Travel literature and the infrastructural unconscious

Abstract

Critical approaches to travel writing have tended to overlook the mundane, everyday infrastructures at work in the background of mobile lives, from the roads and tunnels guiding human movement, to the networks of electric cables and pipelines channelling flows of energy and information. For many in the industrialized world, infrastructure has come to form a Lukácsian ‘second nature’ that remains invisible due to its sheer ubiquity; for this reason, the spaces and technologies that facilitate movement in travel narratives often go unnoticed.