Search Results

Between Classical and Marginal

Giovanna Ceserani

in Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology

This chapter explores the differentiation and marginalization of Magna Graecia within an emerging Hellenism increasingly focused on classical, mainland Greece, by looking at late eighteenth-century ... More

This chapter explores the differentiation and marginalization of Magna Graecia within an emerging Hellenism increasingly focused on classical, mainland Greece, by looking at late eighteenth-century travel narratives and historiographies. Disappointment at the paucity of classical monuments in Magna Graecia, as expressed by Winckelmann's German pupil Riedesel, is shown to give way to later French and British travelers’ interest in the region's exotic and antique quality. Magna Graecia's central role in the origins of modern narratives of ancient Greece is examined alongside the region's marginalization, in these same narratives, as a mere site of ancient Greek colonization, overlooking its place as a center of Greek culture. A distinctly different take is revealed in the historical works of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, which sought to harmonize Magna Graecia's past with the Italic past, a trend that signals a growing divide between Italian and non-Italian approaches to Magna Graecia.Less

Postface from the Cultures of Travel to Travelling Cultures

Charles Forsdick

in Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity

This chapter discusses changes in travel narratives, and one of these is where travellers represent the cultures they go to during their voyages. Some of the textual proofs of these changes can be ... More

This chapter discusses changes in travel narratives, and one of these is where travellers represent the cultures they go to during their voyages. Some of the textual proofs of these changes can be found in French postcolonial literature. One example of this is French postcolonial literature and the literary works made in Polynesia.Less

“Cosa de Cuba!”: American Literary Travels, Empire, and the Contract Coolie

Edlie L. Wong

in Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

Chapter 1 mines an under-examined archive of American travelogues to Cuba to explore the emergence of Chinese “cooliesm” as a transatlantic racial formation enmeshed in the geopolitics of U.S. Empire ... More

Chapter 1 mines an under-examined archive of American travelogues to Cuba to explore the emergence of Chinese “cooliesm” as a transatlantic racial formation enmeshed in the geopolitics of U.S. Empire and in national debates over labor versus capital. Controversies over U.S. participation in the lucrative “coolie trade,” involving the transport of thousands of Chinese indentured laborers to Cuba and Peru, intensified as sectional tensions over the future of slavery threatened to erupt into Civil War. This chapter explores how popular travel narratives by writers, including Richard Henry Dana and Eliza McHatton Ripley, refracted and reshaped American ideas about slavery, citizenship, and free labor, especially in relation to contract ideology and its associated concepts of self-ownership and free will. These narratives helped disseminate the specter of the Chinese “coolie-slave,” which influenced U.S. debates over slavery and later became a potent symbol for the enduring legacy of slavery in Reconstruction America.Less

Latemodernism’s Geopolitical Imagination: Everyday Life in the Global Hot Zones

Thomas S. Davis

in The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life

This chapter turns to travel narratives from global hot zones where the examination of everyday life reveals the emergence of a new form of warfare shifting the balance of power in Europe and Asia.

Introduction

Wendy S. Mercer

in The Life and Travels of Xavier Marmier (1808-1892): Bringing World Literature to France

Xavier Marmier's vast output, the variety of his achievements, and his celebrity status made him an influential figure in nineteenth-century France. In retrospect, his greatest achievement was ... More

Xavier Marmier's vast output, the variety of his achievements, and his celebrity status made him an influential figure in nineteenth-century France. In retrospect, his greatest achievement was probably as an initiator in bringing an awareness of foreign literatures and cultures to France; but his contribution is so vast that it is impossible to summarise it succinctly. Although he is now generally neglected, his name still occurs quite frequently, most often in studies of comparative literature analysing the introduction of a particular author or culture to France. Some of his travel narratives are slowly being recognised today as important social documents of the ways in which people lived in particular countries.Less

Through an Ocean of Sand: Pastoralism and the Equestrian Culture of the Eurasian Steppe

Arash Khazeni

in Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa

Through a reading of nineteenth-century Persian natural histories and travel narratives about the Eurasian steppe from eastern Iran to western China, this chapter diverges from prevailing ... More

