Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature, 1840-1930 (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies)

Recent scholarly works indicate a developing interest in travel writing and its place in the rhetoric of imperial expansion and colonial ideology. Exotic Journeys focuses specifically on representations as manifested in sexuality and eroticism in U.S. travel literature. Framing his literary analysis within 19th-century modernist developments such as urbanization, nationalism, imperialism, and consumption, Justin D. Edwards examines U.S. travelers in the South Pacific (Melville, Charles Warren Stoddard, Jack London), the European Grand Tour (Hawthorne, William Wells Brown, Wharton), and in American urban settings like Greenwich Village and Harlem (Djuna Barnes, Carl Van Vechten, Claude McKay). He captures a crucial moment in the formation of an American identity in opposition to the eroticized "foreigners" of his travelers' imaginations.Justin D. Edwards is the author of 'Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature, 1840-1930 (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies)', published 2001 under ISBN 9781584651154 and ISBN 1584651156.