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Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester
eds., Microtravel: Confinement, Deceleration,
Microspection

Anne-Florence Quaireau

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Anne-Florence Quaireau. Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester eds., Microtravel: Confinement, Deceleration, Microspection. 2025, https://journals.openedition.org/viatica/5098. 10.4000/13efk. hal-04985762

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn
Walchester eds., *Microtravel: Confinement,
Deceleration, Microspection*

London, Anthem Press, 2024

Anne-Florence Quaireau

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OpenEdition
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Electronic version

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/viatica/5098

DOI: 10.4000/13efk

ISSN: 2275-0827

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Université Clermont Auvergne

Electronic reference

Anne-Florence Quaireau, "Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester eds., *Microtravel: Confinement, Deceleration, Microspection*, Viatica [Online], 12 | 2025, Online since 17 February 2025, connection on 28 February 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/viatica/5098; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13efk

This text was automatically generated on February 28, 2025.

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Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and
Kathryn Walchester eds.,
*Microtravel: Confinement, Deceleration, Microspection*

London, Anthem Press, 2024

Anne-Florence Quaireau

REFERENCES

Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester eds., *Microtravel: Confinement, Deceleration, Microspection*, London, Anthem Press, 2024, 234 pages, ISBN: 9781839986581.

<footnote n="1">1 The COVID-19 global pandemic and ensuing lockdowns spurred many investigations into forms of mobility that differ from more conventional journeys. This renewed interest in “vertical travel”¹ has intersected with a growing awareness of the environmental cost of travel, as well as the correlated responsibility of travel writing. Several recent publications have thus examined vertical travel, slow travel, and environmentally minded travel writing, such as the *Astrolabe* special issue on “Le Voyage Immobile”², *Travel Writing and Environmental Awareness* (2023) edited by Françoise Besson, and the special issue of *Studies in Travel Writing* devoted to “Vertical Travel”³. Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester, who edited that special issue, have collaborated again to edit a new collection of essays on “Microtravel” which in many ways reads as a sequel or companion publication to the first. Building on theoretical works by Kris Lackey, Michael Cronin, Alasdair Pettinger, Jean-Didier Urbain, as well as previous publications by Forsdick⁴, the editors and contributors endeavour to explore “microtravel”, a term used to encompass different types of travel situations – such as “confinement, deceleration, microspection” (as made explicit by the subtitle). The thirteen contributions are distributed into four sections:</footnote>
"Confinement and Immobility", "Deceleration and Pedestrianism", "Palimpsestic Travel", and "Microspeciation and Microsound".

2 In their introduction, Forsdick, Kinsley and Walchester, who also contribute a chapter each, attempt to circumscribe “microtravel”, first by comparing the use of the prefix “micro-” in different fields, then by clarifying what is meant with this neologism in travel writing studies. Conceding the “imprecision” (p. 3) of the term and departing from its common use by practitioners of travel, they propose to use it to tie together practices which have in common “the quality of attention paid to a particular place” (p. 6) – slow travel, vertical travel (Kris Lackey), “thick description” (Clifford Geertz), “palimpsestic” travel, Michael Cronin’s “microspeciation”, and pedestrianism. They define it as “an ethical mode of experiencing and recording encounters with place” (p. 13). Rather than setting it up in a binary opposition with macrotravel, they invite the reader to think about it in terms of scale and highlight that it is “identifiable by its practice, rather than its extent; in the attention and focus of the travel writer rather than the length or scope of their travels” (p. 15).

3 In the first section, “Confinement and Immobility”, microtravel is considered as travelling yet with (or despite) hindered mobility. In the first contribution to the volume, Joëlle Weiss analyses the Benedictine Monk Honorius Philoponus’ travelogue *Nova Typis Transacta Navigatio* (1621) as an example of imaginary journey based on authentic travel narratives. As monks were committed to their monastery for life, Philoponus never went to the New World he describes. Written in Latin, the text reimagines Christopher Columbus’s second voyage to the West Indies from the perspective of a Spanish Benedictine which, Weiss shows, serves an ideological purpose. Sally Abed’s contribution approaches Lucy Duff Gordon’s *Letters from Egypt* (1865) as microtravel because of the English traveller’s confinement, once in Egypt, due to her deteriorating health. Using an ecocritical lens, she reads Duff Gordon’s relationship to the Nile in light of its associations with life and death in Egyptian mythology. Gabor Gelléri’s chapter also explores the microtravel embedded in macrotravel, as well as the confinement involved by travelling on water, which he calls “kinetic ambivalence” (p. 52). He offers a stimulating exploration of colonial tourism and its intersection with gender, by looking at unpublished personal testimonies (mostly letters and an unpublished memoir) of French female students who travelled to Indochina in September 1924. He analyses their stopovers as “micro-mobilities” characterised by a focus on their multisensory dimension. In the last chapter of this section, Carole Delaître compares two short stories by French writer Marie Ndiaye, “En Chine 1” and “En Chine 2”, arguing that Ndiaye subverts “the logic of travel that implies that the traveller returns to his point of origin” (p. 73).

