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Working the Past: Identity and Memory

Charlotte Linde

in Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory

This chapter summarizes the book's aim: to tell a story about stories. The book has presented an ethnography of the structure and the use of stories within an institution, taking both the story and ... More

This chapter summarizes the book's aim: to tell a story about stories. The book has presented an ethnography of the structure and the use of stories within an institution, taking both the story and the institution as the primary units of analysis. The chapter finishes by concluding what the book has achieved: this has been a story about the adventures of stories in groups of people and the adventures of people in groups of stories. The work of this book has been to demonstrate the existence and the nature of this work—mundane, daily, and utterly essential to any group that considers that it has an identity. This is the work that keeps us Us, whoever We may be.Less

The Matter of Hannibal

Shelley Fisher Fishkin

in Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture

This chapter describes Mark Twain's Hannibal, the physical setting of his most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huck Finn, and his inspiration for countless others. ... More

This chapter describes Mark Twain's Hannibal, the physical setting of his most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huck Finn, and his inspiration for countless others. Hannibal is the place where Twain grew up, where he shared the experiences of his two famous characters, Tom and Huck. Twain considered the town as a microcosm of America, living proof of its guilt and shame, and triumph and achievements. The chapter, using experiences while travelling to and within Hannibal, then traces the history of John Berry Meachum, a prominent slave turned free black reformist in neighboring St. Louis, Missouri, as a prologue to a discussion on slavery in the South, and its manifestations in Twain's hometown. The chapter describes the town as a tourism hotspot for Twain fans and relates her conversations with contemporary town members of their views on Twain's philosophy and works.Less

From Rome to Lhasa

Trent Pomplun

in Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri's Mission to Tibet

This chapter provides back story. Desideri sails for India, arrives in Goa, meets Manoel Freyre, ascends into Ladakh, and enters Lhasa. This chapter shows how Desideri's rather exuberant letters ... More

This chapter provides back story. Desideri sails for India, arrives in Goa, meets Manoel Freyre, ascends into Ladakh, and enters Lhasa. This chapter shows how Desideri's rather exuberant letters follow the themes of the Spiritual Exercises and express the spirituality of the missions. It also shows how Europeans viewed Tibet before Desideri and Freyre embarked on their mission and discusses some of the salient myths about the land of snows already in circulation. While in Ladakh, the two Jesuits will also argue about whether to continue to Lhasa, an episode that will later illuminate some of the political mysteries of Desideri's career that will be discussed in the fifth chapter.Less

Conclusion: To Find the Ten Lost Tribes

Zvi Ben‐Dor Benite

in The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History

At the end of the book, the ten tribes emerge as a geographical mystery. With the whole world exposed and mapped, no one still has been able to the find the ten tribes. This chapter shows how the ... More

At the end of the book, the ten tribes emerge as a geographical mystery. With the whole world exposed and mapped, no one still has been able to the find the ten tribes. This chapter shows how the rise of the English Empire as a “Global” Empire turned the search for the ten tribes into a romantic adventure. This in turn gave new life to the story of the ten lost tribes after millennial sentiments that fanned during the 17th and early 18th centuries later declined. From the later part of the 18th century, the ten tribes became the subject of a huge body of travel literature seeking the tribes all over the world. The chapter shows how the British Empire nourished enabled adventurers to embark on expeditions to find the tribes in various corners of the world. While the earlier millennial impetuous for finding the tribes declined, the basic theological principals of exile and return that first shaped the story remained. Thus, the search was now a fusion of romantic and theological desires to find the tribes. The chapter ends with showing modern Jewish travelers to be the inheritors of the past, and how their activities help “repatriate” indigenous tribes from Africa, South America and India to modern day Israel.Less

Auto/biografiction: Counterfeit Lives: A Taxonomy of Displacements of Fiction towards Life‐Writing

Max Saunders

in Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature

This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety ... More

This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.Less

Collaborating with the Enemy: Treasure Island as Anti–Adventure Story

Marah Gubar

in Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature

The boys' adventure story is perhaps the genre that seems least likely to invite child readers to dodge rather than succumb to adult authority, since such stories often strive to brainwash boys into ... More

The boys' adventure story is perhaps the genre that seems least likely to invite child readers to dodge rather than succumb to adult authority, since such stories often strive to brainwash boys into committing themselves to the imperialist cause. Chapter 2 argues that Treasure Island, long accepted as an exemplary text in this regard, actually functions as an anti-adventure story, inciting child readers to see through the seductive propaganda of typical desert island romances. Like Ewing, Robert Louis Stevenson portrays the project of draining foreign lands of riches as traumatizing and morally problematic. At the same time, he exposes flattery as the key narrative technique adult storytellers employ to seduce children into embracing the project of empire-building. Thus, the duplicitous Long John Silver butters up Jim Hawkins using the very same techniques employed by writers like W. H. G. Kingston and R. M. Ballantyne: addressing the boy as an equal, promising to tell him the truth, and portraying him as an invaluable collaborator in the project of subduing foreign lands. Treasure Island warns children to beware of the treachery of such silver-tongued adult storytellers.Less

