Journeys in the Sun: Travel Literature and Desire in the Balearic Islands (1903–1939)

The Mediterranean and the Balearic Islands have always enticed the minds of British travellers. In the first years of the twentieth century, the tourist industry made the islands accessible for a wide number of visitors, who depicted them in pictures and words. In the following decades, however, the image of the islands shifted and developed considerably from a quiet and pastoral winter resort to a popular destination for pleasure-seeking tourists and "sea ‘n’ sun" tourism. Taking these last representations as a starting point, this book travels back in time to explain how, by whom and why these images were created/shifted/developed to articulate the ultimate place of leisure and pleasure signified in today’s Majorca and Ibiza. The depiction and the evolution of topics such as ‘travel’, ‘tourism’, ‘authenticity’, ‘landscape’, ‘South’, ‘North’, ‘margin’, ‘centre’, ‘exoticism’, ‘people’, ‘costumes’ and ‘customs’ are examined in order to establish their contribution to the formulation of the ‘Balearic paradise’ in the first third of the twentieth century. This book will help the reader to understand the imagery associated with the islands today.

Eduard Moyà is Lecturer in English at the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) and member of the UIB research group RELATMIT. His PhD thesis, Balearic Visions (2012), was conferred the Dean’s Award for Research Higher Excellence Degree at the Graduate School of The University of Queensland (Australia). He has co-edited the book Le voyage dans tous ses états (2016) and collaborated in the dictionary of literary visitors on the Balearics, Entre la calma y la inspiración (2016).