Sultry Climates

Travel And Sex

Contributors

By Ian Littlewood

Formats and Prices

Price

$19.99

Price

$25.99 CAD

Format

Trade Paperback

Format:

Trade Paperback $19.99 $25.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around April 3, 2003. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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 cauth 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 travelers’ visits to Dresden streetwalkers and Venetian courtesans as it is to reckon with their visits to the Picture Gallery and the Doge’s Palace. To understand the Victorian passion for the Mediterranean is to be aware of Greek and Italian attractions that extended far beyond the historical. 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, that comes into full view only with the twentieth century’s cult of the sun. Suffice it to say that after reading Sultry Climates , you’ll never look at tourists in quite the same way again.

Genre:

On Sale
Apr 3, 2003
Page Count
256 pages
Publisher
Da Capo Press
ISBN-13
9780306812217

Ian Littlewood

About the Author

Ian Littlewood is the author of literary companions to both Paris and Venice. He has taught at universities in the United States, France, and Japan, and now teaches at the University of Sussex.

Learn more about this author