Microtravel: Confinement, Deceleration, Microspection

By Charles Forsdick and Zoë Kinsley

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic imposed immobility on large sectors of the world’s population, with confinement becoming an everyday reality. The lives of those who previously enjoyed the privileges of being ‘fast castes’ ground to a halt, while at the same time the displacement of more vulnerable populations along well-established migration corridors has been radically reduced. The result has been a recalibration of the scale of journeying, with travellers slowing down their journeys and readjusting their relationship to the proximate and nearby. This situation has provided an opportunity for those who study travel and travel writing to rethink their objects of study and approaches to them. This volume explores and historicizes the phenomenon of ‘microtravel’, designating slower journeys within a limited radius which allow, and sometimes necessitate, new forms of experiencing the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9781839986598

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The cover image for Microtravel

Microtravel

Microtravel

Confinement, Deceleration,

Microspection

Edited by

Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2024

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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© 2024 Charles Forsdick, Zoe Kinsley, & Kate Walchester editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: 2023951236

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ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-658-1 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-658-1 (Hbk)

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CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors

Microtravel: An Introduction

Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester

Section 1. Confinement and Immobility

Chapter 1. How to Travel in Monastic Confinement: An Imaginary Journey to the New World

Joëlle Weis

Chapter 2. The Nile, Immortality and the Body in Lucy Duff Gordon’s Letters From Egypt

Sally Abed

Chapter 3. A Slow Boat to Indochina: Immobility and Micro-movements on the Road to Indochina

Gábor Gelléri

Chapter 4. No Going Back: Interrupted Journeys and Identity Crisis in Marie Ndiaye

Carole Delaitre

Section 2. Deceleration and Pedestrianism

Chapter 5. Friedrich Engels Travels in a Chimney

Jayson Althofer

Chapter 6. ‘I Wanted to Think, Write, Stay or Move on at My Own Speed and Unencumbered’: Pedestrian Rites of Passage in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A TIME OF GIFTS

Béatrice Blanchet

Chapter 7. ‘Foot foundered and broken down’: Painful Pedestrianism in John Clare’s ‘JOURNEY OUT OF ESSEX’

Zoë Kinsley

Section 3. Palimpsestic Travel

Chapter 8. Elegy for the Living: Travels in Guyana with Michael Swan and Wilson Harris

Patricia Murray

Chapter 9. Back to Base: Palimpsest Travel in the Black Country Geopark

R. M. Francis

Chapter 10. Observed and Reflected: Women Tourists, Microtravel and Souvenirs, 1750–1830

Emma Gleadhill

Section 4. Microspection and Microsound

Chapter 11. ‘This Is a Place Where We Should Like to Have Lived’: The Garden As ‘Dwelling Place’ in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Travel Writing

Kathryn Walchester

Chapter 12. In a Sound World: On Microaudition As a Mode of Microtravel

Charles Forsdick

Chapter 13. ‘The echo of great spaces traversed’: Microaudition and Vertical Travel in In Search of Lost Time

Eleanor Lischka

Index

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sally Abed is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin. In fall 2022, she was awarded the Juynboll Fellowship at Leiden University and libraries to conduct her research on medieval travel and monsters. Her research interests and future publications focus on travel, strange creatures and the Cairo Geniza, but also include other areas of medieval and Comparative Literature. Her most recent piece is ‘Between East and West: John Pory’s Translation of Leo Africanus’s Description of Africa’, in Globalism in the Pre-Modern World? Questions, Challenges and the Emergence of a New Approach to the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. Sally is also a freelance journalist in the Ahram Weekly, the English version of the Egyptian national newspaper, where she has published several pieces on different aspects of Egyptian history and culture such as the history of civil aviation, the travels of Dom Pedro II to Egypt, the historic gardens of Alexandria and the Egyptian opera.

Jayson Althofer is an independent scholar based in Toowoomba, Australia. He works at Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery and has taught Australian history and Anglophone literature at the University of Southern Queensland. He has written about Engels for the journal Ethnologies (themed issue on ‘Nocturnal Ethnographies’, 2022) and the edited volumes The Graveyard in Literature: Liminality and Social Critique (2022) and TEXTile Manifestoes (2022). His forthcoming publications include chapters in Global Indigenous Horror and The Undead Child: Representations of Childhoods Past, Present, and Preserved (both scheduled for 2024). He also co-writes with Brian Musgrove; their collaborations include chapters in Representing Childhood and Atrocity (2022) and Gothic Dreams and Nightmares (2024).

