Tales Of Travel Research Articles

Marco Polo in Manuscript: The Travels of the <em>Devisement du monde</em>

Marco Polo's account of his journeys in Eurasia and the Indian Ocean is both a travel tale and a tale that traveled. Composed in 1298, Polo's account survives in 135 manuscripts produced before 1530 throughout Europe, and copied in over ten languages.1 Additional evidence of the work's broad distribution is found in early print editions from across western Europe.2 This geographical difffusion was complemented by dissemination among various social groups. Several fourteenth- and fijifteenth-century authors cited Polo, and early readers included encyclopedists, theologians, doctors, merchants, and kings.3 Polo's travel account was certainly one of the most widely circulated, if not influential, vernacular narratives in late medieval Europe.The varied manuscript corpus of Polo's account reveals the extent to which this narrative defijied literary and epistemological categorization. It was the fijirst vernacular account of travel in the Far East, it was written by a layman, and it included information previously unknown to Europeans.4 Polo's account is in fact not a coherent story at all, but rather an assemblage of many kinds of facts, descriptions, and narratives. It is also a generic hybrid that fuses elements of folklore, myths, hagiographies, epics, and romances that one normally associates with the fund of Eurasian tales, yet departs radically from them.5 As a result, Polo's account did not have a stable textual identity. Not only was it translated into many languages, but also the text was given many diffferent forms and material contexts. There is no single authoritative version of the text, and the variations within and across linguistic corpora may be extensive. The text may be copied as a solo work, or compiled with any number of other works. Similarly, the facture of the manuscripts themselves ranges from the slapdash to the professional to the princely. Just as there is no defijinitive text, so is there no consistent mise en livre for Polo's text.This essay examines one particular branch of the Polo manuscript tradition, that of the Old French text, commonly known as Le Devisement du monde (The Description of the World). It fijirst discusses how Polo's account made its way into France, where it was preserved in luxury manuscripts and became an heirloom of the French royal family. It then focuses on the ways in which diffferent manuscripts present, or frame, the Devisement through the use of written and visual paratexts. In the same way that the oral transmission of tales involved recontextualization from one telling to the next, so too did the presentation of texts in medieval manuscripts. The Devisement manuscripts are particularly striking because, although closely related textually, paratextually they are very diffferent. As Polo's account migrated from copy to copy, each manuscript became a narrative locus that invited a new framing and telling of the story. The varying titles assigned to the text and the diffferent depictions of Marco Polo reflect the multiple interpretive choices that the Devisement offfered to late medieval readers. Like other tales that traveled, Polo's account was both valuable and exceptionally adaptable. It meant diffferent things to diffferent readers, and as a result was endowed with a wide range of manuscript contexts.Marco Polo in FranceOne of the oldest surviving Polo manuscripts (Paris, BnF, fr. 1116) is in a Franco-Italian dialect and was produced between 1310 and 1320, during Marco Polo's lifetime.6 This manuscript is a professional production, with a table of contents and decorated initials but no pictures. In it, Polo's text is copied alone and is titled the Divisiment dou monde in the opening rubric. Its patron, the circumstances of its production, its relationship to Marco Polo, and the date of its arrival in France are unknown. Nonetheless, the manuscript is signifijicant as an early witness of the text, and because it is related to the progenitor of the Old French versions of Polo's account. …

The Music of Tomorrow, Yesterday! Music, Time and Technology in BioShock Infinite

Filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino have taken full advantage of the disconcerting effect that pop music can have on an audience. Recently, video games have followed their example, with franchises such as Grand Theft Auto, Fallout and BioShock using appropriated music as an almost integral part of their stories and player experiences. BioShock Infinite takes it one step further, weaving popular music of the past and pop music of the present into a compelling tale of time travel, multiverses, and free will. The third installment in the BioShock series has as its setting the floating city of Columbia. Decidedly steampunk, this vision of 1912 makes considerable use of popular music of the past alongside a small number of anachronistic covers of more modern pop music (largely from the 1980s) at crucial moments in the narrative. Music becomes an integral part of Columbia but also an integral part of the player experience. Although the soundscape matches the rest of the environment, the anachronistic covers seem to be directed at the player, the only one who would recognise them as out of place. The player is the time traveller here, even more so than the character they are playing, making BioShock Infinite one of the most literal representations of time travel and the tourist experience which video games can represent.

