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This part focuses on the travel texts of Julio Camba and Josep Pla, writers from opposite sides of the Iberian Peninsula, who wrote the city for professional reasons. The works of Camba and Pla present curious cases regarding translation and the city given the fact that they both are from regions in which Spanish is not the sole language, they both traveled extensively, and both have at least one entire book dedicated to New York City. In drawing associations between the two writers, as well as between the travel writer and the translator, this part outlines what they were they able to give their readers beyond another description of the cityscape. As Camba's and Pla's New York experience and their resulting texts strikingly marked the timeline of their work, this part argues for travel as an event that sharpens and broadens the creative imagination of writers as well as for a more robust reading of travel narratives as complex texts that carry within them aspects of the city that exceed the visual.

This chapter draws upon the burgeoning genre of nineteenth-century travel writing to map a transcolonial and mobile consciousness through which New Zealand and Australian settler colonial identities were forged. Travel writing created a direct link between Europe and the colonies, and this was made explicit through its mobile narrators, knowledge, and ideologies. Recent modes of conceptualising empire - from Ballantyne’s ‘webs of empire’ to Alan Lester’s ‘imperial networks’ to Peter Hulme’s ‘traffic’ to James Clifford’s ‘routes’ - are important to new understandings of past and present empires, and particularly of the production and circulation of colonial knowledge. Travel texts remind us that ‘national’ cultures emerged in a dialectical relationship with other colonial cultures as much as with Britain, and that crucial ideas about race, place, and identity were developed across the Tasman.

For many British women the exoticism and difference of the East proved to be a powerful draw. The 'otherness' of their experiences in Serbia and Russia inspired them to adopt a range of different styles in their writing. Almost all memoirs engage with the journeys of the women as individuals across unfamiliar, at times even alien, landscapes, well as dealing with harsh reality of the war experience. Their literary heritage is often apparent in their language. This chapter examines some of the key primary texts through the genre of travel writing in particular and explores the alternative literary strategies employed by the women to tell their stories. It provides a context for women's travel writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, looking back to its development in the nineteenth.

This chapter charts the long history of travel writing about the US South and explores the continued fascination and simultaneous repulsion with its poor whites. It discusses neo-colonial approaches to the region and poverty in the work of writers including Pamela Petro, V.S. Naipaul, and Paul Theroux, and the cosmopolitan perspectives advanced by writers such as Bill Bryson and Eddy L. Harris. It compares representations of Atlanta as the embodiment of the New South with romanticized accounts of rural poverty and proposes that the realities of contemporary poverty either go unrecognized or are aligned with the economics of the Global South rather than with US economics that shape the Global North. It critically examines stereotyping, appeals to authenticity and questions the impact of tourism on the region.

The introduction offers an overview of the critical tendencies surrounding Iberian literatures and their relationship with New York City, and situates this book within Iberian literary studies as well as within Translation Studies. Additionally, the introduction presents the theoretical influences and conceptual framework of the book which emphasize the role of translation in travel and the city not only as a physical site but also as an audible one.

This chapter considers the historiography of Nest and women in medieval Wales, broadly understood, from the early eighteenth century to the emergence of formal academic historiography. It assesses the Welsh historiography, both formal and as expressed in other genres, especially travel writing, showing divergent tendencies to view Nest either with horror or embarrassment, or to make her a heroine; and this will be related to the ways in which she is made to relate to the English, and also to conceptions of the proper behaviour of a medieval princess. Comparison will be made with the developing historiography of contemporary Welsh princes.

This part studies the New York prose and poetry of José Moreno Villa, one of the most overlooked cultural figures of twentieth-century Iberian Studies. As a gateway to the context surrounding Moreno Villa's New York, this part begins with a prefatory discussion of Federico García Lorca and his epistolary writing in which he assesses travel to New York as one of the most useful experiences of his life while also repeatedly noting the continuous linguistic negotiations surrounding him while in the city. Then, this part introduces Moreno Villa and the fruits of his transatlantic travel: Pruebas de Nueva York (1927) and Jacinta la pelirroja (1929). Overall, it argues that Moreno Villa's past experiences coupled with his vulnerable linguistic position, as a result of travel, tuned him in the languages of photography, jazz, and the careful use of Spanish, English, and other languages. In doing so, this part proposes that Moreno Villa's literary New York brought his readers more than a superficial experience but one that introduced new discourses and considerations of language and its relationship to other media.

Chapter 2 explores the use of the Arabian Nights as a familiar cultural narrative through which the burgeoning practices of archaeology, geology, geography and ethnography might be communicated. In this period, the imaginary voyage and adventures of the Arabian Nights, known since childhood, profoundly interacted with actual voyages above and below the ground, providing a narrative template for approaching new experiences that was already familiar to British readers. At the same time, this narrative strategy infused those emergent sciences with an enduring form of magic, or magical thinking, in the adult world, which informed processes of thinking about the physical laws of nature, the elements that comprise the globe, and new technological developments of the period. The magical possibilities and treasures of the Arabian Nights held an irresistible fascination for Western readers, who did not want to relinquish fully to the emergent discipline of science the potential meanings and possibilities of Eastern exploration.

The Introduction outlines ‘travellers’ tales of wonder’ as an area of inquiry, and as a demonstrable presence in contemporary international literature – despite a tendency to regard travel in the period in terms of belatedness, nostalgia, and disenchantment. It provides an introductory assessment of the research fields of studies in travel writing and in wonder, as well as scholarship on the individual writers Chatwin, Naipaul, and Sebald, and presents the approach and structure of the book as one seeking to bring these research fields together, with a more comparative point of view.

