Creative uses of travel in prose literature (the novel and the short story), with particular reference to the North East of Scotland and Western Australia

’There was no end, it seemed, to these stagings of discovery’
Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel (2012)

This project will focus on creative uses of travel in prose literature (the novel and the short story), with particular reference to the North East of Scotland and Western Australia. It will explore questions about the intersection of place, space, identity and representation. How does the increasing mobility of objects and of people impact on literary fiction and on the writing process?

Some possible questions to explore in terms of both aesthetics and theoretical understandings of literatures of travel might include: How do ideas, individuals, groups, objects and meanings travel, altering and becoming altered by their new surroundings? How do writers represent the sensations of ’the unfamiliar’ and of ’home’ (originary and discovered)? How has the genre of travel writing (with its associated conventions) affected literary fiction - and vice versa? What is the role of nostalgia and longing in literary travel fiction?