Wes Williams Monsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty MagicMonsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty Magic. Wes Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xv+344.

Wes Williams Monsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty MagicMonsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty Magic. Wes Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xv+344.

Travels of an Itinerant Librarian 2011-13

An interesting look at the travel tales and experiences of a retired theological librarian.

Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China by Cong Ellen Zhang (review)

Reviewed by: Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China by Cong Ellen Zhang Beata Grant Cong Ellen Zhang . Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 301. $49.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0824833992. Transformative Journeys represents a fine addition to the growing number of English-language studies on Song literati life and culture. As the author readily acknowledges, there is no dearth of extant materials on Song elite travel, given the exponential increase in the number of men preparing for the civil examinations or taking up official positions, both of which, as this book persuasively shows, entailed an extraordinary number of journeys. These primary sources range from major collections of government statutes and documents to various types of writing by Song literati, including poems, essays, travel diaries, and miscellaneous writings. One of the Zhang's most remarkable achievements is her careful and judicious use of materials drawn from this daunting array of sources to vividly reconstruct both the logistical, economic, and institutional details of travel as well as its equally important social and cultural dimensions. Zhang organizes her book very systematically, with relatively short chapters into which she packs a wealth of detail without, miraculously, compromising their overall engaging readability. She begins with a discussion of the [End Page 470] "transient life" of the average Song scholar-official. This life often began in childhood, since many boys would accompany their fathers or other senior males traveling to take up official positions. Study and education also required substantial travel, especially since many students had the option of attending schools located outside of their hometown. Zhang notes that at any one time there could have been tens of thousands of young men travelling between hometown and schools—a phenomenon that, incidentally, explains the great popularity of travel tales in Song literature. If and when these students successfully passed their exams and were appointed to office, they would then embark on a lifetime of frequent travel, most of it not of their own choosing. In fact, due to state regulations such as the so-called Three-Year Tenure and the Principle of Avoidance, many officials only occasionally actually served even three full years before being transferred (or sometimes, demoted) to other positions. In other words, much of their time was spent either preparing to go or preparing to leave office—with all of the bureaucratic and social protocol each of these required. The thick description provided by Zhang is both fascinating and illuminating, and brings to life the real difficulties of, for example, traveling with family members (one cannot help but think of the unspoken other half: wives and mothers who sometimes went along and other times remained in their native places to take care of in-laws and family property.) And there were also unexpected crises such as personal illness, the death of a parent, or in a time ridden by political factionalism, a sudden change of regime that could turn an official posting into an order of exile. Here, and throughout the book, Zhang nicely juxtaposes facts and figures with specific examples of well-known Song dynasty figures such as Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072) and Fan Chengda (1126-1193), which she uses to illustrate the great extent and range of their travels, the often very brief length of their individual official postings (between one or two years), and the fact that many were demoted and sent into exile at least once in the course of their official career. Once a Song elite male became an official, his travel was directly determined and controlled by the state, which also paid for his expenses. In Chapters 2 through 4, Zhang provides a detailed description of the physical logistics of travel for which the government was largely responsible: roads, rivers and waterways, boats and barges, horses, donkeys, and sedan chairs, not to mention lodging and places to eat. Zhang also describes the immense amount of [End Page 471] paperwork created by a central imperial state determined to micromanage its civil servants. The time and expense involved in acquiring proper travel documents, not to mention writing memorials of gratitude to the emperor and other high...

Jack Tar's Story: The Autobiographies and Memoirs of Sailors in Antebellum America (review)

