Travel Writing Research Articles

Woman’s Work is Never (Un-)Done: A Response to “Contemplating Women’s Imperial Service: Mabel Bent as Photographer, Travel Writer, and Collector,” by Esther Wetzel

A Woman’s Work is Never (Un-)Done: A Response to “Contemplating Women’s Imperial Service: Mabel Bent as Photographer, Travel Writer, and Collector,” by Esther Wetzel

Contemplating Women’s Imperial Service: Mabel Bent as Photographer, Travel Writer, and Collector

Despite a growing body of literature on women’s roles within the British Empire as settlers, teachers, nurses, missionaries, activists, and ‘adventuresses,’ their contribution to Victorian knowledge production remains underexamined. In particular, the labor of married women has often been subsumed under their husband’s work and, as a result, has largely gone unrecognized. Treating them as emblematic of a shadow archive of married women’s cultural production in the late 19th century, I interrogate Mabel Bent’s diaries, photographs, and ethnographic collecting strategies to show that she exercised epistemic power through the imperial practices of representation and appropriation. I locate her productive and reproductive work within a complex web of service relationships between herself, the British Empire, and her husband, and show that while Bent related ambiguously to her service, she exploited it to defy gender conventions without risking her reputation.

English Travel Writers’ Representations of Freedom in the United Provinces, c. 1670–1795

AbstractFrom the Second Anglo-Dutch War to the fall of the United Provinces (c. 1670–1795), dozens of English writers published accounts of their travels across the North Sea. The English and the Dutch were bound by centuries of intellectual, political, and cultural interaction. Factors like a shared confession and similar economic structures meant that Anglo-Dutch relations were uniquely intimate, and this close relationship allowed a nuanced and complex exploration of political ideas. This article recreates one of those ideas that was repeated so often in English travel writing: that the Dutch Republic was free. This freedom was presented as a Faustian pact. In practice, the Dutch state guaranteed many freedoms that the English lauded, such as the right to property, to government accountability, and to efficient justice. However, English writers disdained the theories that underpinned these freedoms, which were viewed as egalitarian and republican. It was argued that these suspect doctrines led the United Provinces down the path to licentiousness, luxury, and decline. Paradoxically, therefore, the nature of Dutch freedom determined both the country’s rise and its fall.

‘An Oriental Holiday’: constructing Bosnia and Herzegovina as a destination in British tourist literature, c. 1890–1914

ABSTRACT This article challenges imagological historiography that contends Bosnia-Herzegovina represented a no-go zone for British tourists before the First World War because of its reputation for cultural backwardness and political instability. Through an analysis of published travelogues, travel guides, and travel journalism, as well as their reception in Britain, it places the evolution of images of Bosnia-Herzegovina in dialogue with British anxieties about the detrimental effects of industrial society. This article argues that the country (administered by Austria-Hungary from 1878 and annexed in 1908) became a popular destination for upper-class British tourists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as it was constructed as unspoiled by mechanical civilisation and free from lower-class tourists. Travel writers, most notably Henri Moser whose travel guide An Oriental Holiday (1895) will be closely examined, were imbricated with Austro-Hungarian authorities and regularly employed by the regime to promote this romantic image of Bosnia-Herzegovina to British audiences. This article concludes by demonstrating that the upsurge in touristic interest in Bosnia-Herzegovina was short-lived because of growing political tensions between Britain and Germany but provides a forceful counterpoint to imagological historiography that suggests the imagined geography of the region was defined in entirely negative terms.

Knowledge and the Picturesque: Encountering Syria in the Eighteenth Century

AbstractThis essay looks at the West's engagement with Syria in the eighteenth century, through the writings of travellers and through the history of the publications they brought back from their travels. It argues that these publications provoked a rethinking of various tropes in the description of the Levant, helping to define attitudes to ruins as well as providing a model for thinking about the customs of the inhabitants of that part of the world. It shows the growing awareness for knowledge about the province. It looks in particular at the place of Palmyra through the writings of Wood and Volney and of Aleppo through the Natural History of Aleppo, written by the Russell brothers, who were both physicians and naturalists and who studied the effects of the plague in Aleppo.

