Sultry Climates : Travel and Sex since the Grand Tour - Softcover

Ian Littlewood

2.79

28 ratings by Goodreads

9780719562075: Sultry Climates : Travel and Sex since the Grand Tour

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0719562074 ISBN 13: 9780719562075

Publisher: JOHN MURRAY, 2002

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The sexual motives of travel are rarely spelled out. Travel books, social histories, guides and brochures favour a more wholesome image of tourist pursuits. But in the shadows there is an alternative history of tourism made up of precisely the details that ususally go unmentioned It is this history that Ian Littlewood sets out to explore.;He argues that we inherited from the 19th century three main versions of the tourist - as Connoisseur, Pilgrim or Rebel. But these identities have a sexual as well as a cultural life. If we want to make sense of the Grand Tour, it is quite as important to take account of Boswell's visits to Dresden streetwalkers and Venetian courtesans as of his visits to the Dresden picture gallery and the Doge's Palace. To understand the Victorian passion for the Mediterranean, we need to be aware of Italy's cultural attractions but also of the sensual revolution it offered to tourists as diverse as J.A. Symonds and Margaret Fuller or Fanny Kemble and E.M. Forster. Byron's travels in Greece, like Isherwood's in Germany or Orton's in Mexico, had as much to do with sexual rebellion as with more conventional tourist motives.What emerges from the many travellers discussed here is a continuing thread of tourist experience, for the most part neglected or ignored, that comes to public view only with the 20th century's cult of the sun. From the American expatriates of the 1920s to the package holiday-makers of today, sun-worshippers have reshaped the old tourist categories, acknowledging erotic pleasure;Women as well as men, gay people as well as straight, are the subject of this book. It will be difficult after reading it to look at tourists in quite the same way again.

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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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