Page - 17 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert, Sandra Vlasta | Travel Writing 17 between text and image in an ephemeral sub-cultural form of writing: the zine. Taking two zines by British creators Emma Charleston and John Molesworth as examples, Kapp examines the ways in which zines use intermediality to convey psychogeographical walking. By conside- ring the combination of words and images in the zine in particular, she shows how the experi- ence of travelling correlates to the experience of reading. Kapp argues that ‘the psychogeogra- phical zine thus provides a territory into which the reader sets out to travel, a practice that, in this medium, requires its audience to subjectively complete an abstracted, simplified world of text and images’ (Kapp: 171). Erika Unterpertinger uses the method of literary mapping to visualize geographical infor- mation from the South Tyrolean collection of sagas Tales of the Fanes. With this contribution, the special issue comes full circle in two ways: first, maps are one of the most widely used (and earliest) visual elements of travelogues. It has been shown that although maps may aim to pro- vide a realistic depiction of a certain space, more often than not they distort reality. They can create spaces just as much as they reflect them. Therefore, both their accuracy and their aim must be critically assessed. Still, they can be very useful: in the case of Tales of the Fanes, the text does not contain any illustrations — only various references to actual places and spaces. The method of literary mapping enables us to visualize information (place names, physical and geographical features, movements in space, etc.) in maps, which then helps us to gain more information about a text and reveal hitherto unnoticed details. Thus, text is not alone in being able to describe images, as we saw above in the case of Fanny Lewald and Heinrich Heine; we as researchers can generate pictures from the texts we work with and use the former for a more productive analysis of the latter. This thematic issue also includes a section with an essay and two reviews. In his essay on August Strindberg and the travelogue of his journey through France in 1886, Holger Helm retraces the Swedish writer’s journey. In particular, Helm focuses on the views from the train, which Strindberg at times wrote about, at times sketched, and at times photographed. The visual elements in this travelogue are thus threefold: besides the actual traveller’s view of the landscapes he describes in the text, Strindberg tries to convey these vistas by drawing them and by taking pictures of them. We close the special issue with two reviews by Birgit Englert, one of which is dedicated to a coffee table book by the Bell Collective, a group of female travel photographers who began their careers on Instagram and who have now published their photographs in a printed book for the first time. The second review deals with a book by Franz Paul Horn, who combined a travelogue of a bicycle trip with two friends from Vienna to Teheran with the narratives of two refugees who travelled a similar route in the summer of 2015 — albeit in the other direction and under very different circumstances. While the bike trip by three young Austrian men is documented in numerous photographs, which form an important part of their travelogue, only a single picture on the back cover of the book depicts the journey made by the two men from Syria and Afghanistan — a visual reminder of the ‘regimes of mobility’ at play. Acknowledgements We would like to thank the contributors to this special issue and the peer reviewers of the articles for their valuable feedback. We would also like to thank the editors of MSCJ for their