Travel Writing and Satire James D. Sumner Royal Holloway College
1 Travel Writing and Satire James D. Sumner Royal Holloway College PhD in English University of London 2013 2 Declaration of Authorship I, James D. Sumner, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: ______________________ Date: ________________________ 3 Abstract: 1) Critical Component: The purpose of my thesis is to explore the history of British travel writing and to consider how the literature of exploration, which initially presented itself as factual, evolved into the fictional use of travel writing. In order to provide a context for travel writing, I will be looking at the work of Porter, Mills, Pratt, Chard, Hulme and Youngs before discussing the Grand Tourist (1660-1837) and the growth of mass tourism under Thomas Cook. In order to consider early-twentieth-century travel writing in this context of mass tourism, I propose to engage specifically with Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure (1933) and Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937). Evelyn Waugh, at various times, acted both as a friend and a reviewer to both Byron and Fleming. The thesis will then focus upon Evelyn Waugh’s work and look at the differences between his travel writing and the fictional use of travel in his fiction. Waugh’s writing style has been important to me in the development of my own. As Waugh wrote in his review of Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure (1933), ‘the trouble about all forms of writing is that one is working against a background of predecessors and contemporaries.’ 1 Thus in my last chapter, I will discuss someone whom Waugh influenced, namely Malcolm Bradbury.
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