A Victorian Traveler In The Middle East

Juxtaposing the albums of Lady Brassey, an overlooked figure among Victorian women travelers, with Brassey's travel books, Nancy Micklewright takes advantage of a unique opportunity to examine the role of photography in the 1870s and 1880s in constructing ideas about place and empire. This study draws on a range of source material to investigate aspects of the Brassey collection. The book begins with an overview of Lady Brassey's life and projects, as well as an examination of issues relevant to subsequent discussions of the travel literature, the photographs, and the albums in which the photographs are assembled. Lady Brassey is next considered as a traveler and public figure, and the author gives an overview of Brassey's travel literature, placing her in her social and political context. Micklewright then considers the seventy volumes of photographs which comprise the Brassey album collection, taking an especially close look at the eight albums devoted to the Middle East. Analyzing the specific contents and structure of the albums, and the interplay of text and image within, she explores how the Brasseys constructed their presentation of the region. While confirming some earlier work about constructions of the Orient by the British during the time, this book offers a much more detailed and nuanced understanding of how photographic and literary constructions were related to individual experience and identity within a larger British identity. The first appendix explores the illustrative relationship between the photograph albums and Lady Brassey's travel books, yielding an understanding of the processes involved in transferring the photographic image to a printed one, at a particular moment in the development of book illustration. A second appendix lists the contents and named photographers of all seventy albums in the Brassey collection. All in all, Micklewright's study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex and unstable socia

The volume focuses on three countries - Egypt, Israel, and Turkey (earlier the Ottoman Empire) - in the period between the mid-nineteenth and the early Twenty-first-centuries. It studies the consumption of homes and domesticity as changing processes in space and time. It further foregrounds research into the impact of economic, political, and socio-cultural transformations on the private life of individuals. Even more so, the volume advances the discussion on the processes of restructuring of self-identity and lifestyles via acts of consumption. The volume focuses on the market where producers and consumers meet, the state and the national movements with their respective ideologies and practices, the role of advertisers, but also the agency of individual and group choice. In addition, it discusses, in different ways, the close interrelations between the representation of home and domestic life, for example in journals, books, and photography, and the political economy of house consumption. Thus, this volume avoids the notion of linearity and 'progress' in the transition to modern lifestyles in favour of more subtle accounts of the different venues in which people in the Middle East restructure their most immediate and intimate surroundings.

An invaluable compendium of writing on the Middle East including extracts from canonical and less well known travellers’ works.

In the first book to address the critical role of the (un)dressed body in the formation of the modern Middle East, these essays unveil contemporary struggles over nation, gender, modernity and post-modernity. Contributions from leading interdisciplinary scholars, exploring gender representation, photography, dress and visual culture, recount the role of the visible elite body in campaigns for gender and social emancipation, dress histories concerning early nationalist women and men, and legal frameworks used by those who seek to control the movement of gendered bodies. The result is a rich picture of a historical period and cultural landscape which brings dress and visual culture back into historical narratives of the modern Middle East. Recognising multiple modernities, multiple imperialisms and diverse regional experiences of post-colonialism, Fashioning the Modern Middle East contains a range of theoretical frameworks invaluable to students of fashion studies, Middle Eastern studies, anthropology, photography and gender. Bringing forward new primary material and re-investigating extant sources from new perspectives, this is the essential introduction to the role of the dressed and undressed body in the formation of the modern Middle East.

First published in 1964. This book is concerned with impressions of Arabic culture on the British before the First World War. More particularly, it is concerned with three Victorian travellers, all of whom knew Arabic culture first hand through their travels in the Middle and Near East, and especially in Arabia, Arabic North Africa, and the seaboard of the eastern Mediterranean. This title will be of interest to students of history.

First published in 1982. The Art of Travel is the first collection of critical essays to be devoted to British travel writing. It attempts to give a sense of the wealth of such writing, to map some of its forms and conventions and, implicitly, to claim a place for travel writing in any revised definition of literature. For this collection, travel includes sea voyages, European tours, commissioned enquiries into social conditions, and urban writing; travel writing ranges from works such as Sea and Sardinia by D.H. Lawrence whose status as a novelist guarantees his travel books some attention, through the essays and books of Victorian middle-class travellers into working-class London, to the work of V.S. Naipaul, a contemporary writer, who has increasingly preferred the travel book to the novel.

This collection reveals the variety of literary forms and visual media through which travel records were conveyed in the long nineteenth century, bringing together a group of leading researchers from a range of disciplines to explore the relationship between travel writing, visual representation and formal innovation.