Sultry Climates

This text sets out to explore the sexual motives of travel. It argues that the British have inherited from the 19th century three main versions of the tourist - the connoisseur, pilgrim or rebel - these identities having both a sexual as well as a cultural life.

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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.