The world made flesh: experiences in fragility in British travel literature
Abstract
Starting from the assumption that the staging of the traveller's body is a topos of English-language travel literature, this paper examines, beyond physical representations, the symbolic body of the artist at work in travel narratives. Drawing on three travel writers who left their imprint on the twentieth century—D H Lawrence, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Lawrence Durrell—we show how the traveller’s vulnerable and suffering body becomes the site of a contemplative meditation that invites us to cross the boundaries of the visible and to explore the ontological fragility at the source of artistic creation.