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As the study of travel writing has grown in recent years, scholars have largely ignored the literature of modernist writers. Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad, by David Farley, addresses this gap by examining the ways in which a number of writers employed the techniques and stylistic innovations of modernism in their travel narratives to variously engage the political, social, and cultural milieu of the years between the world wars. Modernist Travel Writingargues that the travel book is a crucial genre for understanding the development of modernism in the years between the wars, despite the established view that travel writing during the interwar period was largely an escapist genreone in which writers hearkened back to the realism of nineteenth-century literature in order to avoid interwar anxiety. Farley analyzes works that exist on the margins of modernism, generically and geographically, works that have yet to receive the critical attention they deserve, partly due to their classification as travel narratives and partly because of their complex modernist styles. The book begins by examining the ways that travel and the emergent travel regulations in the wake of the First World War helped shape Ezra PoundsCantos. From there, it goes on to examine E.E. Cummingss frustrated attempts to navigate the unworld of Soviet Russia in his bookEimi, Wyndham Lewiss satiric journey through colonial Morocco inFilibusters in Barbary, and Rebecca Wests urgent efforts to make sense of the fractious Balkan states inBlack Lamb and Grey Falcon. These modernist writers traveled to countries that experienced most directly the tumult of revolution, the effects of empire, and the upheaval of war during the years between World War I and World War II. Farleys study focuses on the question of what constitutes evidence for Pound, Lewis, Cummings, and West as they establish their authority as eyewitnesses, translate what they see for an audience back home, and attempt to make sense of a transformed and transforming modern world. Modernist Travel Writingmakes an original contribution to the study of literary modernism while taking a distinctive look at a unique subset within the growing field of travel writing studies. David Farleys work will be of interest to students and teachers in both of these fields as well as to early-twentieth-century literary historians and general enthusiasts of modernist studies Annotation Introduction: modernism and travel writing between the wars -- "Damn the partition!": Ezra Pound and modern travel -- E.E. Cummings: intourist in the unworld -- Wyndham Lewis in Morocco: a satiric enterprise -- Rebecca West's Black lamb and grey falcon: the quality of visibility in Yugoslavia -- Conclusion: aftermaths and late modernism.
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