Time And Temporalities In European Travel Writing

This book is a collective effort to investigate and problematise notions of time and temporality in European travel writing from the late medieval period up to the late nineteenth century. It brings together nine researchers in European travel writing and covers a wide range of areas, travel genres, and languages, coherently integrated around the central theme of time and temporalities. Taken together, the contributions consider how temporal aspects evolve and change in regard to spatial, historical, and literary contexts. In a chapter-by-chapter account this volume thus offers various case studies that address the issue of temporality by showing, for example, how time is inscribed in landscape, how travellers’ encounters with other temporalities informed other disciplines; it interrogates the idea of "cultural temporalities" in regard to a tension between past and future, passivity and progression; and focuses on how time is entangled in identity construction proper to travelogues.

This volume is a collection of contributions about the history and practice of travel and travel writing from a variety of academic disciplines including anthropology, history, linguistics and literary criticism. It brings together scholars from over ten different countries and reflects on what travel is and how travel writings function. It traces the history of travel and travel writing and the notion or idea of a European civilisation that permeates performances and perceptions. The notion of Europe appears as a set of quality standards as well as guidelines for experiences against which civilisations are measured. This set of standards and guidelines, however, is far from stable. It is a floating foundation carrying different versions of Europe throughout time. The authors tackle the problem from different angles: travels from Europe across the seven oceans transported the idea of European civilisation just as travels to Europe or within Europe. The volume explores the different meanings attached to the term 'Europe' and 'civilisation' throughout history and shows how different political or cultural contexts affect the notion of what Europe is or should be.

Excerpts from over 100 travel writings of Europe, from 16th c. pilgrimage diaries thru early specimens of modern tourism accounts to 20th c. impressions from the other side of the Iron Curtain By focusing on east European travel writings, this work enlarges both the documentary base and the terms of the debate over a rich source for discussions of identities and mentalities; knowledge and power; gender; and cultural change. The texts – chosen for their relevance, but literary criteria have also been taken into account – illustrate the variety of ways in which east Europeans have written about the West. Most of the material is presented in English for the first time or, in a few cases, rescued from dusty oblivion in long out-of-print volumes. Each text is introduced with a short passage placing it in context. This is the first volume of the three-part set East Looks West. Vol. 2. Under Eastern Eyes. A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe, 1550–2000; Vol. 3. A Bibliography of East European Travel Writing on Europe.

The volume asks how the literatures of the Americas and the Caribbean present multiple or internally differentiated spaces and how these are distinguished or traversed by different temporalities. The historical and (post)colonial experiences of these areas turns them into especially fertile ground for the exploration of the connections between landscape/geography and historical/temporal palimpsests as well as the specificities of literary form. The contributions are dedicated to individual, yet conceptually interconnected studies of staggered, multiple, non-simultaneous temporalities in modern and contemporary literature. The volume adopts a comparative perspective throughout and intends to foster the dialogue between the study of Latin/American and Caribbean literatures—in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Therefore, the individual essays are not grouped according to geographical or linguistic areas, but follow a trajectory from spatiotemporal constellations of the 19th century to ruined/catastrophic landscapes and the geopoetic inscriptions of time in regions. The essays should appeal to all readers interested in World Literature, Hemispheric Studies as well as temporal approaches to space and geography.

"These timely reconsiderations of European Travel writing from the 1930s reassert the oppositional primacy of subjective translations and disavow hermetic notions that travel should or even can be divorced from socio-political or cultural contexts." - Journeys "Cultural Encounters offers a rich, varied and yet impressively coherent collection of essays on the meanings and practices of travel writing in 1930s Europe. Carefully building on theoretical interest in travel writing of recent years, the essays follow written journeys to Graham Greene's Liberia and Lorca's Cuba, to Fascist Italy's Greece and France's Indochina, and many more. Throughout, texts and authors are shown to be alive with hybrid constructions of self and of ideological, national and colonial identity. What is more, the book provides compelling reasons for seeing 1930s travel writing as being of particular fascination, lying on a cusp between the Depression, totalitarianism, colonialism and modernism, and the seeds of mass tourism, post-colonialism and globalization." - Re-reading German literature since 1945, Robert Gordon, Cambridge University The 1930s were one of the most important decades in defining the history of the twentieth century. It saw the rise of right-wing nationalism, the challenge to established democracies and the full force of imperialist aggression. Cultural Encounters makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ideological and cultural forces which were active in defining notions of national identity in the 1930s. By examining the work of writers and journalists from a range of European countries who used the medium of travel writing to articulate perceptions of their own and other cultures, the book gives a comprehensive account of the complex intellectual climate of the 1930s.

The book draws on the history of economics, literary theory, and the history of science to explore how European travelers like Alexander von Humboldt and their readers, circa 1750–1850, adapted the work of British political economists, such as Adam Smith, to help organize their observations, and, in turn, how political economists used travelers’ observations in their own analyses. Cooper examines journals, letters, books, art, and critical reviews to cast in sharp relief questions raised about political economy by contemporaries over the status of facts and evidence, whether its principles admitted of universal application, and the determination of wealth, value, and happiness in different societies. Travelers citing T.R. Malthus’s population principle blurred the gendered boundaries between domestic economy and British political economy, as embodied in the idealized subjects: domestic woman and economic man. The book opens new realms in the histories of science in its analyses of debates about gender in social scientific observation: Maria Edgeworth, Maria Graham, and Harriet Martineau observe a role associated with women and methodically interpret what they observe, an act reserved, in theory, by men.

Travel Writing and Re-Enactment: Echotourism explores the popular subgenre of travel narratives that re-enact historically prominent journeys. Drawing on philosopher Walter Benjamin, this monograph reads such re-enactments as quests for aura in which travellers seek to capture a sense of distinction and historical profundity. Travel Writing and Re-Enactment frames the re-enactment of past journeys in a number of contexts, including Benjamin’s writing on mechanical reproduction, Judith Butler’s work on gender performance, and postmodern parody. Echotourist journeys are surprisingly contingent and precarious, and force travellers to navigate historical changes involving empire, gender, and travel practice in densely performative ways. Through close readings of contemporary travel narratives, this monograph considers the legacies of Lord Byron, Charles Darwin, Graham Greene, Mary Kingsley, and Ernest Shackleton, among others. Travel Writing and Re-Enactment examines the way literary re-enactment expresses, and sometimes confounds, the desire to find meaning through travel in the contemporary world.

Broadly this book is about the Arabian desert as the locus of exploration by a long tradition of British travellers that includes T. E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger; more specifically, it is about those who, since 1950, have followed in their literary footsteps. In analysing modern works covering a land greater than the sum of its geographical parts, the discussion identifies outmoded tropes that continue to impinge upon the perception of the Middle East today while recognising that the laboured binaries of “East and West”, “desert and sown”, “noble and savage” have outrun their course. Where, however, only a barren legacy of latent Orientalism may have been expected, the author finds instead a rich seam of writing that exhibits diversity of purpose and insight contributing to contemporary discussions on travel and tourism, intercultural representation, and environmental awareness. By addressing a lack of scholarly attention towards recent additions to the genre, this study illustrates for the benefit of students of travel literature, or indeed anyone interested in “Arabia”, how desert writing, under the emerging configurations of globalisation, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism, acts as a microcosm of the kinds of ethical and emotional dilemmas confronting today’s travel writers in the world’s most extreme regions.