Idea Of Travel Research Articles

Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space by Fred Scharmen

Reviewed by: Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space by Fred Scharmen Rick Cousins Space for All? Fred Scharmen. Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space. Verso, 2021. 266 pp. $26.95 hc, $9.99 ebk. I know I'm in for an interesting read when an author sneaks a quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy under the radar on the first page. Douglas Adams's quip "space is big" appears in the third sentence in Fred Scharmen's Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space, separated by a mere nine words from a much less jocular opening salvo: "Why should we want to go live in space?" (1). The ability to juxtapose the serious and the comedic is one of the highlights of Scharmen's style: it also helps point up the fine distinction between the urgency of the question he poses and the degree to which it remains unanswered, as if waiting for a punch line. We don't live in space yet—and the "going" part has got us no farther than a few quick jaunts to the moon that ended before much of Scharmen's readership was even born. The idea of space travel is, in this sense, the same as the idea of travel anywhere on Earth: an overture of hopeful dreams followed (if the trip begins at all) by a series of sobering and frequently disappointing realities. Scharmen sets these dreams and realities in relief against each other by offering a series of possible answers to his opening question, laid out through case studies of figures who sometimes made surprisingly significant contributions to the theory and practice of space flight. One of the challenges a writer faces when structuring a work in an episodic fashion concerns the role of connecting themes. How much should ideas, questions, and problems shared by individual cases dominate the discussion, forming a clearly visible narrative thread? To what extent should each individual case stand alone as an independent story in its own right? Scharmen pulls off the delicate balancing act between the specific and the general with a skill that never lets the reader see the effort that goes into it. Make no mistake: it requires effort to keep some of the themes common to the stories Scherman tells from elbowing everything else out of the way and turning a well-tempered, harmonious account into a clangorous one-note polemic. The most forceful central idea in Space Forces requires particularly deft handling to allow it to hold the floor without becoming a filibuster. Every one of the cases that Scharmen investigates deals in some way with questions of inclusion: Who gets to go into space first? What do they do once they get there? Who joins them later? Who has to stay home and why? It's all too easy for us to read this from the perspective of a world where Amazon and SpaceX are drowning out the rest of the conversation and boiling all debates about space travel down to discussions about capitalism and commercial interests. [End Page 588] To be sure, money talks, but as Scharmen notes throughout his study, that talk often serves as background noise to other ultimately more influential voices. A number of the figures profiled by Scharmen never had the economic (or political) power to realize any part of their plans for life in space, but the social doctrines embedded in their writings served to influence later wellcapitalized and state-sanctioned plans. Scharmen orchestrates two of these voices from the infancy of rocket science—Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) and his friend and mentor Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903)—into an antiphonal duet for his first full case study. Tsiolkovsky, whose calculations defined the first parameters for escape velocity, was more than just a pioneer in rocketry. He was also a visionary with a far-reaching program for outerplanetary exploitation which "drew on a core of unique mystical materialism" (14). Tsiolkovsky's mysticism and materialism expressed themselves equally in works of fiction and nonfiction: his novel Beyond the Planet Earth (1920) and his pamphlet The Future of Earth and Mankind (1928) combine...

Dangers, Delights, Development: Female Travel in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Turkish Embassy Letters

This paper examines the portrayal of travel for women in two eighteenth-century literary texts by women writers: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe and The Turkish Embassy Letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. With a focus on the mental, emotional, and psychological effects of female travel that each author depicts, it analyzes both the dramatic dangers and pleasures faced by Radcliffe’s Gothic heroine and the more mild, cerebral ones experienced by the historical Montagu. Drawing on the work of Marianna D’Ezio, Adam Watkins, and Mary Jo Kietzman, it argues that both Radcliffe and Montagu ultimately endorsed the idea of travel for women through their work, portraying the pleasure, experience, and self-cultivation it afforded as outweighing its dangers. Finally, it posits that this position resisted both Enlightenment and Romantic ideas of appropriate female behaviours and desires by encouraging women readers to experience the world outside of the domestic sphere.

