The Night Writer: The Emergence of Nocturnal Travel Writing

Part of the process of re-thinking travel writing in the post-COVID era is to observe and illuminate alternate and subordinated perspectives. This opens up new ways of approaching the genre in the future, for both writers and scholars. In this chapter the notion of nocturnal travel writing, as a form that allows for different voices, unfamiliar views and new ideas with strong historical precedents, is examined. The chapter looks at the alignment with the flâneur, the origins of the style in Paris and London and how this is now practised in a more contemporary and vertical sense.