This book is one of the first studies of twentieth-century travel literature in French, tracking the form from the colonial past to the postcolonial present. Whereas most recent explorations of travel literature have addressed English-language material, Forsdick's study complements these by
presenting a body of material that has previously attracted little attention, ranging from conventional travel writing to other cultural phenomena (such as the Colonial Exposition of 1931) in which changing attitudes to travel are apparent.
Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures explores the evolution of attitudes to cultural diversity, explaining how each generation seems simultaneously to foretell the collapse and reinvention of "elsewhere." It also follows the progressive renegotiation of understandings of
travel (and travel literature) across the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of travel narratives from France's former colonies. The book suggests that an exclusive colonial understanding of travel as a practice defined along the lines of class, gender, and ethnicity has
slowly been transformed so that travel has become an enabling figure--encapsulated in notions such as James Clifford's "traveling cultures"--central to analyses of contemporary global culture. Engaging initially with Victor Segalen's early twentieth-century reflection on travel and exoticism and
Albert Kahn's "Archives de la Planete," Forsdick goes on to examine a series of interrelated texts and phenomena: early African travel narratives, inter-war ethnography, post-war accounts of Citroen 2CV journeys, the travel stories of immigrant workers, the work of NicholasBouvier and the Pour une
litterature voyageuse movement, narratives of recent walking journeys, and contemporary Polynesian literature. In delineating a francophone space stretching far beyond metropolitan France itself, the book contributes to new understandings of French

• Preface


• Introduction: Exoticism in the Fin de Siècle


• 1: Postcolonial Approaches to Exoticism


• 2: Exoticism and the Decline of Diversity


• 3: New Approaches to 1930s Travel Literature


• 4: Around the World in a 2CV


• 5: Between Unity and Diversity


• 6: Journeying Now


• Postface: From Cultures of Travel to Travelling Cultures

Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool. He was previously a lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow.