Travel Literature Research Articles

«Da natural vaghezza mosso»: Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri's Travels Through Armenia (1694)

Travel Literature is a goldmine of information for the study of Armenian art and culture. Nevertheless, it is a largely unexplored field of investigation, especially accounts written in Italian. Among the understudied works, Giro del mondo (1699‑1700) by Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri (1651‑1724) stands out. Travelling to Ispahan across Historical Armenia in 1694, Gemelli described populations, settlements, and monuments. The analysis retraces the traveller’s path examining the information on the presence and conditions of the Armenian artistic heritage in the Eastern Ottoman districts and the Safavid provinces of Erevan and Naxiǰevan.

Comparative analysis of the Context of travel literature in Sanskrit and Nepali literature

Travel plays an important role in the human and non-human life. All living creatures of the world have an innate tendency of travel. It is also associated with the human civilization. By traveling different geographical, cultural, and historical sites one can learn unseen things and gain new experiences.There is a long tradition of travel literature or travel contexts in Sanskrit literature. There are many examples of travel narratives or travel related stories found in the ancient Sanskrit texts like Vedas, Puranas, Aitareya Bahmana, Kaushitaki Bahmana, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Panchatantra etc. Nepali literature has also been greatly influenced by the context of travel or travel literature of the Sanskrit literature. There have been many translations of Sanskrit epics in Nepali literature. The Sanskrit texts like Ramayana, Mahabharata and different kinds of Puranas, Vedas have been translated into Nepali in abundance, which has been discussed in this article and tried to clarify the relationship of Sanskrit literature with Nepali literature in the context of the travel and travel literature.

“Written upon the Stones”: Of the Cyclops, the Shamir and Other Legends of Origin in Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels

This paper examines legends on the origins (aetiologies) of places and placenames in Benjamin of Tudela’s travel account. Origin stories are prevalent in medieval travelogues, but Hebrew travel accounts employ a unique form that is embedded in placenames. Midrash Shem (מדרש שם), as this form is known in Jewish tradition, is the homiletical interpretation of names, typically characterized in some measure by wordplay. I suggest that these legends and placenames serve Hebrew travel literature both as an evidential tool and as an artistic means of expression, contributing to the construction of “known” and “foreign” lands and peoples, and consequently to the formulation of group identities. En route to the foreign and unknown, yet “own”, holy Eretz Yisrael, Benjamin of Tudela encounters Jewish communities and records a variety of aetiologies throughout the Middle East. In retelling the origins of the travelled landscape, he transmits local mythical, theological and historical content as well as particular Jewish-diasporic socio-political realities. Diversely told origins of Roman architecture, scattered across most of Benjamin’s account, show how these local traditions varied. Some aetiologies fuse traditional with foreign content to affirm a sense of belonging under foreign rule, while others actively undermine established non-Jewish narratives or even oppose competing Jewish narratives.

Образ Италии в аспекте «фронтирного восприятия» в «итальянских» очерках С. П. Шевырева

The research aims to characterize the features of building the image of Italy in S. P. Shevyrev’s travel essays in the aspect of “frontier perception”. The scientific novelty of the paper is determined by the insufficient study of the topic of Italy in Shevyrev’s works and by the attention to the “frontier aspect” of Italy’s image in Shevyrev’s artistic consciousness. The paper traces the influence of the concepts of J. G. Herder (on the interconnectedness of cultures of different peoples in the synchronic and diachronic contexts of history) and J. J. Winckelmann (on the influence of climate on the appearance of the people) on the ethnopoetics of Shevyrev’s travel prose. The research identifies and describes a number of positions in which Shevyrev brings together the culture of Italy and Russia (characteristics of the natural and urban landscape; architectural features of buildings; details of material culture; folk traditions). The idea is justified that the traveler, comparing “his own” and “foreign”, is in the cultural “frontier zone”, which is reflected in his travel notes. The research contributes to the study of S. P. Shevyrev’s creative work, to the exploration of the travel prose of the first half of the 19th century. In addition, using the “frontier” approach expands the range of methodological directions for the study of travel literature.

