Abstract

JOURNAL OF TOURISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE BOOK REVIEW Illusion and Disillusionment: Travel Writing in the Modern Age, edited by Roberta Micallef, Boston, Ilex Foundation, 2018, vii+182 pp., $19.95 (paperback), ISBN-13: There is, it seems, a new center for the study of travel writing in the United States. For over a decade now, literature faculty at Boston University have been quietly conducting interdisci- plinary reading groups and workshops that probe and push at field’s frontiers. Their meetings have inspired an exciting series of edited volumes, including On the Wonders of Land and Sea: Persianate Travel Writing (Boston: Ilex Foundation, 2013) and Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing (2022). This review considers the series’ second installment, Illusion and Disillu- sionment: Travel Writing in the Modern Age (2019). Edited by Roberta Micallef, the book’s eight chronologically organized chapters bring together travel writing from around the world in comparative perspective. The travel authors they study are linguistically and geographically diverse, but are united in being ‘modern:’ with just one exception, they belong to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume’s chronological organization means that the travel writers in the book’s first five chapters are all men: an Italian priest in China (Menegon),