The Adventure Chronotope and the Oriental Xenotrope: Galland, Sheridan, and Joyce Domesticate The Arabian Nights

Srinivas Aravamudan

in The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West

This article focuses on structuralist and narratological criticism of Oriental adventure to extend our understanding of the reception history of The Arabian Nights in a European context. Using ... More

This article focuses on structuralist and narratological criticism of Oriental adventure to extend our understanding of the reception history of The Arabian Nights in a European context. Using Frances Sheridan's fiction, The History of Nourjahad (1767), as a proof-text, the chapter argues that the 18th-century literary genre system was seriously altered with the advent of the oriental tale into the European canon. This influence is traced through James Joyce's appropriations of Galland's and Burton's translations of The Arabian Nights. Conventional literary history has underplayed the significance of literary Orientalism. A predilection for national realism led to the retroactive rewriting of the history of fiction as substituting psychological interiority and high-realist maturity for immature romance and exotic fantasy. A renewed assessment of 18th-century Orientalism demonstrates the very real limits of literary hierarchies organized around a nationalist paradigm.Less

Prologue: A Wild Ride

Marilyn Ann Moss

in Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood's Legendary Director

The grief that Raoul Walsh experienced when his mother died was almost unbearable. So adrift was young Walsh that he could not understand his life or what lay in store. He knew how to escape great ... More

The grief that Raoul Walsh experienced when his mother died was almost unbearable. So adrift was young Walsh that he could not understand his life or what lay in store. He knew how to escape great sadness by dreaming, then creating, an adventure of his own making, one shaped by his own design. His escape was forged from a schism in his psyche that he would come to articulate in storytelling and that he would come to count on. Now only “half a person,” Walsh had to fill in the other half of himself, and he would do it through adventure and storytelling. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Walsh wrote and directed at a fever pitch. Grief, adventure, spiritedness—all these meshed together as Walsh traversed his long career. He was a man extremely conscious of how Hollywood viewed him, and he did all he could to help shape that view.Less

Epilogue

Shelley Fisher Fishkin

in Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture

The chapter makes a final tribute to the patriotism and bravery that Mark Twain exhibited in his works, particularly in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where he dared to defy the prevailing views ... More

The chapter makes a final tribute to the patriotism and bravery that Mark Twain exhibited in his works, particularly in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where he dared to defy the prevailing views of European superiority and American mediocrity. He was a hero to the various readers whom he helped free from the strictures of Victorian sensibility to step bravely into the modern age. He was a maverick who turned his back on conventional literary rules and managed to create a unique style that gracefully captured ordinary, even crude, vernacular speech to produce numerous literary masterpieces. Finally, he was a socio-political reformist who took it upon himself to fight the pervading social iniquities of his time with his words. Indeed, the echoes of his vibrant consciousness, immortalized in his work and deeply embedded in the warp and weave of American culture, is expected to reverberate for generations to come.Less

Introduction

Carl Thompson

in The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination

Since the Romantic period, there have been travellers who have especially valorized the discomforts, dangers, misadventures, and disasters that can occur in the course of travel. This introductory ... More

Since the Romantic period, there have been travellers who have especially valorized the discomforts, dangers, misadventures, and disasters that can occur in the course of travel. This introductory chapter outlines this ‘misadventurous’ agenda and suggests ways in which we might interpret this curious attitude to travel: as a mode of anti-tourism that maintains a distinction between the tourist and the proper traveller, as a form of masculine self-fashioning in travel, as a route to authenticity, and so forth. The notion of the travel ‘script’, the narrative we expect to see playing out in the course of our travelling, is introduced, and also the strong link between the characteristically Romantic travel script — that is to say, the script espoused in practice and in writing by figures such as Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge and Keats — and the various branches of contemporary travel writing in which the sufferings of the traveller are a key point of interest; notably, narratives of shipwreck, captivity, mountaineering, and exploration. These sub-genres of Romantic-era travel writing and the Romantic utilization of them in the fashioning of their own travel personae will form the focus of the rest of the book.Less

Misadventurers I: Existential Themes

Carl Thompson

in The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination

This chapter explores some of the ways in which a hugely popular literature of shipwreck and maritime disaster played an important ‘scripting’ influence on Romantic travel. It explores firstly the ... More

This chapter explores some of the ways in which a hugely popular literature of shipwreck and maritime disaster played an important ‘scripting’ influence on Romantic travel. It explores firstly the religious traditions and conventions strongly associated with this material (and accordingly, with the figure of the suffering mariner or maritime misadventurer), emphasizing in this regard the routine Providentialism of many of these accounts, and their connection with traditions of spiritual autobiography. The chapter goes on to suggest, however, that these associations between maritime suffering and spiritual revelation become complicated by the rise of more rationalistic and empiricist modes of travel writing in the 18th century. It is in part this tension that makes the figure of maritime misadventurer so fascinating to the Romantic imagination, a fascination that is explored in relation to Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Byron's emulation of the Mariner in his own travelling.Less

