In 2014, Juliet McKenna wrote 'The genre debate: Science fiction travels farther than literary fiction' (McKenna 2014). This title aligns literature and genre with travel, but she also resorts to place-based metaphors to establish the distance between specific types of writing. 'Speculative fiction', she suggests, 'prompts the reader to pay so much more attention, looking for the details that make sense of this strange world. Reading speculative fiction isn't arriving in Manchester. It's finding yourself in Outer Mongolia with no help from Lonely Planet or a rough Guide'. Cli-fi is notoriously difficult to locate generically, but thinking about it in relation to travel may assist in understanding how it works to develop contemporary identities. This paper therefore examines specifically Australian cli-fi, predominantly from the 21 st century and its use of concepts familiar from travel writing. These include touristic alienation/authenticity, destination image perception as it relates to revisit intention, and mental time travel. This enables us to highlight local Australian literature in a global context in relation to cli-fi and travel. We argue that travel concepts as they are engaged in non-narrative travel literature enables an engagement with cli-fi that moves beyond debates about its generic or literary status to deeper more existentially relevant understandings of what it means to be human in the 21 st century.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.