Travel and the Framing of Multiplicities in Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room

Postcolonial forms of countertravel writing are sites through which previously marginalised subjects such as women and queer others produce agency. This article examines Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room as a countertravel narrative that imagines journeys as a negotiation of fractures within the self. I utilise the idea of travel to locate crossings and or contemplation of boundaries both physical and metaphysical. Galgut’s In a Strange Room explores geospatiality, race, sexuality and narratology as sites of journeys to locate multiplicity as an inherent quality of the self. Galgut fashions ‘queer travel’ and ‘queer narratology’ as producing allowances for confronting anxieties within the self and the self’s relation with others. The narrative demonstrates that in constantly confronting the fractures of ‘being-out-of-place’ subjects redefine the fluid sense of being-in-place and in the world.

The discreet charm of the escape routes. The journey to Italy in the work of Pier Vittorio Tondelli

This article aims to analyze the work of Pier Vittorio Tondelli starting from the idea of travel. In the light of a first theoretical reconnaissance linked to the historical-political context in which the production of the Emilian writer is placed, our research develops the topos of the journey along three directives: 1) the journey as an escape route 2) the journey to Rimini, a jump into the Italy of goods 3) the journey back: the return to Correggio.

Journeying through inner and outer worlds: the significance of travel across the works of Rabindranath Tagore

ABSTRACT Travelling is a common subject and motif throughout the works of Indian poet, philosopher and artist Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Tagore travelled across India and the world throughout his life, especially after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. He often wrote of his journeys and their lessons in letters, memoirs, and essays and frequently used travelling and related themes as metaphors or allusions in written and visual works. Travelling between inner and outer realms, home and world, was especially illuminating, offering him inspiration and new perspectives. This discussion traces the theme of travel across Tagore’s career, examining references to travelling in four different genres in Tagore’s oeuvre – early travel letters, a mid-life memoir, his prize-winning poetry and paintings made later in life. These and related works are used to show how the act and idea of travel profoundly influenced Tagore’s life and works, shaping his political, educational and creative philosophies.

Moving On Up: Economic Opportunism, Transpacific Mobility and Non-Elite Internationalism

ABSTRACTDespite a wealth of scholarship on Australian travel, economic motives for transnational mobility remain little studied. Tourists, soldiers, reformers and students dominate the pantheon of Australians in the world, while the aspirational jobseeker is near forgotten. As a result, Australian international engagement has been closely associated with social and economic elites. Yet recent research hints that economic opportunism was a central motivation for white Australians’ travels to interwar China. This article argues that the same was true of the United States. Drawing upon state and private archives, it examines how the famed prosperity of the United States led non-elite Australians to seek work and money across the Pacific. Throughout the early 20th century, steamers ploughed between Sydney and San Francisco carrying economic migrants in pursuit of their own American Dream. Consequently, a wide diversity of white Australians would demonstrate an everyday engagement with the “international” that derived more from economic need than high-minded ideals. By recovering their journeys, this article draws new connections between Australians’ physical and economic mobility, unsettles the idea of travel as an elite or dutiful phenomenon, and asks how a more materialist analysis of transnational lives might recalibrate our understanding of Australia in the world.

Nenhuma Bulgária existe

O artigo analisa o último romance de Campos de Carvalho, O púcaro búlgaro (1964), por meio das noções de viagem e inexistência. E procura mostrar algumas consequências críticas e narrativas do impasse entre a promessa de uma “expedição ao fabuloso reino da Bulgária” – feita pelo narrador logo de saída com a eloquência de um viajante tarimbado – e seu constante adiamento ao longo do romance. Por meio de um estilo na maioria das vezes inexato e fabuloso, sempre verborrágico e exagerado, o narrador dessa expedição torna-se complexo não por dominar o assunto que supostamente é objeto de seu interesse (o púcaro búlgaro) e sim porque, ao contrário, ele gira no vazio. E nesse giro só pode “devanear sobre o nada”, como ele próprio diz, enquanto não atina para a razão de escrever o diário. Tal impasse, de um lado, dialoga de modo crítico e irônico com certa tradição dos relatos de viagem à medida que se apropria de alguns dos seus pressupostos, como a confiabilidade do narrador e a obsessão pelas classificações, para fazer deles objeto de piada; de outro, na tentativa de realizar um romance altamente experimental, toma de empréstimo o princípio que Breton formula no “Manifesto do surrealismo”, segundo o qual a “existência está em outro lugar”, ou seja, na Bulgária, que não existe. Desse modo, o romance de Campos de Carvalho poderia ser pensado como uma experiência de desarme da nossa maneira de ler os relatos de viagem nacionais, ao mimetizar tais narradores e expor – ao ridículo – os seus limites. É a hipótese que se propõe.

