This conference is part of the research project “Exotic Spain: American
Travel Literature about Spain (1900-1950)” (ATLAS) funded by the
Research and Knowledge Transfer Office of Alicante University
(GRE18-14 A). The project focuses on the study of a corpus of
American authors who traveled to Spain in the first half of the twentieth
century, especially on those texts that look beyond the vision of Spain
related to the experience of the Spanish Civil War.
ATLAS addresses, from an interdisciplinary perspective, a variety of literary texts and analyzes how the vision of Spain has been constructed and how the uses and customs of the chroniclers—as opposed to local
uses— influenced their writing and their representation of the territory. Following Mieke Bal, who in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) invites us “to explore the intellectual excitement of interdisciplinary
cultural analysis”, ATLAS plays with the boundaries between literature, linguistics, history, geography, visual arts and philosophy to explore the perception of Spain within a particular historical context, which deserves
further critical attention. The project also traces the routes drawn in the different travelogues to construct the authors’ literary cartographies with an informative and pedagogical purpose in mind.
This conference aims to be not only a discussion forum on the project itself, but also an opportunity to further explore both the physical and intellectual journey that these traveling experiences involved. For this purpose,
we welcome paper and round-table proposals that deal with the presence of writers, intellectuals and American travelers in the Iberian Peninsula between 1850 and 1950 including, but not restricted to, the following topics:
● Literary creations—fictional and non-fictional—based on traveling.
● Testimonial and autobiographical writing, literary chronicles, travel writing.
● Contrastive studies on travel writing.
● Traveling and chronicles in times of war and postwar.
● Travel experiences and their correlation with visual arts.
● Philosophical approaches towards travel experiences.
● The “Self” and the “Other” in travel experiences.
● Traveling and travel experiences from a gender-based perspective.
● Spatial criticism, representations of rural and urban spaces.
● Artistic and architectural tourism.
● Studies on corpus linguistics and travel literature.
● Traveling and travel experiences from an ecocritical perspective.
● Traveling and geography: geocriticism and geolocalization; literature and cartography and study of the territory.
● Approaches towards travel experiences within a historical framework.
● Sociological, anthropological, ethnographic approaches towards travel experiences.
● Travel literature and digital humanities.
The following plenary speakers have been confirmed:
Dr. Pere Gifra Adoher (Pompeu Fabra University)
Dr. Eulalia Piñero Gil (Autonomous University of Madrid)
Please, submit your proposals in English or Spanish (250-300 words and 3-5 keywords) to alicante.atlas@ua.es by February 29, 2020.
Organizing Committee
Sara Prieto García-Cañedo, U. de Alicante
Lorraine Kerslake Young, U. de Alicante
Remedios Perni Llorente, U. de Alicante
José Antonio Sánchez Fajardo, U. de Alicante
Scientific Commitee
Xavier Amat Montesinos, U. de Alicante
María Encarnación Carrillo García, U. de Murcia
Alba Mª Gálvez Vidal, U. Católica de Murcia
Benito García Elías, U. de Alicante
Macarena García-Avello, U. de Cantabria
Raquel García-Cuevas García, U. of Kent
Eva Espinar, U. de Alicante
Helena Establier, U. de Alicante
Terry Gifford, Bath Spa University
Lourdes López Ropero, U. de Alicante
Elena Martínez-Acacio, U. of Michigan
Mónica Moreno, U. de Alicante
Jorge Olcina Cantos, U. de Alicante
Robert Tally, Texas State University
Raúl Travé Molero, Ostelea, E. de Turismo
Website: https://web.ua.es/es/atlas
Twitter: @ATLAS_Alicante