Writes of Passage explores the interplay between a system of "othering" which travelers bring to a place, and the "real" geographical difference they discover upon arrival. Exposing the tensions between the imaginary and real, Duncan and Gregory and a team of leading internationa contributors focus primarily upon travelers from the 18th and 19th Centuries to pin down the imaginary within the context of imperial power. The contributors focus on travel to three main regions: Africa, South Asia, and Europe - wit the European examples being drawn from Britain, France and Greece.

List of contributors, 1 Introduction, 2 Limited Visions of Africa: Geographies of savagery and civility in early eighteenth-century narratives, 3 Enlightenment Travels: The making of epiphany in Tibet, 4 Writing Travel and Mapping Sexuality: Richard Burton's Sotadic Zone, 5 The Flight from Lucknow: British women travelling and writing home, 1857-8, 6 Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the cultures of travel, 7 Dis-Orientation: On the shock of the familiar in a far-away place, 8 The Exoticism of the Familiar and the Familiarity of the Exotic: Fin-de-siècle travellers to Greece, 9 Travelling through the Closet, 10 Writing Over the Map of Provence: The touristic therapy of A Year in Provence, Index