Sharing the Road with Burton Holmes and Dr. Jones: Mapping Fitzgerald's “The Cruise of the Rolling Junk” and the American Road Narrative

Abstract F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Cruise of the Rolling Junk” remains a critically neglected text. This article proposes that one reason for this neglect is that the work has yet to be placed into any greater critical context. It remedies this problem by analyzing the essay in the context of the American road narrative. Specifically, the reading places Fitzgerald's work within its own historical moment by recognizing how it both distances itself from and yet is complicit in the romantic idea of travel as expressed by the twentieth-century travel orator Burton Holmes. Through a close reading of the text, the article argues that while Fitzgerald attempts to break from the overly picturesque view of travel and adventure that colored much early travel and road literature in an effort to highlight the sense of identity loss (in terms of self and world), he is, in the end, unsuccessful in fully accomplishing his own narrative goal. However, in his attempt, Fitzgerald does place himself within the greater conversation of the American road narrative and helps to complicate traditional theories of American road literature.

Fielding, Nick South to the Great Steppe: The Travels of Thomas and Lucy Atkinson in Eastern Kazakhstan, 1847–1852 (review)

SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 748 Byzantine Empire, under Greek rule, was also not part of Tsar Nicholas’s plans in the Near East’ (p. 203). Thesixthandfinalchapteranalysesthe‘Russianangeranddisappointmentat theresistancetoabsolutism’(p.16)whicheventuallyledtotheGreekRevolution of 1843. This revolution, led by veterans of the War of Independence, called for the departure of the Bavarians and demanded a constitution, and led to an era of constitutional monarchy in Greece. The analysis of Greek identity as expressed in the constitution of 1844 serves as a background to the conclusion, which analyses the long-term legacy of Russian relations with Greece during that period. Overall, this book makes an important contribution to many fields within East European history. First and foremost it contributes to the history of the early Greek kingdom and the history of Russian international relations, but also to the study of Eastern Orthodoxy in the modern era, and nation-building processes in the Balkans specifically and in Europe more generally. Its strength lies in its use of both Greek and Russian sources taken from various archives, which allows Frary to offer a nuanced analysis of Greek national identity in the early Kingdom period and of Russian politics, particularly in terms of Russia’s perception of itself as an actor in the international arena. Harari College Worldwide Orel Beilinson Fielding, Nick. South to the Great Steppe: The Travels of Thomas and Lucy Atkinson in Eastern Kazakhstan, 1847–1852. First, London, 2015. 160 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. £35.00 (paperback). A few years ago Anthony Cross published his invaluable reference work In the Lands of the Romanovs: An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand Englishlanguage Accounts of the Russian Empire, 1613–1917 (Cambridge, 2013). Lands of the Romanovs provides a fascinating reminder of just how many Britons published accounts detailing their experiences when travelling through the tsarist empire (including a thousand by those who visited the country between 1800 and 1900). Among the works listed by Cross are two written by Thomas Atkinson, and a third by his wife Lucy Atkinson, describing their travels through western Siberia and central Asia in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The books themselves are rather forgotten today, except by scholars who study the changing place of Russia in the British imagination. Nick Fielding uses his book, South to the Southern Steppe, to introduce a new audience to the Atkinson’s travels. He also casts some new light on the biography of the couple themselves. REVIEWS 749 Thomas Atkinson was an artist and architectural draughtsman from Yorkshire, who left England in the early 1840s following family bereavement and bankruptcy, and seems to have become fascinated by the idea of travel in Russia as the result of a chance meeting with Alexander Von Humboldt in Berlin. In his book, Oriental and Western Siberia (1858), Atkinson describes how he received permission from Nicholas I to ‘travel and sketch’ in the remote regions where central Asia met Siberia, visiting the region in spring 1847 in the company of the engineer Charles Austin. Before leaving St Petersburg, Atkinson had met Lucy Finley, who worked as governess to General Mikhail Muraviev-Vilenskii. Over the following year he sent her numerous letters, describing his experiences during his trip, which took him from the mining towns of the Urals and on into the steppes of central Asia. Atkinson returned to European Russia early in 1848, marrying Lucy at the British Consulate in Moscow, after which the two of them headed east again, travelling via Kazan´ to Semipalatinsk, and on towards the Altai mountains. Fielding quotes extensively from Thomas Atkinson’s published accounts of his travels, along with Lucy Atkinson’s Recollection of the Tatar Steppes and their Inhabitants (1863), a book which is both a more interesting and more reliable account than those of her husband. Fielding vividly describes the challenges faced by the Atkinsons in areas where Russian rule was at best tenuous (they faced death on more than one occasion from bandits and thirst). Despite the conditions, Lucy successfully gave birth to a son, who travelled with them over the following months, before the two of them returned to the comparative safety of Zmeinogorsk. Thomas later returned to travel again in Semirechye, leaving his wife...

