Tales Of Travel Research Articles

Long Gone Daddy (review)

Reviewed by: Long Gone Daddy Deborah Stevenson Hemphill, Helen Long Gone Daddy. Front Street, 2006 [176 p] ISBN 1-932425-38-1$16.95 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6-9 Harlan Q. Stank has been living with the Hamiltons and working at their funeral parlor for four months, ever since his father, the Reverend Harlan P. Stank, kicked him out for his possession of religious doubts. The prodigal son returns when the body of Harlan O. Stank, Harlan Q's grandfather (who left the family twenty years previously, in 1952), turns up in the Hamiltons' funeral parlor and Harlan Q feels obliged to break the news. When Harlan O's bequest requires that he be buried in Las Vegas, Harlan Q, desperate for a glimpse of the high life, convinces his father that the Lord means him to go. Father, son, and deceased grandfather (in a coffin in the back) then depart Texas for Sin City, en route picking up an easygoing, alternatively spiritual young man called Warrior; in Vegas, Harlan Q learns things about the grandfather he never knew—and the father he thought he did. In her first novel, Hemphill catches the classic tone of the road-trip story, as confidences and life stories roll by along with the miles, and the possibilities open up with the horizon, and she never overplays her quirky, satirically touched humor and picturesque particularity. By overtly focusing the story on fathers and sons, the book relieves itself of the burden of being unobtrusive, so that Harlan Q can be keenly interested in Warrior's relationship with his own estranged father and with Harlan P; the "Long Gone Daddy" of the title is actually the name of Harlan O's Vegas [End Page 454] bar, taken from a Hank Williams song and summing up Harlan O's own history of parenting, with which Harlan Q's dad has never really come to terms. The colorful and comedic travel tale will draw a broad range of readers, while those dealing with their own parental friction will sympathize with Harlan Q's struggles. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

La formule Bardey: voyages africains (review)

Reviewed by: La formule Bardey: voyages africains Ambroise Kom La formule Bardey: voyages africains By Alain Ricard Bordeaux: Editions Confluences, 2005. 288 pp. Despite a subtitle that offers clues to the book's content, the expression "Formule Bardey" remains rather enigmatic for lack of use. Across their diversity, all 23 texts in this collection are in some way studies of various voyages across the continent made by the author throughout his career as an Africanist. The work was inspired, he says, by Alfred Bardey's tagline, "commercial explorer and traveler at the end of the nineteenth century." Bardey "was a fearless young man, a clairvoyant, broadminded. [. . .] Alfred, in the twilight of his years, left us the formula that he applied to his journeys. [. . .] Countries, people, situations, etc. are too diverse for a one-size-fits-all formula, but I can give the one I used, perhaps because of my temperament, and which can be inscribed in the new manner: COS—Confidence, Optimism, Solidarity" (19). Although Alain Ricard thus privileges the tone and style of his tales, the importance of the field he is covering deserves emphasis. His ballads in the shape of dizzying tales of travel lead us from Ibadan to Lake Victoria, from Lomé to Timbuktu, from Lubumbashi to Dar es Salaam, and from Africa to Europe, etc. Yet we are not dealing with a banal travel guide but rather with examples of cultural anthropology. The author who, one suspects, has a high opinion of himself, delivers to us highly developed images of his various interlocutors. Whether these are scenes of daily life (funeral wakes in Lomé, police reports, scenes of modern life in circumstances of conjuncture, etc.) or whether negotiating—or rather buying—his border crossings ("the graveyard of Pan-African ambitions," 38) in a highly corrupt environment, Ricard always effectively holds his lived experiences at an objective distance. The work likewise offers us an impressionistic portrait gallery of artists and intellectuals who are living or working on the continent: Wole Soyinka, Ebrahim [End Page 218] Hussein, Nurudin Farah, Kangni Alem, Clémentine Nzuji, Léo Kuper, Robert Escarpit, Agbota Zinsou, János Riesz, etc. Of all these tableaux, Soyinka'shadow imposes itself with a particular insistence. The author explains: "I had the chance to know Africa in part through the vision given by Wole Soyinka and I have never had cause to complain about this first teacher. He removes barriers between practice and theory, and forces us to rethink a notion such as that of engagement [. . .]. He is not a writer in exile, he is not in prison, but neither is he in power, or in the underground [. . .]. An anti-imperialist, he is also anti-Marxist, and his satire of the 'leftocracy' offers no enticements over his satire of 'kleptocracy.' He belongs to an antitotalitarian left that the French—and francophone—intellectuals have trouble situating on their mental map of the intellectual universe" (232–33). Such a portrait indicates that La formule Bardey is above all the work of an informed literary critic. Moreover, although Ricard suggests that in France comparative literature is a discipline headed for disappearance, many of the texts he offers for our reading prove that he is a nostalgic if not a fervent representative of that discipline. The same may thus be said for his texts on Amos Tutuola and Soyinka, or his study on what he calls the "Eyadema generation." La formule Bardey is inscribed in what today is called cultural studies, given the nature and diversity of the field he has embraced as well as the point of view he has adopted. In this respect, selections such as "Thinking about Rwanda" or "France, Mother of the Arts . . ." deserve attention. Here, the objective distance that was previously noted is no longer in place. About Rwanda as well as about francophony, Ricard speaks as an intellectual as well as a French citizen: "Black Africans are in short the sharpshooters of francophony: summoned to furnish troops, but not given a voice" (192); "Thus in Rwanda, France was manipulated by an extremely adept clan that was assured of their impunity. [. . .] An investigative commission is more than ever needed [. . .]" (241–42). In sum, La formule Bardey...

