Department of English

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"The stutter of the world beneath you": the literature of cycle travel
(2022) Buchanan, Dave; Norcliffe, Glen; Brogan, Una; Cox, Peter; Gao, Boyang; Hadland, Tony; Hanlon, Sheila; Jones, Tim; Oddy, Nicholas; Vivanco, Luis
The earliest accounts of cycle travel, from the 1870s, mostly in magazines in England and America, tended to be not so much literary as itinerary: plain-prose descriptive narratives of distances rode, places visited, and technical and logistical details about things like road conditions, supply points, and accommodation. The three main types of cycle-travel writers that emerged in the late nineteenth century – pilgrims, ramblers, and adventurers – remain responsible for the vast majority of cycle-travel literature produced today. Not all cycle-travel writers emphasize destinations or specific routes the way pilgrims do. In fact, a vibrant tradition of cycle-travel writing from the 1890s to the 1940s is more concerned with celebrating the experience of the ride as an end in itself. Both pilgrims and ramblers tend to take a leisurely, recreational, small-scale approach to travel, one that emphasizes interactions between traveller, place, history, texts, and nature rather than distances covered and difficult terrain traversed.