La apuesta filosófica de Michel Foucault por la alteridad. Viajes y periodismo como marco explicativo de las reflexiones en torno a la experiencia iraní

There is consensus in disapproving the journalistic articles written by Foucault about the Iranian revolution. They are considered clear mistakes. Some say that this is so because the enthusiasm of Foucault towards the Islamic revolution moved him away from his true theoretical interests; others say that what those texts reveal is a totalitarian, naive, and even misogynistic background of his philosophy. By doing this, commentators spear themselves a hermeneutical work on the incorporation of those texts into a work whose general bet remains the subject of academic discussion. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to the issue; one in which the texts are not considered a mistake but rather they are seen as part of a diagnosis that can get some light from the ideas of travel, radical journalism and heterotopology. These considered as fundamental elements of a philosophical bet on alterity.

Traveling in place: a history of armchair travel

Armchair travel may seem like an oxymoron. Doesn't travel require us to leave the house? And yet, anyone who has lost herself for hours in the descriptive pages of a novel or the absorbing images of a film knows the very real feeling of having explored and experienced a different place or time without ever standing up from the couch. No passport, no currency, no security screening required-the luxury of armchair travel is accessible to us all. In Traveling in Place, Bernd Stiegler celebrates this convenient, magical means of transport in all its many forms. Organized into twenty-one legs - or short chapters - Traveling in Place begins with a consideration of Xavier de Maistre's 1794 Voyage autour de ma chambre, an account of the forty-two-day journey around his room Maistre undertook as a way to entertain himself while under house arrest. Stiegler is fascinated by the notion of exploring the familiar as though it were completely new and strange. He engages writers as diverse as Roussel, Beckett, Perec, Robbe-Grillet, Cortazar, Kierkegaard, and Borges, all of whom show how the everyday can be brilliantly transformed. Like the best guidebooks, Traveling in Place is more interested in the idea of travel as a state of mind than as a physical activity, and Stiegler reflects on the different ways that traveling at home have manifested themselves in the modern era, from literature and film to the virtual possibilities of the Internet, blogs, and contemporary art. Reminiscent of the pictorial meditations of Sebald, but possessed of the intellectual playfulness of Calvino, Traveling in Place offers an entertaining and creative Baedeker to journeying at home.