Béatrice Blanchet is a lecturer in geopolitics and English studies at UCLy (Lyon Catholic University, France). She graduated from Sciences Po (Aix-en-Provence) and completed her PhD on French and British intellectuals at the University of Oxford (Bourse d’Excellence Lavoisier, French Foreign Office). She is particularly interested in the construction of the emblematic figure of the intimate stranger in British political discourse, media representations and travel writing, whether it be the cosmopolitan intellectual (symbol of exile), the activist (between subversion of norms and inclusion in a protest tradition), the interpreter (influenced by his multiple allegiances) or the traveller (whose narratives contribute to redefine the familiar and the foreign). Her current research investigates the link between the celebration of British exceptionalism and the existence of liminal spaces of belonging, against the backdrop of resurgent imperial representations of borders and spaces of exception. Her recent publications include ‘Leave Thy Home, O Youth, and Seek Out Alien Shores’. Dépaysement et Nostalgie dans A Time of Gifts de Patrick Leigh Fermor’ (Textures, LCE/Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2021) as well as a chapter in the edited volume Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe: Beyond Regime and Refuge (forthcoming).

Carole Delaitre is an independent researcher. Her fields of study are twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone literature, with particular emphasis on aesthetic representations of mobilities (tourism, migration and exile), spatial theory, environmental humanities and the history of literary genres. Recent publications include: "Enfers et paradis touristiques dans Autoportrait avec Grenade et Amours et aventures de Sindbad le Marin", in Agnès Schaffauser (ed.), Salim Bachi(2019); ‘Entre éloge et blâme: polyphonie et critique du tourisme dans Lanzarote et Plateforme de Michel Houellebecq’, (Argumentation et analyse du discours, 27, Les discours du tourisme / Discourses of tourism, 2021); ‘‘Je suis le contraire de l’établi’ : réappropriation spatiale et identitaire dans Trésor à prendre de Violette Leduc’, (Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, SITES, 25, 3, Parler la terre / Speaking the Earth 2021).

Charles Forsdick is Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely on exoticism, travel writing, colonial history, postcolonial literature, comics, penal culture and the afterlives of slavery. Recent publications include the coauthored Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (2017) and a series of co-edited collections: The Black Jacobins Reader (2016), Keywords for Travel Writing Studies (2019), Georges Perec’s Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces (2019) and Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France (2020).

R. M. Francis is from Dudley and is a lecturer in creative and professional writing at the University of Wolverhampton, where he completed his PhD. He’s the author of five poetry pamphlets. His debut novel, Bella, was published with Wild Pressed Books and his poetry collection, Subsidence, is out with Smokestack Books. He is the editor for Wild Pressed Books’ New Towns Anthology of Place-Writing. In 2019, he was the inaugural David Bradshaw writer-in-residence at the University of Oxford. He is currently poet-in-residence for the Black Country Geological Society. As a critic, he contributed a chapter to Palgrave’s New Urban Gothic and Routledge’s UK Spoken Word and co-edited the Palgrave book Smell, Memory and Literature in the Black Country.

Gábor Gelléri is Senior Lecturer in French at Aberystwyth University, specializing in travel in early modern France. He is the author of Philosophies du voyage: visiter l’Angleterre aux 17e-18e siècles (2016) and Lessons of Travel in 18th-Century France: From Grand Tour to School Trips (2020). He co-edited, with Rachel Willie, Travel and Conflict in the Early Modern World (2021).

Emma Gleadhill is a social and cultural historian, and watercolour artist, based in Melbourne, Australia. She is specifically interested in women’s history, travel and accessing new dimensions of the female experience through souvenir culture. Emma’s first academic monograph, Taking Travel Home: The Souvenir Culture of British Women Tourists, 1750-1830, was published by Manchester University Press in their Gender in History series in April 2022. Her book uncovers the souvenir culture British women developed around the texts and objects they brought back with them to realize their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, friendship and science. It argues that the rise of the souvenir is representative of female agency, as women used their souvenirs to form spaces in which they could create and control their own travel narratives.

