The first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates. The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives, with their distinctive representations of identities, places, and cultures, respond to today's globalized, high-speed world characterized by the dual mass movements of tourism and migration. Yet a corresponding cutting-edge discussion of twenty-first-century travel writing in German has until now been missing. The fourteen essays in Anxious Journeys redress this situation. They analyze texts by leading authors such as Felicitas Hoppe, Christoph Ransmayr, Julie Zeh, Navid Kermani, Judith Schalansky, Ilija Trojanow, and others, as well as topics such as Turkish-German travelogues and the relationship of comics to travel writing. The volume examines how writers engage with classic tropes of travel writing and how they react to the current sense of crisis and belatedness. It also links travel to ongoing debates about the role of the nation, mass migration, and the European project, as well as to Germany's place in the larger world order. Contributors: Karin Baumgartner, Heather Merle Benbow, Anke S. Biendarra, John Blair and Muriel Cormican, Nicole Coleman, Carola Daffner, Christina Gerhardt, Nicole Grewling, Gundela Hachmann, Andrew Wright Hurley, Christina Kraenzle, Magda Tarnawaska Senel, Monika Shafi, Sunka Simon. Karin Baumgartner is Professor of German at the University of Utah. Monika Shafi is Elias Ahuja Professor of German at the University of Delaware.

About the Author
KARIN BAUMGARTNER is Professor of German at the University of Utah. KARIN BAUMGARTNER is Professor of German at the University of Utah. MURIEL CORMICAN is Professor of German at the University of West Georgia. She is the author of Women and Gender in the Works of Lou-Andreas Salome (CH, 2009).

Reviews
The editors . . . opt[] for a heterogeneous definition [of travel literature] that includes first-person documentaries, fiction and fictionalized travel impressions, visual records such as comics and films, poetic forms, chick lit, and journalistic essays [and] covers gender differences, treats inequality between privileged and desperate travel, illustrates the injustice between poverty and wealth, and connects sex travel and exploitation. . . . [A]cute analyses . . . . A valuable resource for those interested in contemporary German culture. Recommended. * CHOICE *
With the consideration of other forms of media like comics and film, this volume exceeds the boundaries of literature per se and thereby dares to move forward exploratively into truly unknown climes. -- Michaela Holdenried * GEGENWARTSLITERATUR *
Since the beginning of the 21st century, German fictional and nonfictional travel literature alike have taken a more anxious look at travel, as Karin Baumgartner and Monika Shafi demonstrate in their multifaceted and cleverly introduced anthology. What they title summatively as Anxious Journeys encompasses various experiences of a loss of lightheartedness. . . . The volume brings . . . hitherto understudied aspects of travel into the focus of research and illuminates travel literature as "the most socially important of all literary genres." -- Bjoern Weyand * GERMANISTIK *



Book Information
ISBN 9781640140110
Author Karin Baumgartner
Format Hardback
Page Count 284
Imprint Camden House Inc
Publisher Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Weight(grams) 1g