The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination by Carl Thompson

178 Reviews TheSuffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination. ByCARLTHOMPSON. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2007. xi+299 pp. ?45. ISBN 978-o-19-925998-4. Most readersfamiliar with the Romanticperiodwho open this bookwill do so in a spirit ofnovelanticipation, forthetitleseemingly indicates a slightly surprising subtheme withinRomanticismthathas been barelyexplored, and is intriguingly off centre. As one readson, thepleasurethat attendstheobliqueapproach will be reinforced by amore seriousand compellinginterest, fortheevidencepresented byCarl Thompsonand his subtle,elucidatory analysesdemand that we should reconsider therelationship ofRomanticismto travel writing. Further, we should giveserious consideration tothe proposalthat perilous, accidental, andadventurous travel is a fundamental ingredient in theRomantic imagination, and not a sideshow or a quaintdistraction. At thecentreof thisbook is thecontention that Romantic travelismarkedly different fromthenotionof tourism, and thatthe GrandTour is replacedinRo manticism byadventurous ordangeroustravel and exploration. Central,too,isthe ideaof travel as a kindofperformance: a self-dramatizing or self-fashioning that relates to a script thatmay be quite precise and material (as exemplified inplans for travel oradventure) or looseand improvisatory (as invariants basedonclassictravel texts). While thefantasy ofadventurous travel, and thesuffering it may cause,pro videsa strong motifina great manyRomantictexts, Thompsonacknowledges and describestheveryrealdangersof travel encountered in theperiod,and examines thedifferent ways inwhich the Romantictraveller consciously modifiedtheclas sic travel'scripts' to introduce notionsof spontaneity, risk, orboundary-breaking. Two examplesprovidedearlyin thebook-Coleridge's slightly crazyideaofhow to descend amountain and Byron's contemptuous disregard for travelmanuals in favour of new discoveries-epitomize this new sense of travel as the penetration of theunknown and the unpredictable. For theRomantics thisbrought to travel a new authenticity, and as the author remarks, that idea announced a new trajectorywhich continues today, a bifurcation of tourism and travel. The extenttowhich theRomantics were brought upwith travel writingsand accountsofvoyagesprovidesa richand imaginative contextinforming their own stories and self-dramatizations, and Thompson's book reminds us of just how prosperousthiseighteenth-century heritage was, and how realand startling were the feats of endurance and heroism related therein. Perhaps themost remarkable examplesbroughtforward here are theshipwreck narratives, and theRomantic fascination with these as themeans of discovering and exploring new regions of humanexperience and vision.Thompsonhas researched thisarchiveassiduously. He produces a fascinating account of the currency and nature of these narratives and their publication in the late eighteenth century, and argues convincingly that theuneasy relationship between a commentary of providentialist closure on theone hand and the existential or accidental narrative on the other provided a potent mix for theRomantics to exploit. Likewise, the narratives of the open boat (thewreck of the Medusa or theBounty mutiny, forexample) were accompanied by intense poli MLR, 104.1, 2009 179 ticalcontroversies aboutrank and rights, butalso inthemselves presented powerful metaphorsor emblems ofdemocracy. Thompsonuses these paradigmstoproduce informed and illuminating readings of suchtexts asColeridge's 'Ancient Mariner' and theshipwreck episodeinByron's Don Juan. Thompsonhaswrittena verygood book aboutRomanticism whichmakes a significant contribution toourbetter understanding of the Romanticimagination. It isnotveryoftenthat a singleideaormotif-here that ofmisadventure-canbe inserted intosucha thoroughly researched field and have sucha transformative effect. Thesuccessof this book isthatits hypothesis iscontinuously and thoroughly tested inthetexts itdiscusses, and theresults arereadings of Wordsworth andByron (inparticular) that aresimultaneously newand strongly historicized. DE MONTFORT UNIVERSITY PHILIP MARTIN Dickens,Family, Authorship: Psychoanalytic Perspectives onKinshipandCreativity. By LYNN CAIN. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2008. xvii+183 pp. ?50. ISBN 970-0 7546-6180-1. LynnCain's book offers somesuggestive and richly referenced readings ofawide range ofDickens'swork.Thoughfocused on the novels producedbetween1843and 1853, MartinChuzzlewit, DombeyandSon, David Copperfield, andBleakHouse, the projectreflects on the wholeofDickens's literary career, andmakes a thorough and interesting useofhiscorrespondence duringthis period,aswellas,toa lesser extent, his journalism. Indeed,someof thestrongest arguments areadvancedthrough a cross-referential treatment of thisrangeofmaterials;in thefirst literary chapter, onMartinChuzzlewit,forexample,I found particularly instructive Cain's identi fication of theaffinities betweenthisnovelandGreatExpectations intheir shared anxieties aboutfather/son relations (p. 22),andher illumination of thealliterative andOedipal connection of 'Pecksniff andPinch',emphasizedin Dickens'sreference tothis pairingina letter toForster(p.42). The psychoanalytic perspectives certainly open up some interesting interpre tations, which respondto an impressively substantial bodyof classicand recent Dickens criticism, which is takenseriously throughout. I particularly enjoyedthe reflections uponDickens'suseofthe gamut ofauthorial metaphors(including archi tecture, music,gastronomy, andbiologicalreproduction) that this methodopensup. Thereis,however, a persistent, uncomfortable sensethat, despitetheacknowledged complexity ofDickens's literary projects, Cain especially valueshiswork forits anticipation of twentieth-century psychoanalytic theory, particularly that ofFreud, Lacan,Klein, andKristeva.Cain is characteristically...