Through a reading of nineteenth-century Persian natural histories and travel narratives about the Eurasian steppe from eastern Iran to western China, this chapter diverges from prevailing empire-centered analyses of conquest to examine frontier exchanges and interconnections between the pastoral and the imperial. In the late sixteenth century, the Oxus River changed course, leading to the expansion of the sandy steppes of the Qara Qum or “Black Sands” Desert—the arid desert between the Caspian Sea and the Oxus River. As the river changed course, no longer reaching the Caspian, Turkmen pastoralists found new possibilities in the expanding arid steppes of the Qara Qum, forging a powerful and wide-reaching equestrian network in the Eurasian steppe. In the desert, Turkmen pastoralists domesticated wild horses and the swift Akhal Tekke breed, and gained control of the oases. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Turkmen thus carved out a loose trading and raiding confederation built on the power and speed of horses capable of making seemingly impossible journeys through the steppes. This pastoral power and equestrianism of the Turkmen frontier determined the boundaries of early modern Eurasian empires.Less

‘Chambres d’Asie, chambres d’ailleurs’: Nicole-Lise Bernheim's ‘Vertical Travels’ in Asia

Hindson Katy

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

This chapter compares two of Nicole-Lise Bernheim's récits de voyage: Chambres d'ailleurs (1986), and Saisons japonaises (1999). Traveler, writer, novelist, and journalist, the late Nicole-Lise ... More

This chapter compares two of Nicole-Lise Bernheim's récits de voyage: Chambres d'ailleurs (1986), and Saisons japonaises (1999). Traveler, writer, novelist, and journalist, the late Nicole-Lise Bernheim (1942–2003) left a diverse body of work which reveals her passion for travel. Chambres d'ailleurs is the account of the author's six-month journey around a number of countries in Asia, in the company of her partner. The more recent Saisons japonaises is the account of the author's prolonged, lone, stay in Koyasan, a Japanese town, famous as a site of pilgrimage. In general, Bernheim's travel narratives illustrate the recurrence of self-performance and construction of role in contemporary travel writing, creating an illusory rhetoric of intimacy which is thinly disguised by the traveler's claims to vulnerability and naivety. Moreover, they provide an often problematic example of the possibilities of a differentiated female gaze in travel where gender appears, albeit briefly, as a potential point of access from which cross-cultural relations can progress.Less

Ambassador of the World (1846–1847)

Charles Capper

in Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life Volume II: The Public Years

This chapter examines Margaret Fuller’s assignment to England as the first female foreign correspondent of the New York Tribune in 1846. During these travels, Fuller wrote about her experiences, and ... More

This chapter examines Margaret Fuller’s assignment to England as the first female foreign correspondent of the New York Tribune in 1846. During these travels, Fuller wrote about her experiences, and in the process created a new literary genre called travel narratives. After arriving in England, she had the opportunity to interview several prominent writers of the time including Thomas Carlyle and George Sand.Less

Unhomely Travels; or, the Haunts of Daphne Marlatt and W. G. Sebald

in Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing

This chapter examines how the travelogues of Daphne Marlatt and W. G. Sebald thematically explore and stylistically convey the liminality and in-betweenness of spectral presences. It focuses on ... More

This chapter examines how the travelogues of Daphne Marlatt and W. G. Sebald thematically explore and stylistically convey the liminality and in-betweenness of spectral presences. It focuses on Marlatt's Ghost Works and Sebald's Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn. It discusses the plot of these works and suggests that innovative travel narratives of Marlatt and Sebald are emblematic of a cultural shift in modes and media of textual production that illustrates the concern to push the boundaries of generic and textual responses to travel.Less

“Marvelous Tales of Wonders Performed, or Rather, Not Performed” in Baron Munchausen’s Narrative

Sarah Tindal Kareem

in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder

This chapter turns to Rudolf Raspe’s Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels (1785). A loose collection of absurd tales written by the Hanoverian Raspe, this text, an outlier amidst ... More

