ABSTRACT
Some modern desert writers are overtly aware of the very specific tradition in which they write. Collectively termed in this book as “footstep travellers”, these modern travellers – including Charles Blackmore, Bruce Kirkby, Adrian Hayes, and Mark Evans – choose to tread in the path of an earlier explorer and in so doing set up culturally revealing dynamics in their work between expectation and experience. In looking closely at the intertextuality of the work of these footstep travellers through the aid of literary criticism, Chapter 1 explores the reasons why modern travellers continue to write about a region that has been saturated with earlier accounts. It further determines that while the footstep form may lead to some redundancy in terms of the journey’s narrative (in that it attempts to replicate the route and manner of an earlier journey), it contributes nonetheless to helpful insights about what it means to be a traveller, in a desert environment or otherwise, in the modern era.