Zoë Kinsley is an Associate Professor in English Literature at Liverpool Hope University. Her work explores the literary representation of travel and landscape; she has a particular interest in British home tour travel of the long eighteenth century, and has done extensive work on the writings and scrapbooks of Dorothy Richardson (1748–1819). She has written widely on these topics, and her publications include Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682 1812 (2008) and the co-edited Keywords for Travel Writing Studies (2019). She is a member of the Traveling Bodies research network based at the University of Koblenz.

Eleanor Lischka’s research focuses on sound, poetry and the poetic voice in À la recherche du temps perdu. She explores how Symbolist and fin-de-siècle conceptions of the poetic inform Proust’s work, including his early verse and essays, and manifest in a sustained structural focus on sound in his novel. In 2022 she was awarded the R. Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize for an essay entitled ‘"Ma vision harmonieuse et transparente": sound and the power of language in Proust’s argument against obscurity’. Her DPhil at the University of Oxford, where she has been awarded second place in both the Jon Stallworthy Poetry Prize and the Lord Alfred Douglas Prize, is funded by a New College Humanities Scholarship.

Patricia Murray is an independent scholar currently based in south-west France. She taught for many years as senior lecturer and director of the MA in Postcolonial Cultures at University of North London and London Metropolitan University and was recently Associate Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London. She has published widely on Latin American, Caribbean and Black British literature, especially the work of Wilson Harris. Her current research focuses on the aesthetics of the new in the context of migration, race and ethnicity and the environmental humanities.

Kathryn Walchester is Subject Leader for English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published widely on women’s European travel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, northern travel and mountaineering. Her publications include Our Own Fair Italy; Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Writing and Italy 1800-1844 (2007), Gamle Norge and Nineteenth-Century British Women Travellers and Norway (2014) and Travelling Servants: Mobility and Employment in British Fiction and Travel Writing 1750-1850 (2019) and Keywords for Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary, co-edited with Charles Forsdick and Zoë Kinsley (2019).

Joëlle Weis is head of the research area ‘Digital Literary- and Cultural Studies’ at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities (Trier University). Her main publications include articles on the history of early modern scholarship, the his­tory of historiography, collection studies and digital methods in the humanities. For her dissertation on the historian Johann Friedrich Schannat (1683–1739), she was awarded the Austrian State Prize 2019 and the Grete-Mostny Prize 2020.

MICROTRAVEL: AN INTRODUCTION

Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester

Microtravel Now – The Emergence of a Term

The recent proliferation of neologisms based on the prefix micro- suggests that the early twenty-first century is a moment of renewed focus on the infinitely small – we say renewed because it is clear that other historical moments, notably the eighteenth century, are equally identified with a similar fascination with such granular detail and with finding the means of accessing it. While there is a metaphorical interest in the micro, evident for instance in Hannah Jane Parkison’s focus on the ‘joy of small things’,¹ this shift of scale is accompanied by literal attention to the minute. The reception of the work of the contemporary artist Willard Wigan – who uses a microscope to craft the ‘world’s tiniest masterpieces’ – encapsulates this public fascination with the minuscule.² The contrast (and often the tensions) between the micro- and the macro-, whether these relate to economics, nutrients, histories or a variety of other phenomena, regulate human lives in ways that are not always immediately apparent. The everyday presence of manifestations of the very small is, however, widespread. X (formerly Twitter) has become a seemingly ubiquitous (if not unproblematic) microblogging platform, the use of which was initially facilitated by the microcomputer reliant on a microprocessor; environmental concerns and the challenges of urban living have increased the use of microapartments, microcars and microvans; microbreweries, micropubs and microbakeries reflect a new small-scale entrepreneurialism that reflects a public appetite to avoid the overcommercialized and buy into a more individualized consumer experience. The Greek etymology of ‘micro-’ suggests in common parlance ‘very small’, but in terms of metric units, it is located between ‘milli-’ and ‘nano-’, designating one millionth. The growing use of the prefix is, in part, a symptom of advances in technology. Improvements in micrometry – measurement of the tiny – provide ever-increasing access to the minutiae of the world while at the same time catering for a persistent human curiosity regarding understanding the detail that surrounds us. At the same time, contemporary manifestations of this attention include countercultural dimensions, with a focus on the micro- reflecting the extreme version of a hyperlocalism that stands against globalization, environmental degradation and the spread of macro-level forces such as neoliberal economics. Whereas the dystopian downside of such an impulse extends to isolationism and various forms of xenophobia, the phenomenon that Michael Cronin has dubbed ‘microspection’ may therefore have a more radical function,³ allowing a recalibration of engagement with the world, in both phenomenological and intellectual terms and leading to a relativization of what it means to be human. Cronin’s understanding is therefore actively global, an invitation to think about the concept in a broader range of contexts, an approach that we would invite readers to adopt – beyond the variety of case studies presented in the chapters that follow – as they explore the meanings of microtravel itself.