Scottish Traveller Tales: Lives Shaped through Stories

Scottish Traveller Tales: Lives Shaped through Stories

Scottish Traveller Tales: Lives Shaped through Stories (review)

Scottish Traveller Tales: Lives Shaped through Stories (review)

“Travel Tales”: an interpretive analysis of constraints and negotiations to pleasure travel as experienced by persons with physical disabilities

Travel personnel and tourism site managers are often ill prepared to assist travelers with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to expand the understanding of constraints to pleasure travel experienced and negotiation strategies employed by persons with physical disabilities. Comparative pattern analysis was used to systematically analyze narratives written by travelers with disabilities, resulting in the emergence of six intrapersonal, six interpersonal, and eight structural themes. Further examination suggested an interactive, rather than hierarchical, relationship between the themes. Including persons with disabilities at every stage of the travel provision process can help ensure improved services for all travelers.

Travelling and translating

This essay looks at ways in which travellers tales seek to authenticate themselves by claiming to be ‘truthful’ accounts of first hand experience. Aparallel is drawn between the travel writer and the translator, since both claim to bring versions of otherness to their readers, rewritten and presented in accessible (domesticated) language and form. Yet both are highly manipulative literary activities, forms of rewriting that contain an inherent journey, and both depend on collusion between writer and reader in the creation of an illusion of authenticity. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville is cited as an example of the fantastical traveller's tale.

Geography as the world discipline: connecting popular and academic geographical imaginations

This article addresses and connects two areas of controversy within contemporary geography: the parochialism of contemporary human geography and the gulf between university and non‐university geography. It is argued that we can find the cause of the latter phenomenon in the origin of the former, namely in academic geography's unwillingness to re‐imagine the ‘global claim’ that it has inherited from its imperial past. This difficulty has created the conditions for the representation of popular geography as intrinsically dated, as politically suspect and/or as mere ‘traveller's tales’. It is suggested that geography cannot escape the burden of its global claim. Rather it needs to critically engage this formerly imperial paradigm and, in so doing, re‐ignite geography's role in public debate and as public knowledge.

Scottish Traveller Tales: Lives Shaped through Stories (review)

The translation of a PhD thesis into a book is a precarious, and not always successful, undertaking. What may have satisfied a dissertation director, an advisory committee, and a small group of readers as regards contents, originality, structure, tone, and style of the issues discussed and the arguments advanced and made persuasive, often fails to impress a non-academic audience. The doctoral thesis submitted by Donald Braid and approved by Indiana University in 1996, with the title "The Negotiation of Meaning and Identity in the Narratives of the Travelling People of Scotland," may therefore well have raised an eyebrow or two when considered for publication outside its original domicile. Fortunately, the intellectual preciousness of the title did not deter the University of Mississippi Press from turning the thesis into a book called Scottish Traveller Tales, with the telling, but somewhat one-sided subtitle Lives Shaped through Stories, and the editors at the Press responsible for commissioning and then nursing it through the preparatory phase are to be congratulated on having had the foresight necessary to recognize this work's potentially wider appeal.

Les récoltes botaniques en Guyane française; géographie historique de la découverte de la flore de Guyane française

How did botanists and naturalists prospect French Guyana for over two centuries? Rather than drawing on travel tales, this analysis focuses on localisation of botanical prospecting (herbariums and other collections). Results show that various exploration strategies were used over time and space: lengthy and far reaching explorations opening new areas but yielding poor collections; heavy and comprehensive explorations of a river or a mountain yielding sizeable collections, but those were often not repeated; short but repeated missions on the same site, often along the coast, accumulating information; permanent stations yielding a wide range of species which allowed for near exhaustive inventories. But vast areas are still void after 235 years of botanical inventories.