This chapter situates ethnographic fieldwork in relation to changing conceptions of travel and travel literature in France. In the early twentieth century, grand voyages from the Romantic period fell out of favor and exoticist literature gained in popularity thanks to developments in the press and mass media. Chapter 6 examines how the idea of a “true” voyage became the site of an intense symbolic competition between travelers and how French anthropologists dealt with this competition. Highlighting the communicability of scientific discourse and its pedagogical relationship to a broad public, they sought to constitute their discipline against tourism and the exoticism of travel writing as a popular genre. Drawing on examples from Michel Leiris’s disillusionment with the model of cultural initiation in L’Afrique fantôme and from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, the chapter ultimately shows how both authors gradually realized that the commonly held idea of travel could not provide a framework for ethnography, and that anthropological fieldwork in fact implied renouncing the idea of the voyage.

This chapter evaluates the writing Harkness produced during her time living in the countries that are now India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Placing Harkness’s work in a nineteenth-century tradition of British historiographical writing about India that begins with James Mill’s History of British India (1817), the chapter argues that her work during this period consciously eschews conventional historical methodology and offers an important counter-narrative to colonial history. It suggests that in her attention to the ways that social movements and political institutions shape people’s daily lives, which is set within a broad foundation of personal knowledge, Harkness’s writing engages more ardently with the conventions of cultural history than it does with those of travel writing.

This chapter is the first of two on recent novels which rewrite and write back to key texts of anthropology. It first examines the way Kincaid’s 1996 novel conceptualizes postcolonial kinship and its understanding of the destruction, perversion and exploitation of intimate bonds by colonial rule. It then turns to the novel’s engagement with the tradition of ethnographic travel writing on the Caribbean, particularly that of Froude and Lévi-Strauss, to argue that the novel demonstrates the strategic use of a discourse of failure. By embracing, rather than rejecting, colonial accusations of civilizational lack in the Caribbean, the novel is able to effectively reflect back and thereby sabotage such imperialist ideologies. Nonetheless, the limits of this strategy of become clear in the novel’s imagination of the figure of Xuela’s Carib mother. Here, the novel’s embrace of a discourse of failure echoes, rather than undermines, colonial and anthropological accounts of Caribbean indigenous groups and their supposedly inevitable demise, and thus it also partly reproduces the ethnographic gaze.

This chapter surveys Grimshaw’s writing from its Ulster origins and considers her as one of several independent women writers in the period who successfully adapted an instinctive feminism to the increasing conservatism of an international publishing marketplace in the 1890s. It focuses on one of Grimshaw’s novels, the romantic literary thriller Broken Away (1897), set in Portadown, Dublin, Wicklow and London, as a portrait of the fin-de-siècle commercial Irish author. The chapter considers the novel’s commentary on the pressurised concept of the ‘New Woman’ in the light of the changing editorial priorities of Grimshaw’s first publisher John Lane/The Bodley Head, as the company attempted to distance itself from the decadence of Wilde and Beardsley on one hand, and the feminist excesses of George Egerton on the other. It compares this initial foray with a later publishing encounter, this time with the recently-formed Mills and Boon, who produced Grimshaw’s 1911 adventure story When the Red Gods Call, the tale of an Irishman’s fortunes in New Guinea. In this case, Grimshaw’s astute response to the tastes of an expanding popular readership can be seen to have dovetailed with the marketing and distribution skills of her new publishers, paving the way to her status as a bestselling author.

The acquisition of empire allowed women to travel about and explore India as they never had been able to before. The result was a new genre of literature in English—travel writing by women. After Jemima Kindersley in 1777, Maria Graham became the second woman to publish journals and letters about India (1812 and 1814). She set the pattern for popularizing the more scholarly work of the Orientalists but she and many of the women who followed her, such as Fanny Parkes and Emma Roberts, also show an enthusiasm and open-minded curiosity about India, not limited to the zenana or sati. Much of what ordinary men and women in Britain would know of India in the early nineteenth century would come from travel writing, especially that done by women.

This chapter is about Lear’s experiences as a traveller, and how they shaped him as a writer. It considers the way his poems and paintings are animated by dramas of arrival, departure, and being left behind. It considers, using evidence from Lear’s travel writing, the relationship between the experience of being a foreigner, and hearing unfamiliar languages, and the creation of nonsense words. It concludes with an extended close reading of “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò”.

Illustrated papers were not only crucial for imaging women’s bodies and identities but also for depicting other cultures, often through an imperialist lens. As Andrea Kaston Tange notes in this essay, weeklies such as the Illustrated London News responded to the opening up of Japan after 1854 with illustrations ‘that tended to draw more heavily on tropes that depicted a country that was artistically very fine in part because it was simultaneously woefully behind in modern technologies’ (p. 273). To some degree, Isabella Bird (1831‒1904), in her travel narrative Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), reiterates these Orientalist strategies, yet she also, through letterpress descriptions and visual representations, balanced ‘fairyland’ imagery with realist detail that defies stereotypes and self-reflexively draws attention to her own status as a foreign spectacle. Tange’s essay challenges us to view women writers’ relationship to the colonialist discourse of illustrated journalism in complex terms, as a ‘series of layered registers, a palimpsest of meaning’ (p. 273).