The Riḥlahs and Road Trips of Modern Iraqi Literature: Ṣafāʾ Khulūṣī’s Abū Nuwās fī Amrīkā

Abstract This article situates the 1955 novel Abū Nuwās fī Amrīkā by Ṣafāʾ Khulūṣī as an exemplar of and commentary on the dynamics of twentieth-century Iraqi cultural production. Drawing on Margaret Litvin’s application of “travel literature readings” to modern diasporic and expatriate literatures, it analyzes the novel’s protagonist—in the form of a reincarnated, radically reformed version of the Abbasid-era poet Abū Nuwās—as engaging in a “riḥlah-road-trip,” traversing the United States alongside an anonymous narrator. Rather than fashioning a conservative extension of the pre- and early modern riḥlah genre, in view of the author’s historical moment and works, this article argues that Khulūṣī parodies this genre by constructing critical distance and building intertextuality simultaneously. Khulūṣī draws on riḥlahs of the past, in which Iraq is represented as an advanced cosmopolitan destination, to speak to Iraq’s future as a differently globalized, modernizing state that grapples with its perceived temporal and cultural regress, much like the novel’s time-traveling protagonist.

Intertwining Narrative and Technology: Reinterpreting European Cultural Heritage through the Voices of Latin American Women Writers

Travel literature not only provides relevant information about cultural heritage, such as authorship, chronology or location, but also reveals the impressions evoked by its reception. This article describes the methodology of the ongoing REWIND project, which explores European cultural heritage through the perspectives of Latin American women writers who travelled to Europe in the early twentieth century. The project seeks to amplify the voices of non-European women committed to feminism and sociocultural diversity to foster decolonial, inclusive and pluralistic historical narratives. On the one hand, we address the configuration of the project corpus, the semantic annotation process, and the design of the ontological modelling according to the deep data concept. On the other hand, we explain the analysis of the relationships between cultural heritage, time, space and emotion. The project uses travel literature in digital format to retrieve, study and interpret data on cultural heritage, creating a workflow that integrates information from various historical sources to raise further questions and provide new insights. The proposed methodology follows the FAIR principles and prioritizes using open-source software to ensure reproducibility and facilitate the use of deliverables in other studies.

Tourist experience and destination evangelism: the mediating role of inspiration

ABSTRACT Even though tourist experience (TX) and destination evangelism are crucial research priorities, a substantial paucity of empirically derived insights into these concepts and their relationships exists. Therefore, this study investigates the TX’s impact on tourist inspiration and destination evangelism by proposing and empirically validating a structural model by collecting data from 384 tourists and then validating it by conducting semi-structured interviews. The study also envisages tourist inspiration to mediate the proposed relationships, thereby contributing further to the tourism and travel literature. This study applies mixed-method explanatory sequential design that consists of two phases. In the first phase, proposed hypotheses were tested by applying the structural equation modelling technique and mediation analysis. The findings revealed that various dimensions of TX exert differential impacts on destination evangelism. The study also confirmed the partial mediation role of tourist inspiration between three dimensions of TX (sensory, cognitive and affective) and destination evangelism; however, the full mediation effect was observed between behavioural TX and destination evangelism. In the second phase, a qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews was conducted. These findings were found in alignment with the findings of the quantitative study. The study concludes by offering key implications and avenues for further research.

TRAVEL AND GEOGRAPHICAL LITERATURE AMONG ARAB MUSLIMS AND ITS IMPORTANCE IN EDUCATIONAL PROCESS

The research showed different trends in travel literature according to what each journey includes. There are journeys with a religious orientation, others with a geographical orientation only, a third with a civilizational orientation, a fourth written to document the trip itself, and so on. It also showed that this beautiful aspect of travel literature and what it includes in terms of descriptions of imagination and reality is of great importance in the field of literature and poetry, its great importance for several other disciplines, including historians and researchers in sociology, geography, philosophy, economics, politics, and others, by providing necessary information that is not obtained from the general books written in those fields.

Garden Travelogues

In this article I introduce the alien view of the traveller, the view from outside, as presented in a number of travel narratives describing the type of the domestic enclosed garden in Nicosia. I focus on three books published between the fourteenth and twentieth century, and do a comparative analysis of the narratives based on the information they provide about Nicosian gardens. I investigate how this knowledge can be used to develop design strategies for gardens as a typology in architectural and urban design. As a demonstration, I discuss the project ‘Nicosian Garden Network’, which uses the historically iconic element of the garden and its narrated spatial qualities as an answer to the problem of urban fragmentation and the presence of a large number of unused plots in the city of Nicosia. The project incorporates unused sites of different sizes into a network of shared semi-public urban spaces that could reconnect the landscape, create conditions of sharing by the different communities on a daily basis, and regain its iconic presence in the contemporary city. The article aims to contribute to the discussion about ways in which travelogues, guides and other forms of travel literature can construct a field of knowledge about vernacular architecture and implement contemporary approaches to architectural design.