Aesthetic Embarrassment: The Reversion to the Picturesque in Nineteenth-Century English Tourism

Aesthetic Embarrassment:The Reversion to the Picturesque in Nineteenth-Century English Tourism Linda M. Austin The late twentieth-century indictment of tourism in Britain and America, launched almost half a century ago by Daniel J. Boorstin, has focused on the industry's embrace of simulation and its tendency to transform everything in its field into, as Jonathan Culler has written, "a sign of itself, an instance of a cultural practice."1 The suspicion of the tour as an inauthentic experience is at least two centuries old, however, and has guided the development of tourism as middle-class recreation since the start of the nineteenth century.2 Inevitably this suspicion affected the aesthetic experiences of tourists themselves. The idea of travel as an exercise in the individual cultivation and display of distinctive taste induced discomfort, even self-contempt, among those of moderate means who were eager to emulate their aristocratic predecessors and develop artistic appreciation and connoisseurship. They suffered from "touristic shame," to use John Frow's words; and their shame educed what Dean MacCannell has called a "rhetoric of moral superiority."3 Although this rhetoric privileged romantic conditions such as authenticity and autonomy, it depended on prestigious aesthetic codes to structure individual experiences. It is the self-conscious and often hapless deployment of these codes in the second half of the nineteenth century that I shall examine. Not only were the codes regularly undermined, but their users were frequently embarrassed. This usually occurred in one of two ways: either the material circumstances of tourism desublimated the aesthetic code of a tourist's consumption or the viewer's efforts to encounter the new and to defamiliarize the customary lapsed into a dependence on a familiar (and shunned) visual paradigm, that of the picturesque. The precariousness of the nineteenth-century tourist's visual pleasure is blatant in the prosaic accounts of ordinary persons in unfamiliar settings; but it is noticeable as well in the records of practiced writers on native ground. When Richard Jefferies, renowned in the second part of the century for his contributions to a literature of English [End Page 629] husbandry and rural life, composed the three travel essays he later collected for The Open Air (1885), he concentrated on the Victorian tourist's sedulous and frustrating efforts to isolate himself from other excursionists and to elevate his observations into an almost abstract formalism. Likewise, John Davidson, a journalist too, as well as a poet—and one, moreover, on the fringes of avant-garde circles of the nineties—remained uncomfortably aware of the obstacles to his pursuit of aesthetic pleasure and legitimacy while on his walking-tours of the Chiltern Hills and the environs of London. A collection of his sketches entitled A Random Itinerary (1894) records the ambitious traveler's efforts to avoid the vapidity of sightseeing and elevate it into an art of description allied with contemporary trends in aesthetic appreciation and the production of the lyric. Written by men of known cultural competence and easily linked to their own travels, these texts exhibit the aspirations of many ordinary travelers who were eager to elevate their tourism not simply into memorable moments but into legitimate ones linked to elitist modes of production and consumption. In recording their embarrassments, the following pages historicize the conflict between the physiological apparatuses of enjoyment and the contemporary aesthetics of authority and prestige. I. Richard Jefferies, Connoisseurship, and Touristic Shame In his reverent study of the writing, and countryside, of Jefferies, published 22 years after his death in 1909, Edward Thomas declared his subject a romantic observer who "was clearly as much of the soil as the things which he described."4 More than a half-century later, Raymond Williams read Jefferies' nature and field studies, as well as his commentaries on the condition of agriculture, as illustrations of "green language," a term he borrowed from John Clare's "Pastoral Poesy" (1832) to illuminate the social and political dilemma of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers who had not profited from improvements in agriculture and tourism. The attention of "green language" to the weather, lighting effects, birds, and botanical life reflected the lonely imaginations of its users and registered, as Williams...

