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A critical examination of French-language travel narratives.

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The volume explores diverse aspects of French-language travel writing. Arranged chronologically by topic, the essays cover the medieval Anglo-Norman story of the Irish traveller Saint Brendan´s fantastical visit to hell; the sixteenth-century French expeditions to Florida; the seventeenth-century Dernières découvertes dans l´Amérique septentrionale de M. de la Sale mises au jour par le chevalier Tonti, 1697 ; the eighteenth-century Histoire générale des voyages by l´abbé Prévost; the eighteenth-century Impressions d´ Orient et d´Arabie written in French by the Polish count Waclaw Seweryn Rzewuski; nineteenth-century tales of travel in Algeria by the orientalist painter Eugène Fromentin; early twentieth-century travel narratives by the modernist Blaise Cendrars; the 1936 visit to the Soviet Union by Louis-Ferdinand Céline and André Gide, odyssean thematics in the late twentieth-century work of Nobel prize winner Patrick Modiano; the thematics of nomadism in the twentieth-century writing of Albert Memmi, and the thematics of travel in works by Bernard Ollivier, Rachid Bouchareb, Fatou Diome, Christine Montalbetti, Marie Ndiaye and Emmanuel Lepage.

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