Potential immigrants do not even apply for a visa because they also confront social forces from the community bearing on their families that deter them from leaving. Many young adults become deterred from migrating not merely from visa requirements, but also due to opposition and pressure from the family. Despite how most of China has a patrilocal kinship system and culture that more strongly sanctions men from marrying outside their bloodline, Chinese parents are much more likely to oppose women going abroad than men, even if this opposition decreases as they age. Aside from overt opposition children may face, many women specifically are discouraged from migrating abroad or even traveling abroad due to concerns about their daughter’s physical safety, socioeconomic dependence on their parents, and societal peer pressure. Such concerns are particularly strong in the patriarchal context of China as it is mediated by a traditional filial duty amongst the one-child-only generation toward their parents and the intense influence that parents exercise over the educational, career, and marital choices of their adult children – both of which have a stronger deterrent effect on daughters than on sons.

My results about denial, deterrence, and disenchantment provide empirical support to how a push-retain-pull-repel model can help us understand why many remain ambivalent (im)mobile and never immigrate. I also review how my findings about each mechanism demonstrate how socioeconomic resources and social ties both facilitate and increase the costs of migration due to an interaction of immigration policy and social forces in society that incentivize individuals to establish stable ties to their society rather than migrate. This (im)mobility paradox makes international migration a far more difficult decision and unlikely event than many in migrant-destination countries perceive it to be. Finally, I reflect on how my data from the PIS the interaction of immigration policy and social forces stratifies potential immigrants who never immigrated due to deterrence, denial, and disenchantment into respectively an under-class, a lower class, and an upper class in the origin society, mirroring the stratification of immigrants through different pathways of assimilation in the migrant-destination society.

This chapter explores the practices and economies of pilgrimage within the Byzantine cultural sphere. The development of Christian pilgrimage sites in the early Byzantine period contributed to the consolidation of Christianity by offering performative spaces for forming and asserting Christian identity. Attention in the first half is given to the origins of Christian pilgrimage, travel economies and the intersections between religious groups within the ritual spaces of pilgrimage sites, along with a brief survey of scholarly approaches to the phenomenon. The second half of the chapter offers two ‘multi-religious’ sites, the Oak of Mamre and the Baths of Ḥammat Gader, as case studies to further explore pilgrimage centres as locations that facilitated experimentation and readjustment in religious identification. Material and literary evidence suggest that pilgrimage activities at these two sites were not simply expressions of Byzantine piety but were instrumental in transforming and maintaining cultural identifications.

This chapter traces William Burroughs’ self-imposed exile across the Americas, North Africa, and Europe, arguing that the geographic settings where he lived were integral to the conceptual structure of his work. Rather than treating setting as backdrop or exotic inspiration, Burroughs reimagines place as a set – simultaneously stage, fiction, and experiential filter – through which he explores identity, language, and systems of control. From his ironic travel ethnographies in Junky and The Yage Letters, to the colonial parody of Queer, and the fractured landscapes of Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, Burroughs engages in a layered literary expatriation that aligns him with, but ultimately distinguishes him from, figures like Bowles, Baldwin, Stein, and Beckett. Focusing on Tangier and Paris as creative epicenters, the chapter argues that Burroughs’ spatial displacements catalyze formal and thematic experimentation. His work reveals a persistent tension between immersive estrangement and mediated construction, exposing alterity not only in foreign cultures, but within language and self.

Chapter 4 turns to the danse macabre and the pathologization of motor disorders in two novels preoccupied with non-normative embodiment: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Smollett’s Humphry Clinker. Eighteenth-century conduct manuals often defined proper “carriage,” “comportment,” “mien,” and “air” in opposition to unusual or awkward motion. Resisting the all-too-common assumption that eccentric bodies function primarily as comic relief, Landreth looks to essays by Hume and Erasmus Darwin together with modern theorizations of ableism and motion sickness to read Sterne’s and Smollett’s novels as experiments in crafting new forms of sensorimotor selfhood. Both novels dispute practices of self-observation championed by Lockean philosophy and the Richardsonian novel tradition and ultimately challenge the assumption that the expression of one’s interior selfhood is – or should be – the main aim of fiction.

Taking the concept of the Anthropocene seriously has changed environmental writing. The Anthropocene concept shifts understanding of the environment from a primal nature to a second nature permeated by human activity. Recognizing new patterns in the atmosphere, distribution of species, water temperature, weather patterns, and even the stability of the earth’s crust, authors tell new stories. Narrative structures as basic as Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey have changed. A contrast between two environments is vital to the hero’s journey, and a transformation of the hero occurs with the passage between them. A familiar domestic world contrasts with a dangerous forest or labyrinthine subterranean zone; the differences between home and the wilderness or another foreign terrain then require the hero to redefine himself. In the Anthropocene, however, nearby and distant lands all reveal the touch of the human hand, and the hero’s prospects for transformation are not triggered by contact with otherworldliness. Instead, the hero of the prototypical genre of the Anthropocene (climate fiction) discovers within himself a latent barbarism together with a counterintuitive sense of awe.

This chapter posits that domesticity played a central role in Ginsberg’s life and work. Although images of mobility recur in his work, reflections on his childhood home and his adult apartment life recur as well. The first section of the chapter interprets Ginsberg’s needs for both travel and a homelife as a nexus rather than a binary opposition. The second section provides an account of his discordant childhood home, a midlife pivot in his sense of the domestic, and the varying circumstances of his apartment existence in the East Village of Manhattan. The final section analyzes the role that home, neighborhood, and his “Jewish-enough” identity played in his poems, including “Manhattan May Day Midnight,” “Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters,” and “My Kitchen in New York.” In Ginsberg's later poems, home is an arena of presentness and a harbor of writing.

