, the mediation of the travel experience in the writing process is also framed by the body, not least because the writer has to rely on her memory to give an account of the experience. Hence, encountering and exploring the world through our sense perceptions, which are not passive impressions but active processes in our interaction with the world, traveling and, by extension, travel writing, is a thoroughly embodied practice, and, therefore, as much about the new, the unfamiliar, and the strange, as it is about the familiar, about ourselves, and what we already know.