4 Section 2, “Deceleration and Pedestrianism”, explores microtravel as slow travel. It opens with Jayson Althofer’s consideration of Friedrich Engels’s social exploration of Manchester’s streets from 1842 to 1844, which led to his writing “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” (1843) and *The Condition of the Working Class in England: From Personal Observation and Authentic Sources*, published in German in 1845. Althofer considers Engels’s urban walks as a set of microtravels which go against “the species-annihilating effects of malign velocities, including but not limited to quick-moving, tireless machinery and the fast flows of commodity production and circulation.” (p. 88) Béatrice Blanchet then analyses Patrick Leigh Fermor’s *A Time of Gifts* (1977) and his commitment to walking across Central Europe in 1933-4. She argues that pedestrianism
enhances a multisensory experience and favours engagement with places and peoples. She underlines the in-betweenness of the walking traveller who is both an insider and an outsider, and shrewdly sheds light on the initiatory quality of this journey for Leigh Fermor who was eighteen at the time. Zoë Kinsley offers an enlightening counterpoint to the other two contributions in this section, as she nuances the prevalent positive consideration of pedestrianism, through the analysis of John Clare's "Journey Out of Essex" (written in 1841 but unpublished in his lifetime). Clare's escape from High Beech asylum and his four-day-long, 85-mile walk to his home in Northborough involved "a lot of pain, and a lot of harm" (p. 112), as it was illness that made his travel slow. Kinsley moreover explores the "palimpsestic intertextualities" (p. 114) with Clare's other writings at work in his 'travelogue', thus seamlessly leading the reader into the following section.

In Section 3, entitled “Palimpsestic Travel”, microtravel is understood as travel in the mind, partly spurred by text or objects, through memory, reading or imagination. Patricia Murray looks at Michael Swan’s travelogue *The Marches of El Dorado: British Guiana, Brazil, Venezuela* (1958) and Guyanese writer Wilson Harris’ response to his travelogue in the form of fables published in two volumes, *The Sleepers of Rosaima* (1970) and *The Age of the Rainmakers* (1971). Microtravel is seen here in the combination of intertextual, vertical travelling and the microspeciation of Indigenous history and ontology. R. M. Francis, in an approach that combines research and creation, shares poems he wrote when he was Poet in Residence for the Black County Geological Society in 2020. These poems are interspersed with reflections spurred by the theoretical texts on geo poetics he dialogues with. The geological layering of the earth is paralleled by our layered relationship to our environment. Emma Gleadhill investigates how souvenirs collected by British female travellers at the turn of the nineteenth century may be construed as a form of microtravel, in so far as this material culture enabled these women to mentally go back to the place visited and to make sense of their journey. She concludes with a case study of Hester Piozzi’s souvenirs from her 1784-6 Grand Tour and the role they played in the definition of her identity as part Welsh, part Italian woman.

Finally, in section 4, “Microspeciation and Microsound”, microtravel is interpreted as travelling while paying close attention, with an intense sensory approach, beyond ocularcentrism. Kathryn Walchester analyses the garden as “a site of microtravel” (p. 179) in Dorothy Wordsworth’s travel writing (her *Grasmere Journals* (1800-1803), *Recollections of a Tour of Scotland* (1802), and *A Tour on the Continent* (1820). Walchester’s innovative consideration of the relation between home and away displaces the focus from the mobility of the traveller to the landscape, here the garden, both literal (Grasmere garden) and figurative (gardens and nature in general). The last two contributions both focus on microaudition, with Charles Forsdick delving into Victor Segalen’s short story “Dans un monde sonore” (1907), a modern version of the Orpheus myth, and Eleanor Lischka into Marcel Proust’s *In Search of Lost Time* (1913-1927). Before his case study of Segalen’s short story, carefully situated in the wider historical context as well as in the personal context of Segalen’s life and publications, Forsdick usefully goes over the use of senses other than sight in travel writing, as well as the attention (or lack thereof) it has garnered in travel writing studies. Lischka’s astute close reading of Proust’s text evidences the crucial role played by sound “in Proust’s geography of
space and time, as horizontal travel is overtaken by the role of memory, offering
journeys through past time" (p. 210).

All texts under consideration, bar two, belong to the Anglophone and Francophone literary traditions, which may be attributed to the respective fields of the editors. The inclusion of fiction, an enduring debate in travel writing studies, less so in mobilities studies, may indeed shed light on practices of travel, as put forward by the editors in their introduction, and it is to some extent the case here. Although not a concept, the umbrella term “microtravel” enables the editors to take the reader on a thought-provoking journey through analyses of travel texts which shed light on the tensions between movement and stasis, between the near and the far, between home and away, between the familiar and the exotic at the heart of travel writing, and more specifically of the texts identified as microtravel. It is not only in the answers it provides that the quality of the collection resides but in the questions it raises, as these essays, whose consistent quality must be underlined, point to the multilayered richness of travel writing.

NOTES

1. Kris Lackey, *RoadFrames: The American Highway Narrative*, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

2. *Astrolabe*, no.51, 2020, “Le Voyage immobile”, ed. Sylvie Requemora, https://crlv.org/astrolabe/voyage-immobile-decembre-2020.

3. *Studies in Travel Writing*, Volume 25, issue 2, 2021: “Vertical Travel”, ed. Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester, https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rstw20/25/2.

4. Jean-Didier Urbain, *Secrets de voyage. Menteurs, imposteurs et autres voyageurs invisibles*, Paris, Payot, 1998; Michael Cronin, *Across the Lines: Travel, Language and Translation*, Cork, Cork University Press, 2000; Michael Cronin, *The Expanding World. Towards a Politics of Microspection*, Winchester, Zero Books, 2012; Alasdair Pettinger, “Vertical Travel,” in *Keywords for Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary*, ed. Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester, London, Anthem Press, 2019, 277-79; Charles Forsdick, “Vertical Travel,” in *The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing*, ed. Alasdair Pettinger and Tim Youngs, Abingdon, Routledge, 2019, 99-112; Charles Forsdick, “Travel Writing in an Age of Confinement,” *British Comparative Literature Association*, https://bcla.org/reflections/travel-writing-in-an-age-of-confinement/, Accessed October 13, 2024.
## AUTHORS

**ANNE-FLORENCE QUAIREAU**

Faculté des Lettres Langues et Sciences Humaines (LLSH), Université d'Angers