Flight-intensive practices and wellbeing: current evidence and future research

This article draws on social practice theory and wellbeing perspectives to outline a research framework for the study of flight-intensive practices. The framework is then used to discuss, through a non-systematic review, the social science air travel literature and to propose avenues for future research. We study both the work and leisure domains, with sub-cases for travel in academia and visiting family and friends. We find insights of a complex relationship between flight-intensive practices and wellbeing. On one hand, currently flight-intensive practices are linked to human need fulfilment, particularly in the family and social domains. Leisure-related air travel often enhances subjective wellbeing, as it contributes to positive moods and life satisfaction, but may not be sustained in the long term. On the other hand, flying, particularly frequent flying, hinders wellbeing by increasing levels of stress and health-related issues, and by straining work/life balance. Overall, the study suggests that policies to reduce the demand for air travel may not significantly compromise wellbeing if accompanied by infrastructural and sociocultural changes that support specific groups to still meet their needs for relatedness, participation, or understanding through low carbon transport, videoconferencing, or reducing the total amount of travel. We identify avenues for future research, both to consolidate our understanding of the practice elements that will support a shift away from flight-intensive practices, and to understand their direct effects on wellbeing.

The Description of Nature in the Works of the Travel Genre: The Case of Karakalpak Writers

The subject of research in this work is the genre of travel in Karakalpak Literature. It analyzes the works of the travel genre of individual Karakalpak writers who have visited abroad in various years. The research material was the poetic collection of the national poet of Karakalpakstan, Hero of Uzbekistan Ibrayim Yusupov Evenings of Distant Malaysia, Caucasus, and travel notes of the Karakalpak writer and scientist Kamal Mambetov Travel, which includes several sections: Travel to India, Hello, Sri Lanka, Shores of the Black Sea of the Caucasus, In the Native Nogai Region, and The ancestral homeland Turkestan. The travel diaries of Karakalpak writers Gulaisha Esemuratova’s American Impressions and Zubaida Ishmanova’s Travel through Europe are also touched upon. Along with the above-mentioned works, the travel notes of the Karakalpak scientist Tazhen Izimbetov Travel to Five Countries across the Ocean and the Karakalpak poet Maten Seitniyazov Travel to Seven Countries are studied. In particular, the author notes that with the motive of the road in literary travels, a special place is occupied by the description of nature and terrain. In her work, the researcher emphasizes the author’s position and subjectivity in travel works in transmitting unknown information to readers. At the same time, in literary travels, the motive of the road occupies a central place, since on the way a person learns about himself, better understands his country, his people and his spiritual roots. The relevance and scientific novelty of the work lie in the insufficient study of the genre of travel in the Karakalpak literature and the author’s attempt to study the issue. The author considers the motive of the hero’s journey in comparison with the motive of return.

L’esprit géographique dans les romans de Xavier-Laurent Petit : l’appel du dehors

Travel literature for young people provides an opportunity to follow the construction of identity around a double didactic knot: the here and the elsewhere. Geographical space is a key element of the novel, and places are the foundation of the narrative. As part of a humanist heritage, the writer creates a journey and an experience of the living: space and species. Xavier-Laurent Petit's work naturally suggests to readers that they belong to the world. In this literary geography, the author weaves together the perceived, experienced and represented space. He highlights landscapes and a geographical gaze that is very reminiscent of Kenneth White's geopoetic approach. This approach anchors our thinking in a triple perspective: scientific, philosophical and poetic. What is this world we live in? This question seems to be entirely contained in this call from the outside and the experience of movement. At the frontier between literature and geography, and drawing on different types of knowledge about the living world around us, travel writing for young readers has the power to question the world. Through language, it gives a space, a landscape, and even sometimes a path to read.

LITERARY TRAVELS IN CHINA DURING THE TANG DYNASTY

The article discusses literary travels in the historical period of the Tang Dynasty, which entered the history of the country as a period of flourishing culture - science, painting, literature, and especially poetry. Two great Chinese poets Li Bo and Du Fu created during this period. Literary and cultural-geographical approaches to the study of travelogues developed in Western, Chinese and Russian literary geography are presented. The historical and cultural contexts of literary travels are discussed. The cultural and historical specificity of the travelogues of the Tang Dynasty period is that many of them were made not out of interest in learning new lands and cultures, but out of necessity. For the most part, the authors of travelogues were applicants for the position of an official who had to submit a literary work at the state exam. Routes, vehicles, stopping places and other elements of travel are analyzed. The role of literary travel in the development of literature of the period under consideration is discussed. Special attention is paid to the anisotropy, or the disparity of different directions, of the cultural space of China of this historical epoch. This is due to the historically low cultural status of Southern China compared to other regions. Travelogue materials reflect this cultural phenomenon well.

