Slow Travels in a Canoe: on Two Recent Narratives by David Gange and Alys Fowler
Slow Travels in a Canoe: on Two Recent Narratives by David Gange and Alys Fowler

Summary/Abstract: The growing interest in social science research in slow travel has been complemented by emerging attention among scholars of travel writing paid to the phenomenon of the slow journey narrative. To date, there has been significant attention paid to pedestrian journeys, notably in their Romantic manifestations but also in the context of the contemporary return to walking among authors such as Robert Macfarlane, Bernard Ollivier and Sylvain Tesson. This paper turns to a sub-genre that has hitherto attracted limited critical attention, the travelogue that recounts journeys by canoe or kayak. It considers two texts in which canoeing becomes a means of exploring very different parts of the British Isles: Alys Fowler’s Hidden Nature: A Voyage of Discovery (2018) and David Gange’s The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel (2019). I will argue that, with the first of these focused on the canal networks of Birmingham, the second on the East coast of Great Britain, these very different travelogues nevertheless permit an exploration in the contemporary travelogue of questions of history, slowness, gender and the travelling self.

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