Traveling Bodies analyzes the central role bodies have in the experience and mediation of travel. Presenting Asian, European, and American perspectives, the case studies focus on historical and contemporary travel narratives, (new) media (e.g., film, travel apps), surf culture, and tattoo art.

Nicole Maruo-Schröder is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Koblenz, Germany. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature, material (food) culture, travel writing, intersectionality, and visual culture. Publications include co-edited collections on Literature and Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America (2014), Space, Place, and Narrative (2016), and Issues in Contemporary Young Adult Dystopian Fiction (2018) as well as a monograph on Spatial Concepts in Contemporary American Literature (2006). A current book project focuses on literature and consumption.

Sarah Schäfer-Althaus is Lecturer in Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Koblenz, Germany. Her research centers on women, gender, sexuality studies, and medical humanities. She is the author of The Gendered Body: Female Sanctity, Gender Hybridity and the Body in Women's Hagiography (2016) and co-editor of Transient Bodies in Anglophone Literature and Culture (2020) and Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture (2023).

Uta Schaffers is Professor of German Literature and Didactics at the University of Koblenz, Germany. Her main research areas include travel writing (various articles and the co-edited volume (Off) the Beaten Track? Normierungen und Kanonisierungen des Reisens; 2018) with special focus on Japan (Konstruktionen der Fremde. Erfahren, verschriftlicht und erlesen am Beispiel Japan; 2006) and the Swiss travel writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (see the editions of Schwarzenbach's works), traveling bodies, and East-Asia in literature, as well as economics and literature.

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

1. Traveling Bodies: An Introduction

Nicole Maruo-Schröder, Sarah Schäfer-Althaus, and Uta Schaffers

I: The Body as Concept and Metaphor

2. The Scientist-Traveler and the Woman-as Land: Sexual Topographies in A New Description of Merryland (1741)

Sarah Schäfer-Althaus

3. From Facts to Physicality: Body Concepts in German Travel Writing Around 1800

Sonja Klein

4. Motherhood and the Embodied Traveler in Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Elizabeth Zold

II: Other Bodies

5. Beasts on Board: Traveling Animals and Pacific Voyages in the First Two Ages of Exploration

Mira Shah

6. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Body of her Letters, or: The Traveler Lost and Found in Scandinavia

Michael Meyer

7. "The most dirtiest children": Spectacles of Otherness on the American Frontier

Nicole Maruo-Schröder

III: Crossing Borders: The Body and its Liminal Zones

8. "My condition gets worse day by day": Controlling Traveling Bodies on the Move in Edo-Period Japan

Andreas Niehaus

9. "The 'Food Question' is said to be the most important one for all travelers": Eating in Travel Writing

Uta Schaffers

10. Going Undercover? Female Bodies and Clothes under Scrutiny in Travel Literature

Sofie Decock

IV: Mobility, Perception, Experience

11. Surfing Wanderlust: Surf Tripping Bodies as Cultural Bearers

Anne Barjolin-Smith

12. Traveling Bodies in Film: Embodied Encounters and Negotiating Selves

Anne von Petersdorff-Campen

13. Tattooed Cartographies and the Displaced Body in an Age of Political Conflict

Karly Etz

14. Strolling through the City on a Self-Guided Tour: Embodied Engagement with the Urban Space

Nora Winsky

Index