The Other Geography: Representations of the Turkish Landscape in English Travel Writings

During the Renaissance and in the post-Renaissance period, the European idea of travel was based on two fundamental paradigms: exploration and cultivation. However, especially from the eighteenth century onwards, with the worldwide expansion of European imperialism and colonialism, in addition to these two paradigms, various other and often antagonistic paradigms, which were intrinsically associated with the imperial ideology, came to characterize European travellers' attitude towards other peoples, cultures, and geographies in general and towards the Orient and Turkey in particular. It was in this context that a growing number of English travellers, who visited Turkey, began to write detailed and descriptive accounts of their observations and impressions of Turkish life, society, culture, history, institutions, and geography. On the one hand, by situating Turkey within the traditional myth of the exotic and mysterious East, and, on the other, by perceiving it as the inhospitable geography of alien others, most of these accounts display a blend of fact and fiction and embody a contradictory attitude of innocent romanticism and arrogant realism. In essence, they seem to exhibit a dichotomy arising from the opposition of the self and the other. This is most clearly seen, for instance, in Lady Montagu and Richard Chandler in the eighteenth century, in Alexander Kinglake in the nineteenth century and in Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark in the twentieth century. Since travel is essentially a confrontation of two cultures alien to each other and is informed through the cultural distance between the self and the alien other, in the writings of these English travellers this confrontation is voiced sometimes openly and sometimes implicitly with reference to various aspects of Turkey. One important aspect, which has not yet received full critical attention, is the dichotomic depiction of the Turkish geography. So this paper, which mainly focuses on Montagu, Chandler, Kinglake, Bell, and Stark, is an exegetical and critical study of the changing ways in which the Turkish landscape has been perceived and represented by English travellers.

George Eliot and the Idea of Travel

Compared with Dickens, George Eliot makes little use of her extensive foreign travels in her fiction. This essay traces the incidental role of travel in the novels until it becomes central to Daniel Deronda. In the early fiction the circumscribed lives of provincial England are framed by the narrative discourse of a well-traveled mind. The journey, particularly for women, dramatizes a crisis of identity, a theme continued in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, where it is contrasted with the male experience of travel as self-culture. In Daniel Deronda travel defines the unstable world of modernity and the condition of Jews, culminating in the problematic journey to the East. ********** On their way to Munich in April 1858 George Eliot and G. H. Lewes stopped for a night in Nuremberg and on the following morning, a Sunday, 'wandered about the beautiful streets and wondered at every turning, until it was time to go to dinner'. (1) If her admiring but measured appreciation of the town in her journal can be seen to express what Henry James was later condescendingly to describe as 'the tempered enjoyment of foreign sights, which was as near as she ever came to rapture', (2) the ebullient Lewes, in a letter to John Blackwood, was less restrained in conveying their enthusiasm for the place, using terms that directly challenge James's assessment: Our journey was like every other journey except the two days at Nurnberg, which was one protracted oh! Were you ever there? If so, you will understand our rapture; if not, I don't think any description bearing the marks of sanity would convey a proper feeling of the pleasure we received. (3) He concludes his letter by holding out to the publisher an intriguing possibility: 'Who knows but some day we may have a Nurnberg novel, as the product?' Despite the couple's intense excitement no such novel ever emerged, and its absence is indicative. With the exception of Romola, whose laborious reconstruction of fifteenth-century Florence owed in any case more to the lamp and the library than to the observing eye and the experience of contemporary Italy, George Eliot's extensive foreign travels left no novels as their direct product. Only the Roman scenes of Middlemarch and a few brief and scattered episodes elsewhere, most notably in Daniel Deronda, bear immediate testimony to her European journeys. The life and the writing took different roads. The adventurous traveler who, from the time she became independent on the death of her father in 1849 until the last year of her life, made frequent and often lengthy journeys to the Continent, exploring with eager interest most of the great cities of Western Europe as far east as Berlin and Vienna, wrote novels of a singularly stay-at-home kind. Of course her fiction, however provincially English its setting, is always informed by a profound knowledge of the literature, culture, and history of the wider world of Europe and beyond; so much so that Barbara Hardy has justifiably argued that a need for foreignness was an essential component of the novelist's creative life, while Deirdre David has shown how that wider world was a fertile presence in her literary imagination. (4) Nevertheless, foreign travel itself, or even journeying of a more limited kind, plays little obvious part in her fiction before the 1870s. The impact of abroad is confined to 'spots of foreignness' (Hardy, p. 9) rather than the extended engagement that travel implies. Yet the idea of travel, so important for the life, is still interestingly present in the wings of the fiction, so to speak, before it finally takes centre stage in Daniel Deronda; and to trace that presence can be to throw light not only on that last novel but also on some of the distinctive qualities of George Eliot's fiction as a whole. The composition of her first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, was bound up with her travels with Lewes around the coasts and islands of southern England as he collected material for his Sea-Side Studies. …