While technology enhances human ability to interrogate detail and while curiosity about the microscopic plays a more anticipatory role in regulating our relationship to the world, the experience of lockdown caused by the COVID-19 epidemic turned such attention to the micro- into an obligation. The existing experience of those subject to confinement as a result of disability, ageing or incarceration was suddenly (if temporarily) generalized, leading to a renewal of interest in detail associated with room travel and nature writing – and reminding us of the ableism often associated with more conventional understandings of travel that we must ensure not to replicate in coining new terms such as ‘microtravel’. Geographer Peter Merriman, in an article on micro-mobilities in lockdown, outlines the implications of this shared experience for broader understandings of mobility:

if we are serious about trying to understand the significance of mobility and movement in people’s everyday lives, if we want to problematize the mobility/immobility binary, and if we want to understand the related role of different forms of movement and mobility in social, economic, and political life, then we must expand mobility studies beyond the large-scale bodily mobilities entailed in transport and migration.⁴

Enhanced attention triggered by the limitation of physical mobility has implications across a broad range of fields, not least (for the purposes of this book) studies in travel writing, and this has led to an intensified focus on the phenomenon studied in the chapters that follow. Microtravel, as our contributors demonstrate, is far from being a new practice and requires, as a result, careful historicization and contextualization. This neologism we have adopted forms part of a network of interrelated terms designating space and mobility on a microscale. Microspaces and microzones are examples of the microgeographic, suggesting an attention to the detail of place. A microtopographer designates an instrument used to measure small surface areas. Microtoponymy describes the art of naming focused locations, such as fields or subsections of forests and woods.⁵ In terms of movements through limited locations (i.e. micro-mobility), microjourneys are the multiple and often imperceptible journeys undertaken each day as people go about their daily business, a practice to be distinguished from microwalks, the robotic practice of movement using very small steps.

As an umbrella term associated with a number of these other practices and concepts, microtravel has gained increasing currency over the past few years, despite the semantic imprecision with which it often seems to be associated. In a commercial frame, microtravel has been used primarily as a marketing strategy: responding to a context of pandemic compounded with fears over environmental sustainability, Hyundai in summer 2021 created the ‘Microtravel Challenge’ – ‘hit the road and discover unexpected hidden gems, while keeping within a 200km driving radius’.⁶ (This 200 km raises questions of scale regarding the relationship of the micro to the macro, to which we will return below.) The relationship between microtravel and environmental approaches to journeying is an element that requires further scrutiny, not least in the terms of the field of ‘eco-travel’ mapped out by Michael Cronin, in which works by indigenous travel writers play a key role.⁷ In the travel press, microtravel is also, on occasion, presented as a solution for the time-poor still seeking temporary escape from the everyday: ‘focused, less-frantic itineraries that concentrate on limited locales and activities’;⁸ alternatively, it can become a contrast to the ‘traditional week-long vacation mindset’,⁹ a sequence of micro-trips (or, if you accept another neologism, micro-cations) occurring across a year; and Lonely Planet offers a guide to such phenomena, excursions ‘within three hours of 60 of the world’s most popular cities’.¹⁰ The concept of microtravel appears rarely if at all, however, in critical work on travel writing. This book is an attempt to explore, from a variety of perspectives, how microtravel transcends these deliberately loose chronotopes that the industry seeks to impose on it. Moving beyond such neoliberal recuperation, we suggest the neologism may serve as a federating term to encompass the practices of confinement, deceleration and verticality to which we allude in our subtitle.

