SSR 'Aboard: British Literary Travelling Between Wars' By Paul Fussell

 

Secondary Source Report ‘Aboard: British Literary Travelling Between Wars’ by Paul Fussell

By Alana Jordan

Complete citation:

Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980.

Image Credit: 

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jcu/reader.action?docID=253379, accessed 15 September 2020. 

Key Words: 

Travel, war, books, abroad, post-war, England, landscape.

Brief Overview:

This book is both about travel writing and travel itself. The book places itself in the context of travel writing from 1918-1939, to suggest what it felt like to be young and intelligent in the final age of travel. The time period is focused between the wars, an age that has barely surpassed one war and is beginning to notice another on the horizon.  

Summary of key points: 

• Fussell argues for the unique character and literary quality of the travel-writing of the interwar years. The first world war was a confining time and travel was a chance for freedom, where the military was not. Wartime England was miserable and restricted, so travel could take you to sun, food and freedom, where war was a distant memory.

• The interwar years were a time when travel reached its peak years. The great era of travel ended with the beginning of the second world war. The war brought on too many restrictions, too many jet planes, and too many tourists. This ended the great era of travel-writing. 

• Fussell draws upon social class where he implies that boarding a ship enters you into a fantasy world where your class and social status are instantly raised. This was one of the desires of ocean travel, to be one of the idle rich, where you were waited on and spoiled no matter who you were back home. It was pure self-indulgence.

• Throughout the book, Fussell uses the works of other authors to express his argument about travel-writing and scatters memories of his own travels throughout the book. 

Important Quotations:

• “Contributing to the rise of tourism in the nineteenth century was the bourgeois vogue of romantic primitivism” (p.38).

• “Forster describes his homeland [England] as a person who has folded her hands and stands waiting” (p.16).

• “A travel book, at its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders, and scandals of the literary from romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply” (p.203).

Usefulness to our group topic or individual project: 

 This book provides insight into travel and travel-writing. It gives clear insight into the reasons travel peaked during the interwar period. This information would help form my argument for my essay, by providing evidence toward the dramatic increase in travel during this era and then explain the drastic decline in travel, with the commencement of the second world war. This book reconstructs the perspective of a young and intelligent person traveling from England, which was a part of the war as opposed to other areas. This needs to be considered when comparing travellers from England to travellers from other countries and the reasons behind the travel. Overall, this book provides a clear indication why travel peaked during the interwar period and how travel-writing was a shirt-lived art.