South African Allegories in Richard Jefferies’s After London; or Wild England (1885)

This paper argues that Richard Jefferies’s After London (1885), often praised as a pioneering work of speculative fiction, has not been sufficiently understood within the context of late-Victorian imperial expansion. While After London is frequently read in tandem with Jefferies’s nature essays and speculative fiction like H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), I locate the novel within the generic conventions of lost world fiction, a subgenre of the imperial romance associated with masculine adventure tales. Analysing After London’s parallels with, and potential influences on, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), published later that same year, I argue that Jefferies’s unflattering portrayal of English ‘Bushmen’, coupled with the geography of Wild England, gesture emphatically to South Africa. In turn, the motif of a ‘relapse into barbarism’ serves to rationalise the fantasies of terra nullius [‘nobody’s land’] and extractive treasure hunting that Felix Aquila, the quixotic hero, enacts. By connecting After London to Haggard’s highly influential fiction and drawing on Jefferies’s writings about British colonialism in South Africa and the conventions of travel literature, cartography, and ethnography, this paper provides a more complete understanding of Jefferies’s contributions to the canon of lost world fiction.

The Portrayal of the Polish-Lithuanian Peasantry in the Memoir Accounts of British Travelers (1764-1795)

The article analyzes the descriptions of Polish-Lithuanian peasants found in travel literature penned by British visitors to Poland during the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski. It aims to present the literary image of peasantry and comment on the Britons’ attitude towards the problems they faced. The authors whose works are analyzed are William Coxe (historian and tutor), John Lind (associate of a Polish king), Nathaniel Wraxall (traveler and ex-merchant), James Harris (a future diplomat), Joseph Marshall (a mysterious figure, probably a merchant) and John Williams. Villagers are generally described as miserable human beings struggling with poverty, cruelly exploited by their lords in a condition resembling slavery. The authors’ attitude is sympathetic to the difficulties of peasant lives. Britons appreciated attempts to extricate them from their plight in the belief that emancipation was ethically desirable and would render their work more productive.

Formation of the Idea of the Library as an Institution in 18th-Century Europe. A Qualitative and Quantitative Approach

The paper illustrates the LIBMOVIT project - - Libraries on the Move: Scholars, Books, Ideas Traveling in Italy in the 18th Century - whose main research focus is the European Eighteenth century socio-cultural framework in which the library as an institution acquired an historical, social, public and dynamic dimension. This context will be analysed through a study of the Eighteenth century sources connected to the learned journey experience of the Grand Tour, in particular those contained in the Angiolo Tursi collection - one of the largest travel literature collections in Italy - held at the Marciana national library in Venice. The paper presents the planned approach of the research: first, a classification and an organization of a corpus of relevant documents for the knowledge of travel literature in connection to the libraries world will be created; in particular, the sources will be identified, further bibliographical information will be added, and new sources will be integrated to the corpus and selected documents will be digitized. After that, the research will proceed through a double analysis – traditional and computational – of the texts collected in the corpus is to be developed. First, all the library and bibliographical aspects described by travellers will be studied according to the traditional approach in humanities research to collect important information about the history of libraries (location, decoration, catalogues, opening hours, access, collections, cited books and documents), the travellers and their companions (professions, nationality, reason to travel), the people met (scholars, librarians, superintendents) and the subjects and ideas discussed during the visits in the libraries. Second, the texts will be computationally analysed through several Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, starting from the automatic text recognition until arriving to more complex lexical and terminological analysis and Named Entity Recognition (NER). This work is meant to support the previously described qualitative study and will also allow to produce Linked open data about the domain entities (e.g. libraries, people, books) in view of their publication in the semantic web in order to ease and promote their exploration, visualisation and reuse.