Defining Microtravel

Moving away, then, from the strategies of the travel industry, the corollary of terms and practices aligned with microtravel and its key principles has nevertheless been implicit for more than three decades in work in the Humanities and Social Sciences focused on mobility. In scholarship cognate with that of travel writing studies, such as cultural geography and tourism studies, various terms have emerged over the period that describe travels that are restricted or confined and in which the attention of the traveller/writer to place is close, asserting an emphasis on the proximate. The roots of microtravel as a concept may be seen in the identification of an increased appreciation for the locals, particularly in terms of consumption – eating and drinking local produce, which was in turn aligned with a decrease in speed. Since the 1980s, as Gaia de Pascale shows, ‘slow travel’ emerged from the ‘slow food’ movement in Italy, where an emphasis on local, sustainably sourced ingredients formed the basis of carefully prepared meals, challenging the increasing prevalence of global fast- and convenience food.¹¹ Subsequently, Catherine Mee has noted the particular (and related) significance of ‘slow travel’ in contemporary Italian travel writing.¹² Likewise allied to consumption, in cultural geography from the 1990s, the term ‘neolocalism’ has emerged in the work of Schnell and Shortridge and has been deployed more recently by Buratti and Hagelman.¹³

During the last two decades in tourism studies, scholars working on ‘slow travel’ have noted its connections with both ecology and the search for more meaningful tourism, in which engagement with local people and the environment have become prominent. These are debates in relation to which the study of microtravel needs to situate itself more actively as scholars of mobility and displacement explore and test the pertinence of the term. In Slow Travel and Tourism, over a decade ago, Janet Dickinson and Les Lumsden anticipated the expansion of ‘slow travel’ due to its fundamentally different approach to tourism.¹⁴ However, Dickinson acknowledges that it is ‘a relatively new label to collectively categorise forms of tourism that have existed for many years, such as cycle tourism or coach tours’.¹⁵ Looking back to Jost Krippendorf’s questioning in The Holiday Makers (1987) as to whether we must ‘in future, in order to get on, run twice as fast as before [...]?’, Peter McGrath and Richard Sharpley see the adoption of the term ‘slow travel’ as responding to a general movement away from the celebration of speed and distance in travel over the last 40 years.¹⁶

Turning away from the speed of travel and focusing instead on the quality of attention paid to a particular place, microtravel might see its foundations in the depth or intensity of description. This is highlighted by terms such as ‘vertical travel’, and in the ‘thick description’ in the anthropological studies of Clifford Geertz, which Alistair Pettinger, in his entry on ‘vertical travel’ in Keywords for Travel Writing Studies, sees as a precursor to the practice.¹⁷ ‘Vertical travel’ itself was first used by Kris Lackey in RoadFrames: The American Highway Narrative to describe open landscapes, a development continued in the work of sociologist Jean-Didier Urbain, whose Secrets de voyage. Menteurs, imposteurs et autres voyageurs invisibles provides accounts of ‘claustrophiliac’ journeys in the urban environment.¹⁸ Michael Cronin’s Across the Lines: Travel, Language and Translation was one of the first studies to theorize the ways in which ‘vertical travel’ might engage with layers of history and space.¹⁹ Such explorations often reveal layers of experience and history and have also been labelled additionally as ‘palimpsestic’ travel.²⁰ The practices of psychogeography are relevant here, with terms such as ‘deep mapping’ or ‘deep topography’ speaking to investigations of place over time and through the emotions and experiences of its inhabitants.