Jack Tar's Story: The Autobiographies and Memoirs of Sailors in Antebellum America. By Myra C. Glenn. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 206. Cloth, $85.00.)Reviewed by Michael D. ThompsonNineteenth-century Americans had an insatiable appetite for tales of maritime travel and adventure, and antebellum novelists did not disappoint. Joining these fictional authors were former seafarers who sought to hawk their stories. Jack Tar's Story critically examines many of these autobiographies and memoirs for what they reveal not only about how antebellum remembered their time before the mast but also for how they understood and interpreted transformative experiences such as combat, impressment, flogging, roistering, and moral and religious reformation. Interweaving the narrative are the dual themes of manhood and nationalism, the complex meanings of which, the author contends, were highly conflicted and contested in antebellum America. Throughout the text Glenn emphasizes seafarers' vital role in America's rise to power between the War of 1812 and the Civil War.The first of the book's five chapters analyzes the autobiographical recollections of both working-class seamen and gentlemen sailors (16) as coming-of-age narratives. Whether to escape the stifling constraints of genteel respectability or hardscrabble lives of impoverishment, restless youths went to sea to become men. Beginning these quests for manhood with an exhilarating sense of freedom, independence, and impending transformation, many mariners later recalled the disillusionment of discovering that life at sea was equally or even more oppressive than the lives of and feminized domesticity they fled on land. Optimistic accounts of liberation and masculine empowerment ironically morphed into captivity narratives of hardship, abuse, and imperiled manhood.The second chapter explores sailor authors' recollections and representations of their resistance to oppression at sea. British impressment gangs and Barbary pirates jeopardized American mariners' pursuit of manhood and freedom, eliciting a bold defense of personal and national pride and sovereignty. Those who fought against the British Navy in the American Revolution and the War of 1812 both contributed to and personified a burgeoning national identity that pitted American liberty, virtue, and honor against British corruption, injustice, and tyranny. Even when captured and imprisoned, naturalized and native-born American Jack Tars alike defiantly resisted subjugation, emasculation, and slavish dependence (61) and asserted their manhood and rights as sailors. The next chapter, perhaps the weakest of the book, continues to consider how seamen perceived and interpreted international conflicts through the twin lenses of manliness and nationalism. Memories of combat and captivity during the Haitian Revolution and Latin American wars for independence prompted white American mariners to proudly mythologize and sanitize their own nation's revolutionary struggle.Chapter 4 returns to sailors' manly assertion of their rights and opposition to maltreatment, this time at the hands of American ship captains. Harsh punishments at sea, especially slave-like floggings, threatened not only to subjugate and unman white but also to undermine the nation's economy and security. Uniting with reformers, seamen authors provided American readers and lawmakers graphic eyewitness descriptions of the abuse, successfully arguing that to protect sailors' rights, honor, and manly independence was to defend the nation's democratic values and sovereignty.Antebellum reformers simultaneously were interested in rehabilitating Jack Tar himself. Roistering too imperiled seamen's dignity and manhood, not to mention the welfare of his vessel, shipmates, and nation. …

A visit to the “Great Ghaytez's palace”

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore corporate buildings as discursive entities. They are machines designed to tell the corporate story; they embody the aspirations of a culture. This is particularly the case with headquarters buildings, which are rhetorical artefacts proclaiming a narrative of identity, designed to legitimise past, present and future decisions and strategies. Buildings such as the Vatican, Windsor Castle, the Houses of Parliament and the old Prudential Insurance Building proclaim that the organisation is old and venerable, trustworthy, a model of probity, stable, and here to stay.Design/methodology/approachThe approach employed in this paper uses literature as a way of representing organisations. This paper works with an archaic genre to present a traveller's tale. This has been used to attempt to open up a third space between literary techniques used to analyse organisations and literature as a management education strategy. By opening up this possibility of a third position, it is hoped that readers will be encouraged to make their own interpretations.FindingsThe paper posits that organisations attempt to affirm their “brand” consciously, or unconsciously, through their public buildings. They tell their “stories” materially. However, despite their best efforts at image control, counter‐narratives leach out from these structures as their use of space is experienced by human subjects.Originality/valueThe paper attempts to open up a third space for readers to co‐create meaning with the author and for themselves. There is a clear political purpose here: to expose the oppressive practices of organisations which legitimate their existence in part at least through their corporate buildings, but the paper also signals the aesthetic delight, the pleasure that we can take in allowing ourselves to be enchanted by these buildings.

'Light in my Life': A Tale of Travel through the Unfamiliar Landscape of a Group Relations Conference in Israel

The author of this paper is an artist and the business development manager of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations; one could think of her role as that of a curator. This paper presents her reflections on attending a group relations conference for the first time, and visiting Israel - the location of the conference - also for the first time. It includes visual images that provide another access point to these two unfamiliar landscapes - the conference and the country. The visual images she brings into the paper provide a unique access point to the Group Relations landscape within its Israeli context and reflect the author's work in bridging the world of fine arts with social dynamics. Drawing on literary, film, and artistic references, key themes of the paper are: (i) the outsider's experience and observance of being a women in Israel - women colluding with men; the female need for protection; men being disparaging of the female voice; (ii) the visual and the creative and how artistic works provide metaphor for the experiences of the conference, referencing the work of Michelangelo, especially his late drawings of the crucifixion; (iii) the emergence of story and meaning from the group experience; the told and the untold.

