Yet Forsdick argues that this anxiety over decline, rather than simply increasing, is in fact part of a cyclical phenomenon, an attitude that continually revolves through opposing visions of diversity's inexorable decline and creative persistence. Interestingly, this line of argument deliberately sidesteps the vexed issue of whether objective indicators are available to measure the decline (or, for that matter, persistence) of diversity in absolute terms; whether or not we are actually moving towards a more homogeneous world is simply not on the agenda.

Rather, the focus is on how we imaginatively respond to the perception of decline, and in this respect it is an argument aligned with Segalen's insistence that diversity is an aesthetic phenomenon, something best understood in terms of its effect on a viewer. Preserving diversity thus becomes dependent on preserving individuals capable of perceiving diversity, and out of this contingency arises Segalen's insistence on the need to cultivate an attitude of real travel as opposed to mere tourism.

The distinction between the traveller and the tourist is, of course, one of the most persistent motifs of modern travel literature, stretching back at least to the mid-nineteenth century, when the advent of steamboats and the first Thomas Cook tours opened up travel for the masses. As travel became more accessible, the ideal of travel as the preserve of young aristocrats began to unravel, and the fear of being unable to distinguish one's own motives for travelling from those of the tourist became increasingly pressing. Segalen was particularly sensitive to such fears, constantly opposing the traveller's vision of exoticism with the tourist's mere ogling. Exoticism is not "the kaleidoscopic vision of the tourist or of the mediocre spectator", he insists in his Essay on Exoticism, "but the forceful and curious reaction to a shock felt by someone of strong individuality in response to some object whose distance from oneself he alone can perceive and savour". The Ubermensch overtones of Segalen's definition are carried over into the distinctly Nietzschean imagery of his prose, with roaming herds of tourists placidly grazing the lowland pastures, while "true exots . . . take refuge on more glacial peaks".

Such glacial imagery ("we are entering regions where it is difficult to breathe, rarefied and icy regions") is used to similar effect by Maurice Constantin Weyer in Le Flaneur sous la tente (1941), where he writes "The movement of glaciers escapes the notice of the tourist's untrained eye .

However, we know that they are far from being inert". Nineteenth-and twentieth-century anti-tourism thus flourished as both a natural extension of Grand Tour ideology in an age of mass travel and a reaction to the unwelcome impact of large-scale tourism on diversity.

While it is easy to see Segalen's prophetic appeal as a cultural analyst, he does present some distinct challenges for those who would incorporate his writings into ideas of travel and diversity today. His diversity is not that of multiculturalism or the modern melting pot (indeed, cultural intermingling is held largely responsible for the decline of diversity), but a concept based on absolute differences between people and cultures in the world. Once exoticism is understood as "the keen and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility" (a pleasurable perception in Segalen's aesthetics), the value of the exotic derives solely from its capacity to gratify our desire for such experience -the "essential exoticism", as he puts it in the Essay, ". . . of the Object for the subject!". This Object remains, of course, an abstraction rather than a concrete reality; yet the Essay itself has its genesis in Segalen's feeling that the vast incomprehensibility of China had, as he wrote to Henry Manceron in 1913, remained intact as "a play of ideas which is strictly philosophical in nature", and that "it is not the least of the merits of this large, immensely 'exotic' continent, to have made my very own exoticism burst forth". Just as Egypt existed to enliven Flaubert's prose style, so China for Segalen.

One of the most striking aspects of the resurgence of French interest in travel literature in the last decade or so is the accompanying drive, in Jean-Didier Urbain's phrase, to "reinventer l'exotisme de ce monde". This move towards reclaiming the world's exoticism has, however, branched into two broadly divergent streams. On the one hand, there are clear signs of a return to an ideal of travel rooted in the colonial past. Forsdick takes issue with the neo-Romantic nostalgia behind such accounts, exemplified in his view by the self-appointed spokesmen of the Pour une litterature voyageuse movement in France -Michel Le Bris, Jean Luc Coatelem and Alain Borer. Borer's view, for example, that as people rarely travel anymore it is left to a few individuals to travel on their behalf, is dismissed as a rather sniffy elitism, one that not only goes against the grain of recent moves to "expand, decolonize, and democratize the concept of 'travel'" in French literature, but also seems to foreshadow the final demise of travel as a way of encountering real difference.

The result is that today's would-be travellers, faced with dwindling possibilities for solitary exploration and yearning for the more heroic canvases of their predecessors, often end up retracing old routes as a way of paying homage to celebrated journeys of the past.

Against the more reactionary tendencies of the Pour une litterature voyageuse movement lie a number of alternative itineraries for seeking diversity through travel today. Just as Segalen believed that one of the compensations for diversity's decline was the traveller's ever- increasing sensitivity to what traces remain, so today's seekers of diversity tend to turn away from the far horizons of capital "O" Otherness and home in on matters of detail instead. One practical way to pursue this, Forsdick suggests, is to take up walking, a mode of travel that emphasizes the role of slowness and the body in our contemporary pursuit of elsewhere. This is a sensible enough point, but the sense of his more extended argument does, unfortunately, go astray at times to describe deceleration as an "anti-entropic strategy" with ties to Mandelbrot's fractal geometry, and suggest "the potential inexhaustibility of the field of travel when the walker is reinscribed physically in time and space", is surely to risk losing the thread in a maze of pseudo-scientific jargon.