A Visit To The Antipodes

A Visit to the Antipodes: With Some Reminiscences of a Sojourn in Australia is a fascinating travel narrative from the mid-19th century. Lloyd offers a vivid and engaging account of his experiences in Australia, highlighting the people, landscapes, and culture of this unique corner of the world. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Excerpt from A Visit to the Antipodes: With Some Reminiscences of a Sojourn in Australia So many books have been written upon the subject of which the following few pages attempt to treat, that it would seem almost unpardon able in the present instance to swell the number by adding such an insignificant item as this. But it would be even more unpardonable were such a production to come out without a preface: such a proceeding would display a want of courtesy, and indicate a degree of vanity which might materially prejudice its reception. It is doubtful if this prefatory notice will ever be read; yet still, under the circumstances, it will at least offer some apology for the perpetration of the offence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

'Virtual Voyages' is a fascinating account of the European discovery of the elusive 'great south land' told through the literature of 'imaginary voyages'. Written at the height of the era of European maritime exploration, these bizarre and captivating tales, with their wildly imaginative visions of antipodean inversion and strangeness, reveal a hidden history of attitudes to colonization. By exposing the relationship between myth and reality in the antipodes, this book casts new light on the power of fiction to influence history. In the post-colonial studies field, books about travel writing and empire have tended to focus on the high period of nineteenth-century imperialism and on the colonial settings of Africa and India. This book offers a fresh perspective by focussing on the eighteenth century, and referring to the geographical region of Australia and the Pacific, which has had far less attention. The book also breaks new ground by being the first to approach the genre of the imaginary voyage from a post-colonial perspective. In addition to the new insights into European colonialism that it offers, the book illustrates many broader themes in eighteenth-century history and thought. These include connections between the rise of science and modern imperialism, the development of narrative history and fiction and the influence of romanticism, the evolution of the early novel in Britain and France, and the role of mythology in the development of national identity.

"If you dug a hole all the way to the other side of the earth, where would you be? What animals would you see?"--

How did Europeans view the unknown region at their antipodes in early times, before the explorations of Captain Cook and others made it well known? Throughout the ages it has evoked fantastic images which affected the arts and sciences, and the evolution of the novel in the century prior to the major discoveries was influenced in the same way. The eighteenth century was also a critical phase in European social history, a time when many modern patterns of economic life and international relations were formed. Distant explorations and discoveries bore implications for that process, which tended to be worked out in fictional voyages mingling fact with fiction. Images of the Antipodes asks what these can tell us about Europe's expansion to the limits of the New World - about the first contacts between cultures with very different worldviews, about the colonial relations that followed, and about the geopolitics of the region since then. They offer a perspective on cross- cultural relationships generally - nowhere more apparent than in their use of ancient images of the antipodes. This is the third part of a study on the intellectual history of travel fiction, and deals with the period from the 1720s to the 1790s, focusing on an issue that is as vital now as it was then: cultural or racial stereotyping, and the link between this and the differing politico-economic aspirations of peoples. It is a dual problem of exploitation, which has been associated with the antipodes since the beginnings of Western literature. The book discusses teratological fantasies, the literary background in utopias and Robinsonades, Gulliver's Travels and other travel fiction from mid-century onwards, the parallels between real and imaginary voyages, and the way the latter often prefigured the rise of modern anthropology and of colonial relationships in the austral regions. Particularly relevant was the odd blend of arcadianism and horror inspired by, or projected onto, these places in the later eighteenth century - as it had long been in the past. The works discussed are chiefly English and French, but include other European examples of the type.

Hamer has written a broad, comparative overview of the evolution of British-derived urban traditions in four former colonies: the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.