The Purchase of Enlightenment

In Eat Pray Love, the film adaptation of author Elizabeth Gilbert’s tale of travel and self-discovery, we see American consumer culture on display. Lucrative industries are ready to help women navigate crises of identity, but these solutions might be nothing more than salves.

Space, Politics and Desire: Configuring the Landscape in Post-Revolutionary France

The French Revolution radically reconfigured citizens' views of both real and imagined space. This article sets out to explore this process of reconfiguration and the relationship between politics and space from the period immediately before the French Revolution in 1789 to the collapse of the Empire in 1815 and its aftermath. Although the liberties brought about by the Revolution made access to space one of its defining characteristics, the spaces of the Revolution were characterized by a diversity in which each political constituency made a space of its own choosing. Those spaces took forms as diverse as the pastoral garden, tales of devil abduction, political festivals, space travel, and hallucinatory visions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Switzerland. It was only when Napoléon ‘terminated’ the Revolution in 1799 that space was given a rational, homotopic shape, a shape that endured until the imperatives of the Bourbon Restoration required another configuration.

Book reviews

The drool of a T−Rex, a tear from a sphinx and a time travelling espresso machine... One thing is certain, you will never drink a cup of coffee in quite the same way after reading this captivating tale of time travel, adventure and espresso!

"Wilderness and Its Waters": A Professional Identity for the Hudson River School

The ideology behind much Hudson River School painting was reflected in the 1855 inaugural volume of the art journal The Crayon . There Asher B. Durand's "Letters on Landscape Painting" were serialized alongside a short story by William James Stillman, a painter as well as The Crayon 's editor. His "Wilderness and Its Waters," a tale of travel into the Hudson River's headwaters, attempted to redefine the landscape painter's activity. Reinforcing Durand's imperative to study nature in its undefiled state, Stillman portrayed landscape painters both as deeply philosophical and as men of action. Emphasizing the primitive conditions encountered on the river, Stillman introduced hardship, privation, and physical risk to the requirement of relentlessly observing nature, while offering spiritual epiphany as reward. He created a novel artistic profile that melded two stereotypical professional identities, those of intrepid explorer and minister of God, which conveniently mirrored the values by which many Americans defined themselves.

Richard Halliburton's Bearded Tales

Fusing the concept of “the beard” with the genre of the tall tale to theorize bearded tales deepens our understanding of closet eloquence, or rhetorical repertories of sexual passing in U.S. history. An examination of adventurer-writer-lecturer Richard Halliburton's sexual provenance and bestselling travel tale, The Royal Road to Romance (1925), illustrates how such autobiographical feints conceal and confound queer subjectivity by proximate heteronormative apparitions that configure straight ethos. At the same time, these fragile constructions gesture toward queer worlds inscribed between the lines for the fourth persona while reflecting upon the exile of archives, and the queer legacy of bearding.

Setting the normative boundaries: crucial epistemological benchmarks in comparative education

Historians of comparative education have ordinarily viewed the development of that field as having progressed in stages, from impressionistic traveller tales to systematic investigations, with each stage eclipsing the previous one in rigour and acceptability. In this essay, I show that this common ‘Darwinian’ view is simplistic and distorts the real development of comparative education. Rather than in stages, I contend that the field has developed within three epistemological streams: positivist, relativist, and historical functionalist. These streams, each shaped over many decades, continue to be alive and well and delineate the field’s normative boundaries. Indeed, comparativists differ markedly in defining the field, because their definitions arise out of whichever particular epistemological stream they embrace. What we need is a definition that encompasses all normative streams, and the one that I propose is: comparative education is the application of the intellectual tools of history and the social sciences to understanding international issues of education.

Traveller's Tales: the stories migrants carry with them and their impact on a writer's life

forthcoming

On the Road to India with Apollonios of Tyana and Thomas the Apostle

This article explores some ways in which the authors of the Life of Apollonios of Tyana and the Acts of Thomas use mechanisms of social networking familiar to their readers to lend verisimilitude to tales of travel in distant India. In both works, the protagonists rely on mundane social networking through claims of ethnicity, religion, language, and commerce to overcome barriers of communication and obtain access to locals. Use of these mechanisms to achieve verisimilitude and secure the reader's belief fits well with recent scholarship that sees these works and others like them as most closely related to the genre of Greek fiction. At the same time, achieving verisimilitude serves the authors' larger purposes of presenting their protagonists as extraordinary figures engaged in extraordinary missions.

