The first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates. The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives, with their distinctive representations of identities, places, and cultures, respond to today's globalized, high-speed world characterized by the dual mass movements of tourism and migration. Yet a corresponding cutting-edge discussion of twenty-first-century travel writing in German has until now been missing. The fourteen essays in Anxious Journeys redress this situation. They analyze texts by leading authors such as Felicitas Hoppe, Christoph Ransmayr, Julie Zeh, Navid Kermani, Judith Schalansky, Ilija Trojanow, and others, as well as topics such as Turkish-German travelogues and the relationship of comics to travel writing. The volume examines how writers engage with classic tropes of travel writing and how they react to the current sense of crisis and belatedness. It also links travel to ongoing debates about the role of the nation, mass migration, and the European project, as well as to Germany's place in the larger world order. Contributors: Karin Baumgartner, Heather Merle Benbow, Anke S. Biendarra, John Blair and Muriel Cormican, Nicole Coleman, Carola Daffner, Christina Gerhardt, Nicole Grewling, Gundela Hachmann, Andrew Wright Hurley, Christina Kraenzle, Magda Tarnawaska Senel, Monika Shafi, Sunka Simon. Karin Baumgartner is Professor of German at the University of Utah. Monika Shafi is Elias Ahuja Professor of German at the University of Delaware.

In the last few decades, the phrase "spatial turn" has received increased attention in German Studies, inspired by developments within the discipline of geography. The volume German Women Writers and the Spatial Turn: New Perspectives engages the analytical category of space and the spatial turn in the context of German women's writing. The collection of essays divides its discussion of spatiality in German literature into sections that reflect privileged sites within the current scholarly debates around space. Essays look to such issues as environmentalism, globalization, migration and immigration, concerns of belonging, points of encounter, spaces and places of (im-)mobility, topographies of departure and arrival, movement, motion, or shifting identities. German Women Writers and the Spatial Turn: New Perspectives continues the challenge to understand the representation of space and place in German language texts by focusing on how spatial theory figures into the realm of feminist thinking and writing.