This chapter turns to Rudolf Raspe’s Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels (1785). A loose collection of absurd tales written by the Hanoverian Raspe, this text, an outlier amidst the otherwise well-known English fictions gathered together in this study, nontheless plays an important role in shaping the English literary marvelous. Raspe renders an impossible world in English natural philosophy’s matter of fact idiom. The Narrative’s hyper-realistic narration of the marvelous defamiliarizes the act of reading in order to produce the same kind of vertiginous effect that earlier fictions were able to produce by virtue of the fact that fiction’s conventions were still undefined. The Narrative prescribes the skepticism its estranging marvelous effects produce as the orientation with which its readers should navigate the world beyond the text.Less

Applications and Prospects

Inderjeet Mani and James Pustejovsky

in Interpreting Motion: Grounded Representations for Spatial Language

Applications and Prospects illustrates a variety of practical applications, including route navigation, mapping travel narratives, multimedia tagging, question‐answering, ... More

Applications and Prospects illustrates a variety of practical applications, including route navigation, mapping travel narratives, multimedia tagging, question‐answering, communication with artificial agents, scene rendering from text, and spatiotemporal event tracking from textual and structured data sources. The authors analyze some of the texts in these applications in terms of ISO‐Space annotation scheme discussed in Chapter 5 along with their relevant DITL representations. The chapter concludes with an enumeration of some open issues, such as more extensive multilingual analysis and annotation, modeling of functional aspects of spatial representation, handling of fictive motion, and further integration of different qualitative calculi and language processing.Less

Caribbean Migrant Writers and the Politics of Return

Angelique V. Nixon

in Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture

Chapter two focuses on well-known Afro-Caribbean women writers, Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat, who reside in the United States and make a significant contribution to “resistance culture.” ... More

Chapter two focuses on well-known Afro-Caribbean women writers, Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat, who reside in the United States and make a significant contribution to “resistance culture.” Through narratives of return, Kincaid and Danticat challenge exploitative consumption and tourism in their literary works by exposing and utilizing the power that lies in the production of history. They do this by using their mobility and prominence in North American literary markets to inform potential tourists and fellow Caribbeans abroad of the injustices of the tourist industry that are rooted in the history of slavery and colonialism. Kincaid directly confronts and criticizes the tourist industry in her satirical essay/memoir A Small Place; while Danticat participates in and critiques the tourist industry with her travel guide/memoir After the Dance. They produce alternative travel narratives that resist the travel guide genre, which has historically defined “natives” (the other) outside of history, modernity, and humanity.Less

The Script: “Africa was but a blank canvas for Europe’s imagination”

Katrina Dyonne Thompson

in Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery

This chapter examines seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European and American travel journals to reveal the manner in which they portrayed West Africans in order to create the moral and social ... More

This chapter examines seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European and American travel journals to reveal the manner in which they portrayed West Africans in order to create the moral and social justifications for slavery and racial stereotypes. It argues that European travelers often ignored the ritualistic purpose of West African music and dance and instead reduced West Africans to servants, prostitutes, and entertainers. These societal positions were developed on the premise of European hegemony and aimed to create an African commodity. Throughout West Africa, music, song, and dance were important cultural expressions. However, from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, European and American travelers distorted these expressions in order to project and fulfill their own desires. This chapter shows how travel narratives presented the identity of West Africans as malleable and capable of being shaped according to the desired purpose of the gazer. Through their creation of the innate dancers and singers, it contends that travel journals contributed to the subjugation and reconfiguration of the black body through its neglect of the actual culture and tradition of the performing arts.Less

Transatlantic Masculinities: Military Leadership and Migration in the South American Wars of Independence

M. Soledad Caballero

in Migration and Modernities: The State of Being Stateless, 1750-1850

Chapter three examines discourses surrounding masculinity and migration in the South American travel narratives of British mercenaries and adventurers, especially those of Captain Basil Hall, Lord ... More