Buried perspectives

In examining representations of engagements with the North American landscape in the fiction of Toni Morrison, this article seeks to explore the author’s revision of dominant discourses about the topography and symbolic spaces of the continent and her exposure thereby of historical structures of power. Focusing on her fourth novel, Song of Solomon (1977), it traces how Morrison attempts to give voice to African American experience and identity and to revisit and contest familiar stories of national belonging and being in the land. In crafting tales of black displacement, dispossession, estrangement, travel, discovery, connection and home, the author is found to excavate buried perspectives and shape her own potent narrative act.

Space, place and the colonies: re‐reading the Starbucks' story

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to re‐examine a celebrity CEO account using a variety of literary forms to uncover discourses of colonisation. Focuses on the probanza de mérito and the wonder tale or traveller's tale. Ideas of Non‐Place (Augé) and spatial practices (Lefebvre) conclude the analysis.Design/methodology/approachA close reading of the account of the building of the Starbucks retail empire, given in the CEO account: Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time against the text, gives insights into the strategy and internal logic of the company founder which might otherwise be missed.FindingsThe account reveals the nature of the published account of the growth of the company as analogous to many of the accounts of the colonisation of the new world. The analysis of spatial practices at the company is used to explain some of the most successful resistance to its expansion.Originality/valueUses a wide range of theory to unpack celebrity success narrative and reveal counter‐narrative of practice.

Designing for developing contexts

Designing for developing contexts

By the Seat of My Pants (review)

Reviewed by: By the Seat of My Pants John Edwards By the Seat of My Pants Edited by Don GeorgeLonely Planet, 2005, 248 pp., $15 Lately the trend in literary travel writing is that the best of times is the worst of times. Everyone secretly relishes the bad trip, as long as it's somebody else's. And there are a whole lot of those in Lonely Planet's new book of humorous tales of travel and misadventure, By the Seat of My Pants, edited by Don George, Lonely Planet's global travel editor and former editor of Salon.com's "Wanderlust." Not since Travelers' Tales' Danger! has such a diverse collection combined literary flair with the savoir-faire of luminaries (Jan Morris, Pico Iyer, Simon Winchester) and lesser-knowns (Bill Fink). At least one story, "The Afghan Tourist Office" (whose title says it all), is by a previously unpublished writer, Alexander Ludwick. In thirty years of wandering the globe, Don George has learned that the one thing you can expect when traveling is that the unexpected will happen. "That's why my #1 rule of the road is this: if you don't pack your sense of humour with your sunscreen, sooner or later you will get burned," Don George says in the introduction. He promises "unadulterated hilarity" and "unimaginable situations" that make us laugh at the world and ourselves. The thirty-one tales of disaster abroad range from the wryly ironic to the laugh-out-loud absurd. There's Vagabonding author Rolf Potts discussing blue movies in a sort-of Shangri-la on the subcontinent, Christopher R. Cox braving a boat in Cambodia that's nothing at all like the tourist brochure, and Pico Iyer on a hair-raising whirlwind tour of Ethiopia. One of the funniest stories, "An Idyll in Ibiza," describes a vacation from hell in the beautiful Balearics. The half-Jewish Karl Taro Greenfeld visits the wealthy German family of his model girlfriend, Anya, and ends up battling a pampered rat (the Beckers feed it) with a tennis racket and trying to reinstall the broken propeller of the Beckers' sailboat during a boating disaster. What makes the book worthwhile is Lonely Planet's knack in recognizing a good read. There is not a boring passage in By the Seat of My Pants, whose tone for the most part is more comedic, mind-ripping yarn than ethereal soul-searching yawn. Who cares if some of the stories aren't misadventures at all, like Kathie Kertesz's fairytale meeting with the Crown Prince of Liechtenstein? The only real criticism is that the anthology is too short [End Page 156] and begs a sequel. The next time you plan to get kidnapped by an Uzi-toting kidnapper-cum-tour guide in Prague, abort a climbing expedition on Mount Fuji, or get locked inside a bathroom in Holland, this is the book to take along for light reading. Your own suffering will pale in comparison. Copyright © 2006 The Curators of the University of Missouri