Sultry climates: Travel and sex since the Grand Tour - Hardcover

Littlewood, Ian

2.79

28 ratings by Goodreads

9780719556029: Sultry climates: Travel and sex since the Grand Tour

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719556023 ISBN 13: 9780719556029

Publisher: J. Murray, 2001

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Book by Littlewood, Ian

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Review:

Travel can mean travail, risk, even danger. Given all that, why have so many people over the course of history taken the trouble to take themselves out of their familiar surroundings and wander off to distant, unfamiliar places?

Well, the rewards for the adventurous traveler are many, writes literary historian Ian Littlewood, among them the promise of self-discovery, of education, of broadening one's horizons. But, more elementally, there's another lure: the prospect of landing in a strange new bed with an exotic partner somewhere far from home. "Travel," Littlewood neatly observes, "tends to undermine moral absolutes." And so many travelers have found out for themselves: Oliver Goldsmith, for instance, who concluded of Italy, "sensual bliss is all the nation knows"; James Boswell, who filled his diaries of travels to the continent with "sultanesque fantasy" and some sultanesque fact; and Lord Byron, who, "having left England in a blaze of scandal ... took full advantage of the sexual privileges of exile."

Littlewood's learned but engaging study takes a fresh look at the cultural history of journeying from a fly-on-the-bedroom-wall point of view, and fans of literary travel will find much of interest in his pages. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

Ian Littlewood is the author of literary companions to both Paris and Venice: 'marvellously rich reading', Sunday Telegraph; 'the only complaint is that it's too short', Spectator. He has taught at universitites in France, the USA and Japan, and now teaches at the University of Sussex.

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