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China of the Tourists: Women and the Grand Tour of the Middle Kingdom, 1878–1923

Kuehn Julia

in Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and Southeast Asia

This chapter looks at women travelers in China between the late 1870s and the early 1920s. It specifically determines a first generation of women's travel in China exemplified in Isabella Bird's The ... More

This chapter looks at women travelers in China between the late 1870s and the early 1920s. It specifically determines a first generation of women's travel in China exemplified in Isabella Bird's The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899) and Constance Gordon Cumming's Wanderings in China (1888). It also poses the question of whether their journeys served as more prescriptive itineraries for later women travelers and, in fact, established the frameworks of what is called a Grand Tour of China. It starts by reviewing Bird's and Cumming's travel routes. It then introduces Eliza Scidmore's travel guide and finally moves into a discussion of how the second generation of female travelers describes the most prominent travel destination on their Grand Tour of China — the capital Beijing — between 1900 and 1924. The accounts of pioneering British women led to the more systematic travel itineraries of succeeding American women. Traveling educated not only the mind but also the senses and feelings, as the recurring encounters with Chinese women show.Less

Undertaking Travel and Exploration: Motives and Practicalities

Innes M. Keighren, Charles W. J. Withers, and Bill Bell

in Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773-1859

This chapter addresses the key role of motive for explorers and travellers, and—for selected individuals in the period between 1813 and 1847, and for the Arctic, Central Asia, and the Near East, ... More

This chapter addresses the key role of motive for explorers and travellers, and—for selected individuals in the period between 1813 and 1847, and for the Arctic, Central Asia, and the Near East, examines the role of instructions given to explorers before their departure. For the Arctic, there is evidence that the monotony of voyaging and the lack of contact with local inhabitants made writing simply a routine. In Central Asia, where much British exploration in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was undertaken in secret and as part of the politics of imperialism, secrecy constrained writing in different ways. Instructions given beforehand shaped explorers’ narratives. For travellers who went without such guidance, the facts of travel could affect what was written, how, and why. Murray-published guides to travel came after many of the exploratory voyages and narratives the firm published.Less

Milieus of Mobility: Itineraries, Route Maps, and Road Maps

Catherine Delano-smith

in Cartographies of Travel and Navigation

This chapter presents a comprehensive survey of European overland travel, travel guides, and mapping in medieval Europe and early modern times. It begins with a profile of the medieval European ... More

This chapter presents a comprehensive survey of European overland travel, travel guides, and mapping in medieval Europe and early modern times. It begins with a profile of the medieval European traveler, dashing the commonly held assumption that medieval Europeans were not mobile. Geographical mobility was neither restricted by class, nor prohibited by the poor quality of roads, nor confined to pilgrimages. The demand for information about routes, therefore, was considerable, but was almost always supplied in the form of written itineraries. The most celebrated early “graphic itineraries,” by Matthew Paris and John Ogilby, were not only separated by several centuries, but appear to have had more to do with vicarious travel than practical guidance. The most celebrated early maps of route networks—the Peutinger Map and the Gough map of Britain—are similarly isolated examples of uncertain utility to travelers. Despite the increasing circulation of maps in Europe after the invention of map printing, specialized maps for travelers were slow to develop. Maps were not attached to practical travel guides with any frequency until the end of the seventeenth century, a change that had more to do with the increase in commercial traffic brought about by industrialization than with the needs of private travelers.Less

Consuming (Post)Colonial Culture: Multicultural Experiences in Travelogues and Ethnic Novels

Faye Caronan

in Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique

This chapter examines how travel guides and ethnic novels, despite being mainstream cultural representations, reproduce hegemonic narratives of U.S. exceptionalism by enabling consumers to experience ... More

This chapter examines how travel guides and ethnic novels, despite being mainstream cultural representations, reproduce hegemonic narratives of U.S. exceptionalism by enabling consumers to experience the “authentic” postcolonial other. It analyzes three different sets of texts that all serve to deliver the colonized other to a mainstream U.S. public that is specific to its particular historical context: Our Islands and Their People (1899), the popular travel guide Lonely Planet: Philippines and Lonely Planet: Puerto Rico, and the novels Dogeaters (by Jessica Hagedorn) and América's Dream (by Esmeralda Santiago). The chapter shows how these novels and travelogues reproduce narratives of U.S. exceptionalism and affirm U.S. global power independently, without overt ties to the U.S. government. It argues that the ethnic novel delivers the postcolonial other for consumption by a mainstream U.S. audience while the travel guide recommends how best to consume the postcolonial nation.Less

Imaginary Black Topographies: What are Monuments For?

Lubaina Himid

in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology

This chapter seeks to reinvent the genre of contemporary travelogue through a satirical juxtaposition of travel guide material against collaged images representing Black diasporic undercurrents ... More

This chapter seeks to reinvent the genre of contemporary travelogue through a satirical juxtaposition of travel guide material against collaged images representing Black diasporic undercurrents within European metropolitan histories. The reinvention of this genre effects the symbolic re-programming of the genre-specific ‘inner eyes’ of secular Western Man, whose code of ‘race’ rendered invisible the history of Black African and Afro-mixed descent peoples from a metropolitan secular Western memory. The chapter takes the reader through a tour of Paris and London, whereby images of monuments, stately buildings, well-known places, urban parks, and a range of other familiar sites are reinvested, literally painted over, with figurations of Black iconographic artists, political leaders, sports heroes, and intellectuals, as well as visual allusions to silenced and ignored moments of colonial and enslavist violence and Black counter-assertion. This visual re-investment shifts the issue of cognition to the realm of art as a form of epistemic intervention, doing so in this specific case as a challenge to the systemic invisibilization and/or negation of Black lives within a modern Western memory.Less

Empirical Political Description

in Political Communication and Political Culture in England, 1558-1688

This chapter investigates the development of a genre of political writing that reported personal observations of empirical political phenomena, particularly those writings conveying political ... More

This chapter investigates the development of a genre of political writing that reported personal observations of empirical political phenomena, particularly those writings conveying political information about non-English countries and locales. It reviews travel accounts and guides, diplomatic reports, and natural histories. Up-to-date political and strategic information was important to the political education of the English political elite. The English were concerned with the political and economic conditions of Ireland and Scotland. Discussions of “interest” and “greatness” were increasingly treated in terms of recently acquired information gathered by travelers, diplomats, and naturalists. The descriptive empirical tradition offered a mode of thinking about political entities for many generations and played a significant role in the way governments, naturalists, chorographers, travelers, and diplomats thought about the political sphere.Less

Visions of the Ancient City, 1869–1880

Thomas Graham

in Mr. Flagler's St. Augustine

During the 1870s, tourist guide books gave descriptions of St. Augustine for travellers. Constance Fenimore Woolson and Abbie Brooks painted verbal pictures of the “Ancient City” as the most unusual ... More

During the 1870s, tourist guide books gave descriptions of St. Augustine for travellers. Constance Fenimore Woolson and Abbie Brooks painted verbal pictures of the “Ancient City” as the most unusual American town--more like old Spain than America. Its Minorcan population gave it an exotic tinge. John F. Whitney promoted St. Augustine as the land of Ponce de Leon. Winter visitors found ways to amuse themselves amid resort society. Local residents found ways to make money from the visitors. Some of the seasonal guests were quite wealthy: George Lorillard; architect James Renwick; William Aspinwall; and William Astor.Less