RSA Journal, the official journal of the Italian Association of North American Studies (AISNA), invites submissions for its 2017 issue on “Touring Texts: Tourism and Writing in US Culture.” While critics have noted time and again the constitutive nexus between travel (in its manifold guises), travelogues, and the formation of American culture(s), the specific practice of tourism has emerged over the past decades as one of the most interesting fields of research. The multiple critical perspectives applied to its interdisciplinary nature, spanning over the boundaries of several disciplines (sociology, anthropology, ethnography, semiotics, history, cultural studies, and literature, to name but a few), have identified tourism as a powerful theoretical tool for studying and understanding social and cultural transformation, turning it into nothing less than a hermeneutic paradigm. From the turn of the nineteenth century onward, American culture has consistently and conspicuously engaged touristic issues in a variety of texts. But despite increased interest, many aspects of the interactions between tourism and the literary and cultural sphere remain to be further understood. We invite articles that explore, from a comparative, transnational, historical perspective, new marginal, emergent, or dominant forms of exchange between literature, history, and tourism within American Studies, as well as re-readings of canonical texts through the lens of tourism studies, or of forgotten and overlooked texts in which touristic concerns figure significantly.

 

Topics might include, but are not restricted to:

Narratives of tourist practices;
Literary representations of new forms of tourism;
Touring cultures vs. the touring of cultures;
Touring texts vs. the touring of texts;
Case studies of the interaction between the touristic/literary/historical fields;
Tourism and gender/class/race/religion;
Touristic narratives and consumption;
Travelogues within/outside the US;
The literary and the tourist gaze;
Alternative tourisms and its representations;
Tourism, Nationalism, Globalization;
Literary tourism, heritage industry, and living history.

 

200 word abstracts and a short c.v. should be sent by September 1, 2016 to the Guest Editors, Simone Francescato (simone.francescato@unive.it) and Carlo Martinez (carlo.martinez@unich.it).

Acceptance notification will be emailed by October 15. The deadline for submission of accepted articles is March 15, 2017.

RSA Journal is a peer reviewed journal. Submissions must be in English, must use the MLA style, and must be no longer that 6.000 words (40.000 characters, including spaces, notes, and works cited).