Location, Delocation, Relocation in 21st‑Century Scottish Wayfaring Narratives
This article considers contemporary travelogues written by Scottish and English writers and historians with a view to examining how 21st-century travellers question the Romantic sublimity inherited from their predecessors in today’s political, ideological and environmental context. It focuses on the...
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| Udgivet i: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprog: | Anglais |
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Études écossaises
2026
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| Online adgang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | This article considers contemporary travelogues written by Scottish and English writers and historians with a view to examining how 21st-century travellers question the Romantic sublimity inherited from their predecessors in today’s political, ideological and environmental context. It focuses on the practices of travel writers whose investigations of Scotland will be viewed within the frame of the spatial turn of the 1980s—the “reconfiguration of place through its multi-perspectival representations in literature” (Smethurst in Kuehn & Smethurst, 2015, p. 97)—and the geo‑critical perspective in its approach to what Michel de Certeau famously termed “spatial stories” (Certeau, 1984, p. 115).The notable resurgence of interest in travel writing in devolved Scotland is bound to be informed by the local debates on land ownership, independence and the threats of mass tourism. This is perceptible in the way 21st‑century travel writers resist the urge to incline towards nostalgia and how dedicated they are to bearing witness to change, in what Gérard Cogez calls “the intentional function” of travel writing (Cogez, 2014, p. 188). Contemporary travels in search of 21st‑century Scotland will not only seek to promote the territory through its natural, cultural and historical heritage, they will also review or, in Lefebvre’s preferred verb, re‑“produce” a territory that, some argue, remains largely “un‑discovered” (Malachy Tallack, 2016, The Un‑Discovered Island), or, worse, “unremembered” (Patrick Baker, 2020, The Unremembered Places). Examples are taken from Linda Cracknell’s collection Doubling Back. Ten Paths Trodden in Memory (2014), David Gange’s seafaring travelogue The Frayed Atlantic Edge. A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel (2019), and Malachy Tallack’s 60 Degrees North. Around the World in Search of Home (2015). Other art forms are considered, for instance Stuart McAdam and Simon Yates’ Lines Lost walking project (2013). By looking at these texts and performances through a rhythmanalytical approach (Lefebvre, 1992), this article contends that a new school of more “responsible” travel writing is currently emerging in Scotland, one that values slow movement as resistance to postmodernity, deep sensory immersion in the post-natural environment and a clear break from technological culture, in keeping with what Philippe Bourdeau terms “post-tourism” (Bourdeau, 2012) and Jean Corneloup “transmodern wayfaring” (Corneloup, 2011). |
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