Sandra Gunning, Moving Home: Gender, Place, and Travel Writing in the Early Black Atlantic

Sandra Gunning, <i>Moving Home: Gender, Place, and Travel Writing in the Early Black Atlantic</i>

‘A land made fit for tourists’: Thomas Cook, tourism promotion, and colonial development in Iraq, 1920–1932

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the British travel firm Thomas Cook & Son's operations in Iraq, threading together the histories of antiquities-focused tourism and development from the country's establishment as a League of Nations Mandate in 1920 through its independence in 1932. It situates the firm's rhetoric within two principles undergirding mandate-era colonial development: development of the land, achieved through the modernisation of transportation infrastructure, and the development of the Iraqi people ‘along native lines’. Journalists, tourism promoters, politicians and travel writers lauded investments in Iraq's railways, automobile transportation and civil aviation infrastructure. They presented visions of Iraq's development as inextricable from its place within regional and global transportation networks. In the same period, a fascination with antiquities resulted in an outpouring of media about ancient Iraqi civilisations. Thomas Cook's cohesive publishing output – from guidebooks and travelogues to ephemeral written and visual sources, including pamphlets, magazines and advertisements – reveals how the company presented Iraq as both a country boasting the latest in modern transportation and hospitality facilities as well as an exotic land of perpetual antiquity. Thomas Cook not only replicated colonial discursive strategies, but also made them legible within the cultural (and seemingly ‘apolitical’) register of leisure travel.

Orientalism and gender: the portrayal of the oriental women in frederick millingen’s wild life among the koords

In Orientalism (1979), one of his most prominent works, Edward Said lays out a critique of the West’s framing and perceptions of the East. It reveals how Eastern communities and individuals are being imagined and reconstructed by the authoritative gaze and ideals of Western imperialism. Said explains how Western writings represent the East as an inferior, the Other which, justifies the European Western power over the East. The depiction of the harem as exotic oriental women is a long-familiar trope found in various Orientalist writings. The paper examines the representations of Oriental women in Frederick Millingen’s Wild Life Among the Koords (1870). The theoretical framework draws on the formulation of the travel writer’s representation of Oriental women in the context of Orientalist discourse and feminist criticism. It explores how the Orientalist constitutes himself and his subjectivity through the agency of desire and supremacy. This paper argues that this is not a question of the other, but rather a question of the Western subject’s views to present his visions of himself within foreign landscapes. Moreover, the detailed description of Oriental women and the depiction of Oriental culture establish modes of reorientation where women are discriminated against and sexualized.

Nordic Travels

Nordic Travels

British Travelers and British Travel Writing: An Overview to British Travelers Visiting Albania in the First Half of 19th Century

The Grand Tour played an important role in the education of the aristocratic British youth. Several requirements served for its classical qualification. The Tour lasted from some months to some years. Travelers’ individual choices, spread of diseases, priority to special places, as well as historical events shaped the travel plan. The Tour changed its classical denotation in the 19th century, reflecting a radical social transformation in the British society. The middle class would be engaged in travelling beyond the borders of the British territory. The Romantic traveler of the 19th century differers from the classic traveler of the Grand Tour, stressing heroism and bravery, avoiding scenic descriptions. These travelers resembled the explorer. A term introduced by the Romantics. The dense narrative produced in this period would permit the British public to become familiar with unalike people, experiences, and lands. There are five travellers that visited the Albanian land in the first half of 19th century, during British Romanticims. Dodwell, Hughes, Martin Leake, Urquhart and Best published works mentioning the Albania theme, people, culture, nature, geography. Dodwell’s work is significant because of classical archeology. T.S. Hughes gives information about Ali Pasha and his mystical figure. Topographical data on the Albanian population, customs, and traditions are introduced in Leake’s book. Urquhart looks at the Orient from a philosophical viewpoint. A work about hunting, natural beauty, customs, traditions is written by Best. Therefore, their books give essential information about the country in the first half of this century.

Rita Banerjee. India in Early Modern English Travel Writings: Protestantism, Enlightenment, and Toleration. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions. Leiden: Brill, 2021. $167.00 (cloth).

Rita Banerjee. India in Early Modern English Travel Writings: Protestantism, Enlightenment, and Toleration. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions. Leiden: Brill, 2021. $167.00 (cloth).

امجداسلام امجد کا حمدیہ اور نعتیہ اسلوب:"اسباب" کا خصوصی مطالعہ

Amjad Islam Amjad He (1944-2023) the recipient of Presidential Award for Best Performance, Sitara-e- Imtiaz and numerous domestic and foreign awards, was not only a versatile creator but also a very reliable reference in Pakistani Urdu literature. As a poet, play writer, travel writer, columnist, critic and translator, his literary services are unforgettable. In 2019, he was awarded the highest national literary award by the President of Turkey, Tayyip Erdogan. The main reference of his literary personality is poetry. He developed Urdu ghazal and poetry. In the same way, he achieved a prominent position among contemporary writers by presenting Hamd and Naʻat in the form of ghazal and poem. In this research article, an analytical study of his Hamdiya and Naʻtiya style adopted in “Asbāb” has been discussed.