Misadventurers II: Political Themes

Carl Thompson

in The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination

The chapter explores the political resonance of the figure of the maritime misadventurer, and by extension the political symbolism that could attach to the Romantic espousal of misadventure in travel ... More

The chapter explores the political resonance of the figure of the maritime misadventurer, and by extension the political symbolism that could attach to the Romantic espousal of misadventure in travel and travel writing. The voyage and shipwreck literature introduced in Chapter 2 did not just bring into focus important existential questions in the Romantic era; it also returned repeatedly to issues of authority, insubordination, and mutiny which were especially resonant in the era of the French Revolution. The first section of the chapter explores these themes directly, whilst the second considers how they are reflected in the maritime imagery of two early works by Wordsworth: Salisbury Plain and The Borderers. The final section explores instances in which an identification with the sufferings of sailors led to a politically-motivated espousal of misadventure on the part of Romantic travellers (focusing on the Romantic practice of pedestrianism).Less

Romantic Travel I: Wordsworthian Scripts

Carl Thompson

in The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination

This chapter explores Wordsworth's indebtedness both to the literature of shipwreck and maritime misadventure outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, and to the literature of exploration outlined in Chapter 5. ... More

This chapter explores Wordsworth's indebtedness both to the literature of shipwreck and maritime misadventure outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, and to the literature of exploration outlined in Chapter 5. From this material, and especially from the traditions of spiritual autobiography and Providentialism in this material, it is suggested that Wordsworth absorbed deeply a sense of travel as properly a form of quasi-religious pilgrimage, and of misadventure as a route to spiritual discovery and renovation. The first section of the chapter discusses Wordsworthian misadventure in relation to Wordsworth's spiritual and creative anxieties and aspirations; this section focuses chiefly on The Prelude. The second section explores the public dimension to Wordsworth's adoption of the misadventurer, focusing on the ways in which Wordsworth harnesses misadventure to a nationalist and imperialist ethos: The Excursion is the principal text discussed here.Less

Romantic Travel II: Byronic Scripts

Carl Thompson

in The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination

This chapter explores Byron's indebtedness both to the literature of shipwreck and maritime misadventure outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, and to the literature of exploration outlined in Chapter 5. It ... More

This chapter explores Byron's indebtedness both to the literature of shipwreck and maritime misadventure outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, and to the literature of exploration outlined in Chapter 5. It shows how Byron offered a significantly different inflection of the misadventurer persona to that fashioned by Wordsworth. A discussion of the persona fashioned in Childe Harold suggests that for Byron, misadventure was valued in sensationalist terms, as a broadening of experience, rather than as a route to spiritual revelation. The corollary to this was a Byronic scepticism as to the Providentialist assumptions and conventions often apparent in Wordsworth's scripting of travel and misadventure. This scepticism is apparent in Byron's notorious rendering of a shipwreck in Don Juan, which is the subject of the second section of the chapter. The final section explores the politically transgressive aspects of Byron's stance as misadventurer.Less

Literary Formulas

John G. Cawelti

in The Superhero Reader

This chapter presents an excerpt from John G. Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery, Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1977). It distinguishes between the two general adventure patterns of ... More

This chapter presents an excerpt from John G. Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery, Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1977). It distinguishes between the two general adventure patterns of the superhero and the ordinary hero. It discusses how specific adventure formulas can be categorized according to the location and nature of the hero’s adventures. These vary considerably from culture to culture, presumably in relation to those activities that different periods and cultures see as embodying a combination of danger, significance, and interest.Less

Frames and Excursions: Rings of Saturn

Carol Jacobs

in Sebald'S Vision

This is a reading of Sebald's “Rings of Saturn” with regard to representation and ethics a chapter which also takes up the works of Thomas Browne, Grimmelshausen, and Celan.

Skirting the Issue: Intelligibility and Recognition

Dúnlaith Bird

in Travelling in Different Skins: Gender Identity in European Women's Oriental Travelogues, 1850-1950

This chapter traces how women travellers from 1850–1950 negotiate reader reception, skirting the issue of intelligibility and recognition in both home and host countries. The first section of this ... More

This chapter traces how women travellers from 1850–1950 negotiate reader reception, skirting the issue of intelligibility and recognition in both home and host countries. The first section of this chapter identifies the strategies used to generate instant reader recognition and cultural belonging, ranging from appeals to national pride, as in Olympe Audouard’s depiction of France’s mission civilisatrice, to the systematic denigration of the foreign Other in Isabella Bird’s descriptions of the Japanese people. It then examines how the identity of the traveller is established through the effacement of male competition. Writers from Jane Dieulafoy to Alexandra David-Néel use their insouciant, incompetent and even injured male counterparts as foils to their own perfect performance as travellers. The final section studies the moment of recognition between traveller and Oriental subject. Focusing on Isabelle Eberhardt’s depictions of Algerian vagabondes from maraboutes to madwomen, it questions whether it is possible to represent the culturally unintelligible without appropriating it.Less