The Planetary Consciousness of British Travel Writers

Global travel, advanced in the early 20th century by trains, automobiles, and airplanes, transformed modernist thought and experience. Stephen Kern has commented that in the modern period "a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing of time and space. Technological innovations including the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, and airplane established the material foundation for this reorientation." (1983, pp. 1-2). Emerging travel technologies not only hurled passengers through multiple time zones in a day but also brought to the fore a global awareness regarding Earth as a globe in space and one's position on it. As early as 1909, while traveling in Florence, Virginia Woolf had noted in her diary, "It is strange how one begins to hold a globe in one's head: I can travel from Florence to Fitzroy Square on solid land all the time" (1984, p. 399). This paper traces the ways modernist British travel writers challenged England's geographical and geopolitical imagination at the turn of the 20th century through their travel narratives.