ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the writings of the British botanist, plant collector, and literary critic Reginald Farrer, exploring how representations of travel within China’s landscapes resonate with modernist concerns and preoccupations, particularly in the context of the First World War and its traumatic aftereffects. While discussing Farrer’s travel writing and its campy engagement with Jane Austen’s novels, this chapter also discusses Farrer’s works in relation to other writers of the period including Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, arguing that his writings provided a space for performing and reimagining identity through an engagement with land and landscape. Through a discussion of Farrer’s intertextual connections with other modernist writers, this chapter argues that his writings speak to a larger context of global crisis and can be interpreted in terms of how they situate the individual within a liminal space of transformation and renewal.