In Francophone literature, as Pettinger and Forsdick have noted, the practice of ‘ethnologie de proximité’ [proximate ethnography] has been central to explorations of urban spaces. In nature writing or studies that focus on the rural, however, ‘deep mapping’ is employed in accounts such as PrairyErth (A Deep Map) by William Least Heat-Moon, as is ‘deep topography’ in Scarp by Nick Papdimitrou, and in Les Roberts’s work on the ‘islandness’ of non-places.²¹ A number of academic studies have embarked on ‘deep mapping’, researching and remembering places through the imagination rather than travelling them in person during the periods of lockdown in the COVID-19 pandemic. Examples include Merriman’s ‘Micro-Mobilities in Lockdown’, which featured an analysis of his own movement during the first part of the pandemic, and Joe Moran’s ‘A virtual island journey: place and place writing in lockdown’.²²

In recent critical developments, Michael Cronin’s guiding concept of microspection, discussed already above, engages with the broader tendencies towards engaging with the tiny discussed at the opening of this introduction. Cronin coined the term to define ‘a form of engagement with the world which is based on an in-depth analysis and understanding (specere: to look at) of the local (mikros: little)’.²³ His work explores Benoît Mandelbrot’s concept of fractal geometry: ‘The shapes or fractals in this new geometry allowed infinite length to be contained in finite space’, which Cronin contends has implications for travel, particularly in countering, often as part of a call for more sustainable modes of engagement with the world, the ‘discourse of exhaustion’, or the end of travel.²⁴ Tiny degrees of movement also feature in work by Merriman, who, in distinguishing between ‘molar’ and ‘molecular’ mobility, argues for a dissolution of the binary between mobility and stasis and sees all movement as in a state of ‘becoming’, drawing on theoretical concepts outlined by Deleuze and Guattari.²⁵

The celebration of restricted mobility was first demonstrated in the ‘room travel’ described by Xavier de Maistre’s 1794 Voyage autour de ma chambre (A Journey Around My Room).²⁶ As Bernd Stiegler demonstrates, de Maistre’s eighteenth-century text prompted many successive emulations of his journey.²⁷ There is, in room travel, as in other versions of such close attention to the everyday and the proximate, a sense of re-enchantment. As Stiegler notes, ‘[r]oom travel involves a type of de-tachment, which involves pulling back from the realm of the habitual to explore and describe it anew’.²⁸ Texts describing room travel saw a renaissance after the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Dis)covering ... Mountains / (Dé)couvrir les Montagnes ... by Flo Kasearu and Sara B. Goulet reimagines, for instance, the idea of the armchair traveller through conversation and images that draw on the literature of travel and the imagination.²⁹ Such imaginative engagements with space are noted as potential new directions for the genre by Charles Forsdick in ‘Travel Writing in an Age of Confinement’ and in Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine, edited by Gary Fisher and David Robinson.³⁰

In the last two decades, focused on the practices of deceleration, a number of texts have described the history of pedestrian journeys and the prevalence of this method of mobility as a basis for modern travels across Anglophone and Francophone traditions.³¹ Writers of pedestrian tours frequently detail the increased attention that is brought to the sensorial and embodied experiences of movement and environment. Frédéric Gros writes: ‘When walking in this mode we discover the immense vigour of starry skies, elemental energies, and our appetites follow: they are enormous, and our bodies are satisfied’.³² As Alasdair Pettinger has shown, pedestrianism is closely aligned with pilgrimage, uniting the slow contemplation of landscape with a spiritual awakening.³³

This practice of close attention, a specific feature of microtravel, involves reworking conventional sensorial engagement with place and further scrutinizing, in the process, the intersections between studies in travel writing and disability studies. In addition to the close visual encounter encompassed in microspection, critics have also begun to examine texts in which the emphasis is on senses other than sight. For example, re-assessing the ocularcentrism of much Western travel writing, Charles Forsdick has focused on the travel accounts of deaf travellers, highlighting the importance of microaudition.³⁴ More recently, in Creative and Non-Fiction Writing During Isolation, Ben Stubbs describes the phenomenon of ‘close travel’, which he defines as ‘a mode of looking around us and within our environments more thoroughly’.³⁵ For Stubbs, this means reflecting on what might be ‘the inevitable death of the form [of travel writing]’; and yet (and as he demonstrates in the remainder of his chapter on travel writing), the restrictions imposed by the pandemic and the reflections by scholars in mobility studies, travel writing studies and cultural geography have revealed a multiplicity of ways in which the writing of travel, in whatever form, has adapted and found new forms of practice and expression.

In scholarship that addresses circumscribed journeys and travel, paying close attention to its locality, there is therefore both a proliferation of terms but at the same time the emergence of