George Eliot and the Idea of Travel

Compared with Dickens, George Eliot makes little use of her extensive foreign travels in her fiction. This essay traces the incidental role of travel in the novels until it becomes central to "Daniel Deronda." In the early fiction the circumscribed lives of provincial England are framed by the narrative discourse of a well-travelled mind. The journey, particularly for women, dramatizes a crisis of identity, a theme continued in Middlemarch and "Daniel Deronda," where it is contrasted with the male experience of travel as self-culture. In "Daniel Deronda" travel defines the unstable world of modernity and the condition of Jews, culminating in the problematic journey to the East.

From recreation to recovery: The idea of travel in French literature and film (1960–2000)

From recreation to recovery: The idea of travel in French literature and film (1960–2000)

Johnson's Rambler and Eighteenth-Century Rhetoric

'Extemporaneous and ad hoc are used by Paul Fussell in and Life of Writing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), pp. 160, 157; arbitrary is Cyril Knoblauch's term (p. 257) in Samuel and Composing Process, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 13 (1980): 243-62. Patrick 0'Flaherty, in Towards Understanding of Johnson's Rambler, Studies in English Literature, 18 (1978): 524-36, sees trying to explore (p. 526) complexities of various weighty subjects in a of probing (p. 528), endeavor which reportedly often ends in confusion and apparent vacillation. Thomas Curley also says that in Johnson's writings thinking amounted to act of empirical exploration (p. 86), and Curley in addition notes how the very idea of travel as a process of empirical validation ... was a dominant intellectual pattern in Georgian literature and certainly in Johnson's morality (p. 87), in and Life of Travel (Athens: Univ. of Georgia, 1976); Curley also describes characteristic movement of Johnson's mind as an inductive search for tentative generalizations about human lot (p. 86). Paul Alkon refers to rambling, disorderly essays and poems that characterize age of Johnson (p. 115), in Critical and Logical Concepts of Method from Addison to Coleridge, EighteenthCentury Studies, 5 (1971): 97-121. Charles Pierce notes how Johnson's Ramblers enact a struggle for self-understanding (Rambler 134 is called an especially fine example of this procedure), and Pierce also observes, This was characteristic movement of his mind-from particular to general, from psychological to moral-and it was also predominant rhetorical pattern of his periodical writing (p. 103), in The Religious Life of (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1983). Illogical is used expansively by Donald Green (p. 331) in 'Logical Structure' in Eighteenth-Century Poetry, Philological Quar-

If your idea of travel on the job isnʼt just an elevator ride to the 3rd floor, Read This AD

If your idea of travel on the job isnʼt just an elevator ride to the 3rd floor, Read This AD