Moving Identities

‘Moving Identities’: The title of this volume refers to the many ways in which travel writing relates the concepts of travel and identity. Its most important meanings are (1) the reflexive-dynamic meaning, (2) the transitive-dynamic meaning, and (3) the paradoxical-static meaning.

All three denote different ways of linking the identities of self and Other with the movement of the journey and of staging them textually, i.e. not simply representing them as if they also existed independently and outside of the texts but presenting and performing them by means of their rhetoric. The reflexive-dynamic and the transitive-dynamic meanings coincide in that they exclude, in principle, the essentialist idea of an unchanging identity as sameness over time and/or across persons. The paradoxical-static meaning, on the other hand, corresponds to the fact that essentialist positions are nevertheless asserted in some of the analysed travelogues.

This volume includes contributions on travel writing in English, French, German, Polish and Spanish from the 18th to the 21st century.