After surveying the relationship between travel writing and postcolonial theory, this article focuses on two home travel accounts by American travel writer Bill Bryson: The Lost Continent (1989) and Notes from a Small Island (1995). By referring to the work of Debbie Lisle, who has written extensively on Bryson’s travel writing, its aim is to demonstrate that those (supposedly) postcolonial discourses which are said to permeate Bryson’s travelogues about foreign countries also appear in these two texts. Particularly significant is the presence of the discourses of “nostalgia” and “melancholy”, as well as the author’s self-representation as a “unique travel ego” and his widespread use of irony. These strategies, it is argued, depend in the first place not much on the perpetuation of a colonial legacy, but on the fact that travelling and writing are two “practices of knowledge” which promote per se the marking of differences. In this regard, travel writing, as the novelistic genre that derives from such practices, cannot help but reproduce the epistemological distance between the self and the world.
The Lost Continent Bill Bryson
The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America Bill Bryson, Author Harper Perennial $14.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-06-092008-1. More By and About This Author. A Different Kind of Journey.
The Lost Continent Book Pdf
‘I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to’ And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left.
Des Moines couldn’t hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England, he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of trim and sunny place where the films of his youth were set. Instead, his search led him to Anywhere, USA; a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by lookalike people with a penchant for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost; lost to itself because blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a stranger in his own land. Bryson’s acclaimed first success, The Lost Continent is a classic of travel literature – hilariously, stomach-achingly, funny, yet tinged with heartache – and the book that first staked Bill Bryson’s claim as the most beloved writer of his generation.