Taking the Sting out of the Traveller's Tale: Thackeray's Irish Sketchbook

(2001). Taking the Sting out of the Traveller's Tale: Thackeray's Irish Sketchbook. Irish Studies Review: Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 25-40.

Taking the Sting out of the Traveller's Tale: Thackeray's Irish Sketchbook

Taking the Sting out of the Traveller's Tale: Thackeray's Irish Sketchbook

Taking the Sting out of the Traveller's Tale: Thackeray's Irish Sketchbook

Taking the Sting out of the Traveller's Tale: Thackeray's Irish Sketchbook

NARCO-TRAVELOGUES AND CAPITAL'S APPETITES

This article surveys drug literature that is constructed around the motif of travel, bringing the drug narrative and the traveller's tale together. It asserts that this unique literary genre reveals an inner logic which also pivots on the essentially capitalist view of the world as a vast pattern of consuming habits.

A Certain Season

Eloquently negotiating their way through a network of traveller's tales and historical and folkloric narratives, these English-language poems are keenly sensitive to twists of humor and irony, both in experience and language.

Islands of the Frigate Bird (review)

Islands of the Frigate Bird brings together Banaban, Gilbertese, Bikinian, and white colonial experiences of the twentieth century in a fictional tale of male travel and survival. Tarte sets up the story as a genealogy that links different characters and events, from the beginning of time, two and a half billion years ago, to the future 2234, and ultimately to a group of voyagers who sailed east from Southeast Asia and landed on Banaba "prehistorically." What follows is a fragmented saga of colonization, mining, world war, nuclear testing, and the woes of [End Page 299] patrolling oceanic exclusive economic zones, all viewed briefly through the eyes of Islander and European male protagonists. It starts in the future with one particular descendant named Ion Itabirik, rewriting his ancestral stories. Thanks to global warming, his roots have been swallowed up by the ocean, displacing many atoll-dwelling folk to countries like Australia where Itabirik now lives.

Settler Anxieties, Indigenous Peoples, and Women's Suffrage in the Colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and Hawai'i, 1888 to 1902

In the year 1896 American Jessie Ackermann published a book entitled The World Through a Woman's Eyes.' It was a traveler's tale of unusual interest. This lady traveler had undertaken a journey of almost epic proportions (especially given her much-mentioned propensity to seasickness). Since she had sailed out of San Francisco in the autumn of 1888, she claimed to have covered 150,000 miles in all. Following the track of English explorer James Cook over a century earlier, Ackermann visited Hawai'i, New Zealand, and Australia. She had set foot on every continent of the world-exotic places like China, Japan, Thailand, Java, Burma, India, and South Africa. She claimed unusually close contact with local people: I was a guest in nearly two thousand homes; all kinds of homes, rich and poor, high and low-from the palace, government house and castle to the thatched cot of the sturdy farmer, the canvas or tin tent of the miner, and the bark hut of the lumber camp.2 Finally, her tale was unusual because of her strong interest in the position of

The play and place of fact and fiction in the travel tale

Journal Article THE PLAY AND PLACE OF FACT AND FICTION IN THE TRAVEL TALE Get access MAUREEN A. RAMSDEN MAUREEN A. RAMSDEN Department of French, University of HullHull, HU6 7RX, United Kingdom Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume XXXVI, Issue 1, January 2000, Pages 16–32, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/XXXVI.1.16 Published: 01 January 2000

Imagining Scotland: Tradition, Representation, and Promotion in Scottish Tourism Since 1750

Contents: Introduction Tourism, place promotion and the cultural frame Traveller's tales Sir Walter Scott and the propagation of the Highland myth The coming of the railways The rhetoric of the open road Selling Highland Scotland: the role of heritage Selling industrial Scotland: tourism and the workplace Cities of culture Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Education

Education

Anna Jameson: Victorian, feminist, woman of letters

Contents: Introduction 'A silent existence': women and biography The riddle of history: unhistorical women Writing Romeo out: rereading Shakespeare's women 'Only a traveller's tale': gendered discourse in professional travel writing Metamorphosed and translated: interpreting the terra incognita Invading the house of Titian: the colonisation of Italian art Alien aesthetics and the representation of women 'Throwing down the partition walls': feminist dialectics and professional work for women Locations of the major manuscript collections Bibliography Works cited.