Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex

by IanLittlewood (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2003

  $21.50

  Here, said the reviewer for Salon.com, is a book that is lively and accessible and erudite...the perfect companion for anyone who wouldn't be caught dead with an airport paperback-though I wouldn't want to wager which one provides more juice. Historically, the sexual motives of travel have rarely been spelled out in travel guides and brochures. Sultry Climates is an alternative history of tourism, made up of precisely the details that usually go unmentioned. As Ian Littlewood demonstrates with dazzling elegance and wit, if we want to make sense of the celebrated Grand Tour of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, it's as important to take account of travellers' visits to Dresden streetwalkers and Venetian courtesans as it is to reckon with their visits to the Dresden picture gallery and the Doge's Palace. From Byron in Greece to Isherwood in Germany, from American expatriates on the Left Bank to Orton in Morocco and right up to the present day, what emerges from these experiences is a continuing motif of tourism, previously neglected or ignored- a breathless book, a Grand Tour in and of itself (Los Angeles Times).

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $3.44

  The sexual motives of travel are rarely spelled out. Travel books, social histories, guides and brochures favour a more wholesome image of tourist pursuits. But in the shadows there is an alternative history of tourism made up of precisely the details that ususally go unmentioned It is this history that Ian Littlewood sets out to explore.;He argues that we inherited from the 19th century three main versions of the tourist - as Connoisseur, Pilgrim or Rebel. But these identities have a sexual as well as a cultural life. If we want to make sense of the Grand Tour, it is quite as important to take account of Boswell's visits to Dresden streetwalkers and Venetian courtesans as of his visits to the Dresden picture gallery and the Doge's Palace. To understand the Victorian passion for the Mediterranean, we need to be aware of Italy's cultural attractions but also of the sensual revolution it offered to tourists as diverse as J.A. Symonds and Margaret Fuller or Fanny Kemble and E.M. Forster. Byron's travels in Greece, like Isherwood's in Germany or Orton's in Mexico, had as much to do with sexual rebellion as with more conventional tourist motives.What emerges from the many travellers discussed here is a continuing thread of tourist experience, for the most part neglected or ignored, that comes to public view only with the 20th century's cult of the sun. From the American expatriates of the 1920s to the package holiday-makers of today, sun-worshippers have reshaped the old tourist categories, acknowledging erotic pleasure;Women as well as men, gay people as well as straight, are the subject of this book. It will be difficult after reading it to look at tourists in quite the same way again.