Travel Writers Online

Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding: Urban Place Writing Methodologies  Travel Writers Book Launch Totnes Totnes author, Dr Charlie Mansfield launched his new book for travel writers at Totnes Public Library, Devon UK at 11am on Friday 3rd March 2023.  The previous Zoom presentation for the European launch, on 10th January 2023, introduced the 3-step process for travel writers and researchers to engage with DMOs, city councils and tourism stakeholders. It gave an overview of dialogue journaling from Chapter 5 of our 2023 book, Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding , Abingdon: Routledge. Please click on the icon below to access the slides in Google Slides (works better if you have a Google Account).  Recording of Book Talk from Zoom Please fast-forward 4 minutes to avoid Zoom Admin Part 2 including question time

We are delighted to annouce the publication of Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding: Urban Place Writing Methodologies with Routledge, Taylor & Francis  Dr Charlie Mansfield and Dr Jasna Potočnik Topler  Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding provides tourism students with a practice-based approach to producing researched literary travel writing on an urban destination, using the writing process as a research tool in itself. The book is scientifically supported with full academic references for researchers. City councils and destination managers are seeking new ways to commission and sponsor professional authors as part of place-branding projects for tourism development. Given the increasing value of such content within the tourism industry, this book provides a cohesive overview of literary travel writing, presenting it as an inquiry process that can be applied by writer-researchers to spaces that have value to them. Travel writing is presented as a methodological p

Reclaiming the City US academic, Professor Kristin Ross spent periods of travel research in Paris in the 1980s (Ross 1988) to develop a new method of inquiry to link literary text and urban space.  Her findings will be used here to explain some of the key aspects of social space in French cities.  She chooses poetry as her data source quite deliberately, giving a challenging rationale for this decision.  Whilst the study of narrative prose in the nineteenth-century novel is conducted in French Studies departments of British and American universities with an unexplained assumption that these texts are a social production of reality, Ross argues that verse is considered to be 'a desiring production that is mere fantasy or wish fulfilment' (Ross, 1988, 11).  Her study values poetry as a discursive practice that can yield data on the social developments of an era.  Her key argument, or finding, from her textual analyses is that social space was transformed during the period of the

EACWP  The conference of the European Association of Creative Writing Programmes is a biannual event devoted to foster a European and Worldwide dialogue on the different approaches to creative writing education. The VI EACWP conference will take place in Madrid, in the context of Escuela de Escritores 20th anniversary, from Thursday 4 to Saturday 6 May 2023. The on-line format for proposals will only be accepted for the Multilingual Workshops. The deadline for submissions is February 24 2023 Teaching the art and craft of writing is a wonderful challenge. Can talent be created or just trained? How to enhance creativity? How do we shape up our students as writers? What role do reading, textual analysis, intertextuality, multilingualism and other strategies play in our teaching? How to make creative writing an inclusive discipline for all people, literatures and literary traditions? How to open it up to the diversity of new writers? What role will technologies play in the evolution of our

Architecture and the French Novel Second Empire architecture and the great department stores are a powerful visitor attraction for Paris in the twenty-first century. Many of the buildings of this period are extravagant mixtures of architectural style using references to gothic but with new building technologies, for example the iron girder, which reflect both France's imperial status and its material gains.  The French empire included both Vietnam and Algeria during this period, indeed the 1885 Maupassant novel, Bel Ami begins with its main character, Duroy, returning from military service in Algeria , and later in the story, land speculation in Algeria contributes to his wealth. The novel appears in English as The History of a Scoundrel in 1903 and gives a description of the Folies Bergère , a visitor attraction which had only opened in May 1869.  At the time of writing a further film adaptation of Bel Ami has been released (2012) directed by Declan Donnellan, demonstrating

French Novels in Literary Tourism The classic novels of France have a central theme that repeatedly deals with modern urban culture in a serious way.  This theme is expressed through the development of the French novel in the nineteenth century in a way which is quite different from English literature in the same period.  The realist writer, Balzac (1799-1850), for example presents a series of novels that chart life in Paris after the fall of Napoleon in 1815 which is very different in approach from the writing of Charles Dickens (1812-70).  Ultimately, this does have an effect on literary tourism associated with these writers today.  Even though Dickens is examining London life in the nineteenth century their literary styles are very different; Dickens uses humour and irony whereas Balzac tackles the issues of class in a more direct, unforgiving manner.  Using a non-comedic approach, like Balzac, Zola (1840-1902) embarks on a self-declared, serious scientific project in his series o