Chapter three examines discourses surrounding masculinity and migration in the South American travel narratives of British mercenaries and adventurers, especially those of Captain Basil Hall, Lord Thomas Cochrane, and W. B. Stevenson. These European mercenaries and merchants assessed the South American Wars of Independence, analyzing the military strategies of Francisco José de San Martín in Peru and Criollo masculinity more generally. Ultimately, the discussions of San Martín and Criollo leadership in these texts reveal little about San Martín himself; instead, they voice these mercenaries’ anxieties about the challenges commerce and empire posed to existing European and British forms of masculinity. Through the figure of San Martín, they negotiate their distance from hegemonic forms of British masculinity, which were marked by wisdom and restraint, and newer and more mobile mercenary forms of masculinity, which operated outside that nation-state and were marked by unrestrained avaricious and personal gain.Less

The “True History” of Captivity Narratives in the Iberian Empires

Lisa Voigt

in Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds

This chapter is dedicated to exploring the connections between accounts of Old and New World captivity, connections that are figuratively and literally illustrated in the woodcuts of the Frankfurt ... More

This chapter is dedicated to exploring the connections between accounts of Old and New World captivity, connections that are figuratively and literally illustrated in the woodcuts of the Frankfurt edition of Staden's Warhafftig Historia. The use of images created for a popular Italian story of a journey through the Middle East and India to illustrate German accounts of captivity in both Brazil and Turkey shows how travel narratives and their illustrations traversed linguistic, national, and imperial borders as fluidly as the voyagers themselves. Early modern Iberia is a particularly rich site for observing the circulation of representations of captivity, given Spain and Portugal's proximity and vulnerability to a powerful Islamic empire at the same time that they were pursuing their own overseas exploration and conquest.Less

Novels of Travel and Exploration

Gretchen Murphy

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 5: The American Novel to 1870

This chapter examines the influence of the travel genre on the American novel during the nineteenth century, as well as the novel’s influence on how Americans viewed travel and adventure. It also ... More

This chapter examines the influence of the travel genre on the American novel during the nineteenth century, as well as the novel’s influence on how Americans viewed travel and adventure. It also considers the relationship of fictional works to their fictional and nonfictional sources and intertexts, first by explaining the concept of “adventure” as a genre using Barbary captivity narratives as a test case. It then turns to novels about South Seas and Antarctic exploration inspired by the US Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842, along with novels called “Robinsonades” and their use of fantasy and adventure to address questions about industrial capitalism and slavery, territorial and overseas expansion, U.S. national identity, and American exceptionalism. Finally, the chapter explores travel narratives about California during the wave of Anglo migration that followed the US-Mexico War.Less

Travelling with the Ondaatje Bros.

in Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing

This chapter compares Christopher Ondaatje's conventional travel narrative The Man Eater of Punanai and his brother Michael Ondaatje's experimental travel text Running in the Family. It analyzes how ... More

This chapter compares Christopher Ondaatje's conventional travel narrative The Man Eater of Punanai and his brother Michael Ondaatje's experimental travel text Running in the Family. It analyzes how the Ondaatje brothers translated their similar journeys to Sri Lanka into intricate palimpsests of texts and voices. It suggests that both texts illustrate how textuality interlocks with globalization and travel and contends that while they share common genealogies and thematic concerns, they employ radically different textual strategies.Less

Introduction: Searching for Japan

Michele Monserrati

in Searching for Japan: 20th Century Italy's Fascination with Japanese Culture

The introduction explains the books’ methodological foundation in transnational theory. It defines key-terms such as “Transnationalism,” “relational Orientalism,” “coeval exoticism” and “cosmopolitan ... More

The introduction explains the books’ methodological foundation in transnational theory. It defines key-terms such as “Transnationalism,” “relational Orientalism,” “coeval exoticism” and “cosmopolitan aspirations.” It provides an historical outline of the relations between Italy and Japan before and after the watershed period of the Meiji era (1866) and the Italian unification (1861). This historical section suggests that Italian fascination with Japan largely depended on the fact that Japan shared with Italy the condition of being a ‘latecomer’ in the world stage. The introduction also offers a summary of each chapter and explains the advantage of using travel narratives as source to uncover unstable conceptions of ‘nation’ and ‘identity.’Less