Literary Journeys: Mapping Fictional Travels Across the World of Literature

In this transportive survey, literature professors and other contributors reflect on the treks undertaken by characters in literary works ranging from Homer’s Odyssey to Amor Towles’s Lincoln Highway. Sam Jordison contends that though Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ostensibly chronicles a band of pilgrims’ trip from Southwark, London, to Canterbury Cathedral, the religion-inflected stories actually offer “a tour around the clerical and lay structures of late-fourteenth-century England.” John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, argues Susan Shillinglaw, charts the Joad family’s migration from Oklahoma to California alongside a cultural shift toward a working-class consciousness grounded in the shared destitution brought on by the Dust Bowl. Elsewhere, contributors discuss Robert Bolaño’s perspective on “poetry as a journey, a way of life” in The Savage Detectives, Yann Martel’s allegorical vision of “a civilization entrapped with everything wild it has sought to cage” in Life of Pi, and Colson Whitehead’s assertion that America owes its “economic might” to the stolen labor of enslaved African Americans in The Underground Railroad. The bite-size entries offer punchy takes on celebrated literature and are accompanied by plentiful photos of artwork inspired by the books or the locales discussed in them. The result is a trip well worth taking. Photos. (Aug.)