PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Nicole Maruo-Schröder is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Koblenz, Germany. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature, material (food) culture, travel writing, intersectionality, and visual culture. Publications include co-edited collections on Literature and Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America (2014), Space, Place, and Narrative (2016), and Issues in Contemporary Young Adult Dystopian Fiction (2018) as well as a monograph on Spatial Concepts in Contemporary American Literature (2006). A current book project focuses on literature and consumption. Sarah Schäfer-Althaus is Lecturer in Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Koblenz, Germany. Her research centers on women, gender, sexuality studies, and medical humanities. She is the author of The Gendered Body: Female Sanctity, Gender Hybridity and the Body in Women’s Hagiography (2016) and co-editor of Transient Bodies in Anglophone Literature and Culture (2020) and Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture (2023). Uta Schaffers is Professor of German Literature and Didactics at the University of Koblenz, Germany. Her main research areas include travel writing (various articles and the co-edited volume (Off) the Beaten Track? Normierungen und Kanonisierungen des Reisens; 2018) with special focus on Japan (Konstruktionen der Fremde. Erfahren, verschriftlicht und erlesen am Beispiel Japan; 2006) and the Swiss travel writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (see the editions of Schwarzenbach’s works), traveling bodies, and East-Asia in literature, as well as economics and literature.
This volume makes an important contribution to the emerging critical literature on travel and the body. Its essays trace historical developments in the ways that travel is experienced as an embodied practice, and offer a thought-provoking range of perspectives and approaches. Traveling Bodies shows how productive interdisciplinary conversations in the field of travel can be, with the study of travel writing enriched by attention to other forms of creative and cultural practice that explore bodies on the move. It is a book that couples broad and wide-ranging discussion of key ideas with detailed and thoughtful analytical work with particular examples and case studies, and will no doubt stimulate new journeys of exploration. Zoë Kinsley, Associate Professor in English Literature, Liverpool Hope University, UK Up until today, matters of the body have not gained as much attention by international travel studies as they deserve. Therefore, the interdisciplinary essay collection Traveling Bodies can be considered a groundbreaking contribution to the field: It presents a wide range of new insights concerning (European, North American, and Japanese) travel literature and culture from the Age of Enlightenment to the present and offers innovative theoretical perspectives which will prove extremely productive for future work on the subject area. A highly recommended, almost indispensable read for scholars and students in travel studies around the world! Stefan Hermes, Senior Lecturer in German Literature, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
