This talk is centered around one of the three American books published by the British author Jonathan Raban to this day - Hunting Mr Heartbreak (London, Collins Harvill, 1990). Basing ourselves on the book's literary aspects, we will analyse in what way Raban uses the technique of accelerating and decelerating in his story in order to distance himself from one of the genre's traditional forms - the travel narrative as a diary.
Comparisons will be made with his travel book on a journey down the Mississippi, Old Glory (London, Collins, 1981), and with this new book, Bad Land (London, Picador, 1996) - on Eastern Montana - to point out an evolution in Raban's writing who keeps stretching the conventions of travel writing both in form and content to achieve a highly personal version of the genre's hybridity. While the linearity of Old Glory's structure compares more or lessto the idea of a prolongued journey on a river, in Hunting Mr. Heartbreak Raban varies the structure by alternating narratives concerning trips within trips with more sedentary sections dealing with various longer stays in the USA. His most recent book is even less concerned with traditional conventions such as chronology and hardly mentions the author's own journeys to Montana to focus better on its main theme, - the waves of new settlers in Eastern Montana in the earlier part of this century. The notions of accelerating and decelerating are based on the notion of "speed" introduced by Gérard Genette in the field of narratology. They will allow us to underline how Raban illustrates certain themes in his book through this technique while permanently stretching form and content through his idosyncratic use of language.
Our analysis will be both guided by and critical of a number of notions that Syed Manzural Islam has proposed in his recent study The Ethics of Travel (Manchester, MUP, 1996), such as "sedentary" and "nomadic" travel and "othering/being othered" in order to state that Jonathan Raban's American work is characterised by considerable flexibility and openness. Thus, Hunting Mr. Heartbreak is one of the most inventive and innovating British travel books of the last 20 years in terms of its narrative strategies and Raban's American *¦uvre* a unique case in the history of twentieth century British travel writing of an English writer trying to grasp the United States in a series of travel books. To our knowledge, Raban is the first writer to this day to present both himself as a narrator and a fictional double of himself that changes identity twice within the same book, thereby keeping afloat the reader's horizon of expectations between the shores of fact and fiction.
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