ABSTRACT
In a region about which so much has been written by white Western writers for so many centuries, there is an obvious danger for modern travellers that the Arabian desert genre has at length become redundant – a weary trope over-invested with literary allusion. But even as travellers grapple with the modern dilemma of meaning in their journeys, and as the desert becomes ever more accessible to the casual tourist, elaborate expeditions are still planned and executed in the Arabian desert, resulting in at least three major new desert texts in the period between 2015 and 2020. This chapter summarises how the desert writers of the current decade have taken an old theme and forged something new from it – in texts that explore extenuated forms of the sublime through extreme desert adventure or that describe the journey inwards through personal pilgrimage.