“I suspect I know a thing or two about Italy”: Byron’s travel guide to (sex in) Italy

ABSTRACT Following his self-imposed exile from Britain in 1816, Byron travelled across Europe and eventually settled in Italy. From here he wrote hundreds of frank, witty, and vibrantly detailed letters. Covering everything from politics to prostitutes, Byron's animated accounts make for riotous reading, and their appreciation of foreign cultures and customs sets them apart from the majority of contemporary travel writing (tarnished by a patina of discontented yearning for Britain and British things). The first half of this article considers Byron's deft reconstruction and subversion of contemporary travel writing conventions in his Italian letters. Cloaking the worldly cosmopolite's mockery of the parochial British reader behind a veneer of generic conformity, Byron plays into travel literature's masculinist orientation by presenting himself in the established guise of the affluent aristocratic tourist encountering the tantalising-yet-dangerous feminised foreign. Accepted into the houses and hearts of a number of Italian women, Byron gained an unusual level of insight into the private intimacies of those he wittily dubs “the continental incontinent”. The second part of this article focuses on Byron's knowledge of Italian sociosexual culture, and acknowledges the unique insights and ethnographic detail embedded within his performative tales of libidinous Italian femininity - designed to titillate and educate in equal measure.

Variabilidade da frequência cardíaca, escalas psicométricas e desempenho de saltos em atletas de voleibol: jogos em casa e fora

The home advantage is very consolidated in the literature. The aim of this research was to evaluate the behavior of heart rate variability (HRV), perceived recovery status (PRS) and rating of perceived exertion (RPE) and vertical jumps performance in professional volleyball athletes in home and away matches. Nine male professional volleyball athletes (25,66 ± 5,7 anos, 97,81 ± 8,65 Kg and 200,94 ± 5,19 cm), with experience in national and international competitions participated in the study. HRV and PRS were evaluated in the morning of the matches. RPE was collected immediately after the matches. Jump performance was monitored during the matches. The data was grouped by home matches and away matches and the t test or Wilcoxon test was performed for comparison. Significance level adopted was α ≤ 0.05. Effect size was analyzed by Cohen’s d coefficient. O nível de significância adotado foi α ≤ 0,05. There were no significant difference in HRV, PRS, RPE, jumps height and number of jumps evaluated in home matches and away matches. We conclude that despite the home advantage consolidated in the literature and possible adverse effects of travel on away matches, the VFC, PRS, RPE and jump performance were similar in the two situations evaluated.

Globalisation Occurred in Loch Craignish in 1720

The arrival of a pirate ship in Loch Craignish in 1720 was an episodic occurrence, which introduced a local community in Argyllshire to the process of globalisation, a process marked by the transoceanic movements of people, goods and ideas. For literate Scots, the wider horizons of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were opened up by novels, travel literature and newsprint. While reading material stimulated the mind and promoted discussion about matters of global interest, actual commodities from overseas variously engaged all the senses. Globalisation became an active rather than a passive experience. Sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste affected all, from the social, commercial and intellectual elites to the woman in the field and the man in the street in early modern Scotland. Nevertheless, public knowledge of where colonial commodities came from became distanced by time. A global awareness of place was retained in families and communities overtly engaged in mercantile and military adventuring, especially when accompanied by death whether through natural causes, misadventure or mortal combat. Illicit activities had a no less profound impact. Indeed, covert people trafficking, enslavement, smuggling, shipwrecking and piracy had a more local immediacy.

A review based knowledge organization supported research framework for digital storytelling from travel records

Purpose This study presents a review based research framework that aims to influence memory institutions in their projects on digital storytelling from digitized ancient travel records. This study aims to influence research and policymaking related to design and delivery of services based on memory institutions’ collections of historical records. Design/methodology/approach The demonstrated research framework has been synthesized using inputs from a review of existing studies on the domain accompanied by a short survey created for collecting the opinion of selected experts. Studies demonstrating utilization of semantic web technologies and those that can influence policymaking related to digital storytelling were primarily reviewed. Findings The core tasks behind digital storytelling vary depending on the project goals. So, a two-part framework had to be proposed that covers the generic fundamental tasks with diverse applicability and digital storytelling related specific tasks separately. Also during the review, it was found that studies demonstrating the use of travel records for digital storytelling were less in number compared to studies using digital storytelling for tourism in general. Originality/value The demonstrated research framework can guide memory institutions in exposing their travel-related holdings to a wider audience using innovative semantic web technologies and open up avenues for future empirical research thereby adding to the novelty of the presented research. Also, reviews of articles on digital storytelling or digital humanities in general exist, but, review of digital storytelling initiatives focusing specifically on tourism and travel literature is scarce.