Bowen’s letters, novels, and short stories all attest to her love of Italy, a country that she visited often and one where she experienced excitement, love, grief, sorrow, and occasionally boredom. The country provided the location for significant events in her life: the breaking off of an engagement; the shared experiences of a country providing solace when she and her lover, Charles Ritchie, were apart; facing both the potential and actual loss of her family home, Bowen’s Court; or mourning the deaths of Humphry House, her former lover, and her husband, Alan Cameron. Like many of her characters in her novels and short stories, Bowen’s response to, and relationship with, Italy is multi-layered and nuanced, the result of her experiences, both physical and emotional, over many years. This chapter draws on those experiences in Italy, placing Bowen’s writing – in letters, essays, selected early short stories, novels, and her ‘travelogue’, A Time in Rome – within their biographical, bibliographical, and geographical contexts.

This chapter examines Pablo Neruda’s deep and complex relationship with the Soviet Union, as reflected in his memoirs Confieso que he vivido: Memorias (I Confess That I Have Lived: Memoirs, 1974). It explores the poet’s encounters, reflections, and evolving perceptions of the country, its people, and their connections to Chile. It analyzes Neruda’s initial fascination with Soviet socialism and communism and his gradual disillusionment with certain aspects of the regime under Stalin’s leadership. The chapter delves into the complexities of the poet’s political and personal allegiances reflected in his encounters with the prominent figures of the Soviet intelligentsia, such as Ilya Ehrenburg. The comparative analysis of Neruda’s memoirs and poetry allows us to shed light on the intertwined histories of Chile and the Soviet Union, highlighting the enduring impact of Neruda’s Soviet odyssey on his literary work and political convictions.

Across her fiction and non-fiction, Elizabeth Bowen is consistently intrigued by hotels. From the grand Italian Riviera establishment of her debut novel, The Hotel, to the series of dingy ‘back rooms in hotels … with no view’ occupied by Portia Quayne and her mother in The Death of the Heart, many of Bowen’s characters occupy, however briefly, the transitory, impermanent space of the hotel. Although characters move through hotel space, they are never left unmarked by it. Portia’s teacher observes her ‘hotel habits’, which she cannot shake. This chapter explores Bowen’s preoccupation with the space of the hotel in her writing, and demonstrates her acute sense not only of its unique spatiality, but also of the intricacies of hotel temporality. More specifically, I argue that Bowen is a writer who is profoundly sensitive to the relationship between people and the spaces they occupy, and this sensitivity comes to the fore in the hotel phenomenologies of her characters.

This chapter examines significant gay American travel writers from the nineteenth century to the present who mine the political, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of travel writing to interrogate the experience of non-heteronormative life. From Herman Melville’s Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) to Robert McAlmon’s time in Paris in the 1920s and Edmund White’s landmark account of travel in the US (published in 1980), the chapter traces how experiences of exoticism, exile, and home have conditioned the representation of gay masculinity.

In the first part of Chapter 5, Goodman considers some basic affinities of Emerson and Montaigne that are evident even before Emerson published “Montaigne, or the Skeptic”: their use of the essay form to register spontaneity and contingency, their critique of books and travel, their discussions of the play of moods, their attention to themselves. The second part of Chapter 5 considers the shape of Emerson’s Montaigne essay, which has its own moods and its own architecture, and which concludes by taking what the critic Barbara Packer calls “a miraculous act of levitation” outside the play of moods to the moral sentiment that “outweighs them all.” In evaluating this leap, Goodman deploys Emerson’s own skepticism against his more metaphysical and dogmatic tendencies. “Why so talkative in public,” he writes, “when each of my neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute?”

This chapter looks at the connection between travel and narrative fiction in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It shows how writers of novels borrowed from, expanded on, and reimagined accounts of actual voyages and descriptions of faraway places. Authors such as Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift took details and ideas from travelers such as William Dampier, Woodes Rogers, and James Cooke. Well-known novels, including Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), reflected on and reconsidered England’s relationship to the wider world beyond Europe and the creation of the British Empire – at times critically, at times enthusiastically. The purpose of travelers, for the most part, was to say what they saw and did. It was the prerogative of writers of fiction to digest these facts and reflect on what they meant.

The early modern period witnessed an expansion of global trade that accelerated the movement of people, goods, and technologies, as well as cultural practices, languages, tastes, and ideas. This chapter examines the representation of commodities in the period by focussing on an illustrative example, coffee in early modern England, and the various literary forms to which it gave rise. It charts the passage of coffee from the Ottoman Empire to western Europe, the parallel circulation of textual material on coffee across works of travel, natural history, and natural philosophy, and the emergence of the coffeehouses and the new modes of literary sociability they produced. In doing so, it reveals the importance of this commodity to some of the most significant developments in the literary and intellectual culture of the period, including shifting conceptions of taste, fraught debates about identity and assimilation, and the invention of new forms of fiction.

Chapter 3 turns to the location of work, examining the spatial dimensions of work on various scales. It begins by looking at regional differences and the contrasts between rural and urban work. The former were remarkably muted, but rural–urban differences are clear. The importance of travel and types of transport is considered as an important element of work largely neglected in existing studies. The final part of the chapter examines workspaces, quantifying inside and outside work and considering the dimension of privacy.