At the heart of Segalen's meditations on the subject was the "Law of Bovarysme", advanced by his friend and mentor Jules de Gaultier in Le Bovarysme: La psychologie dans l'oeuvre de Flaubert (1892), as the rule that "every being which conceives of itself necessarily conceives itself to be other than it actually is" ("tout etre qui se concoit, se concoit necessairement autre qu'il n'est"). Gaultier finds in Emma Bovary the exemplary instance of this pathological tendency to imagine oneself otherwise than one is -pathological because it is the ruling passion in Emma's life, and one that ultimately destroys her. The link between Bovarysme and exoticism can be made by Segalen because both are psychological phenomena. "I conceive otherwise", he writes in the Essay, "and, immediately, the vision is enticing. All of exoticism lies herein."

Although Segalen had doubts about retaining the term exotisme, wondering whether it might be better to coin a new word to describe his subject, in the end he believed he could strip away its semantic sediment -"its cheap finery: palm tree and camel; tropical helmet; black skins and yellow sun" -to recover the "original purity" of its significance: in Segalen's view, "nothing but the feeling of experiencing the purity and intensity of Diversity". Leaving to one side the obvious objections to such invented origins, it is clear that Segalen's reservations about the word's historical taintedness have not gone away.

Particularly in the work of contemporary anglophone critics, where Said's analysis of colonialist discourse in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism has proved so decisive, exoticism remains a much maligned term. For influential writers such as Homi Bhabha it remains linked to colonial concepts of "otherness", yet another way of representing the essential difference between "us" (who represent) and "them" (who are represented).

You might think, then, that Forsdick is a postcolonial critic swimming against the tide in his efforts to salvage exoticism as a term of critical currency.

Yet by compassing trends in French-language texts, where ideas about exoticism and diversity have developed in a climate less receptive to postcolonial orthodoxies, Forsdick is able to negotiate the twin perils of "imperialist nostalgia" (as recently revived in France, for example, by certain figures in the Pour une litterature voyageuse movement) and, on the other side, the blandly celebratory mirage of a conflict-free multiculturalism. His project is therefore, like Segalen's, an essentially recuperative one, but whereas Segalen sought to recover exoticism from the neo-Romantic effusions of colonialists such as Pierre Loti, Forsdick wants to rescue the term from the postcolonial polemics of critics like Bhabha.

This theorizing about exoticism and diversity lays the groundwork for Forsdick's wider exploration of how "travel", as both an idea and a practice, has fluctuated through the twentieth century. As the pan Continental adventurism of the colonial era has shifted to a more attenuated and reflexive approach to both travel and travel writing, the focus has moved away from the grand exoticism of "elsewhere" to the often obscured diversity of domestic spaces.

This, of course, raises some difficult questions about how far a redefined understanding of what it means to travel can be taken before the term itself becomes emptied of real meaning - Forsdick's suggestion that travel now encompasses "a more diverse range of spatial practices", for example, is already too abstract (what is not travel on this formulation?). Such expansiveness naturally feeds into a more widely drawn understanding of "travel writing", along with all the anxieties that adhere to a label used to cover such a wide range. Ian Jack, contemplating the porous borders of the genre in his introduction to The Granta Book of Travel (1998), alighted on the one expectation common to all travel writing: our need to believe that the writer did not simply make it up. Forsdick refuses to be drawn by such issues of generic policing, however, and his distinction between "travel writing" (historically a more documentary mode) and "travel literature" (which accommodates both real and imagined journeys) ends up leaving the field wide open.

While travel literature is the primary concern of Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures, Forsdick also looks beyond the literary to other cultural productions associated with travel: the 1931 Exposition coloniale, Albert Kahn's vast photographic project Archives de la Planete, and even accounts of transcontinental Citroen 2CV journeys in the 1950s. These various enterprises were all informed by a feeling that some measure of the world's diversity was in retreat, and that travelogues, journal accounts and photography were ways of recording the remaining traces of exoticism before its demise.