Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre
Tim Hannigan
Hurst Publishers: 2021
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Tim Hannigan, a British author of several narrative histories on Indonesia, is on a meta quest in Travel Writing Tribe. As a bookish teenage surfer in the 1990s in Cornwall, England, he had gravitated to the writings of the towering figures of his fellow countrymen similarly ‘scholarly’ and ‘intrepid’—Eric Newby, Paul Theroux, Nick Danziger—and continued his love affair with such adventurers into adulthood, largely free of inner conflicts. That is, until he stumbled upon the academic field of travel writing studies, which owes much of its existence to the influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism.

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