일본 여행안내서와 기행문으로 본 일제강점기 인천의 관광지 연구

After Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese regime encouraged its people’s trip to colonies, leading to a boom of overseas trip to Manchuria and Joseon in Japan.&#x0D; The Japanese regime established tourism policies as suppliers of tourism and actively created tourist attractions. Meanwhile, Incheon was urbanized as a port city that served as the entrance to Seoul after the opening of the port, but its image as a tourist city has also been established since the 1920s. The purpose of this study was to first review tourist guidebooks to examine tourist attractions in Incheon created and recommended by tourism suppliers in Japanese colonial era, and second, to analyze travel writings to examine how Japanese, who were the main tourists of Incheon at the time, toured Incheon's tourist attractions. In this analysis, we attempted to capture changes over time. As a result, Most of the tourist attractions in Incheon recommended by tourism suppliers were created after Japanese colonial era, and most of them recommended by suppliers of tourism were mostly places justifying the Japanese rule and showing the superiority of imperial Japan. Japanese who visited Incheon did not deviate much from the tourist attractions and tour schedules proposed to tourism suppliers. Therefore, it can be evaluated that Incheon's tourism in a Japanese colonial era has properly realized the intention of the tourism supplier.

Intercultural Mediation in the Translation of the Self in Travel Writing: A Case Study of Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper

ABSTRACT Travel writing narrates travellers’ psychological development through mediation in the complex interplay between otherness and identity. Based on the notion that translation embraces personal experience and active transformation of the self through text, this paper manifests travel writing as a translation of the self of the traveller/writer. It aims to investigate intercultural mediation in the traveller’s translation of the self via a case study, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, a travel writing classic by Fuchsia Dunlop. We first explore Dunlop’s intercultural mediation by drawing on the concept of acculturation, focusing on her stresses and strategy in acculturation and intercultural adaptation throughout her translation of the self. We then review her ethic of difference in intercultural mediation. Dunlop adopts the integration strategy through intercultural contact. Her attitude towards Chinese culinary culture changes from an unconscious core belief in ethnocentrism to an acknowledgement of ethnorelativity, finally achieving an intercultural adaptation. Dunlop’s memoir provides an opportunity to look at a broadening concept of translation, which is to examine the translation of the self in an intercultural context, particularly changes in translators’ attitudes towards cultural difference: ignore it or open up to it.

Dr. A. B Ashraf as a Pen Sketcher: An Analytical Study

Dr. A.B. Ashraf is a well-known and well-grounded researcher of Urdu literature. He is an authentic critic, fiction writer, travel writer and educationist. B. Ashraf's pen sketches are outstanding. The main reason for its popularity is pen sketches of ancient and modern poets, scholars and writers. By his pen portraits, B. Ashraf gave new breaths to the ancient civilization, culture of Multan, both classical and modern poets. His readers are privileged to know the history of Multan by his pen portraits. Humorous incidents, ironic statements and exquisite dialogues make them captivating. “Kesy Kesy Log” is the masterpiece of Dr.A.B. Ashraf. The depiction of writers, the magnificent combination of Siraiki and Urdu phrases, dance, ecstasy, charm of literary gatherings, alluring imagery, elegant style and poetic episodes enhance its excellence. This magnum opus is of great importance in preserving the name of Dr. AB Ashraf alive and exuberant in the tradition of Urdu pen sketching.

Palatable Bugs for the Victorians: Entomophagy, Class and Colonialism in Vincent M. Holt’s Why Not Eat Insects?

Abstract Entomologists and proponents of insect food have often seen in Vincent M. Holt’s Why Not Eat Insects? (London: Field &amp; Tuer, 1885) the work of a precursor. Holt’s plea to consume insects in Victorian Britain, as an aid to address food poverty and diversify Western diets, certainly resonates with the environmental and social predicaments of the twenty-first century. However, the text and the context of this publication have not been fully examined. The book has attracted comparatively little attention from historians who are yet to unravel why and how Holt could raise the very question ‘why not?’ This article aims to bridge this gap, with a close reading of the sources and the language deployed by Holt, who heavily relies on European travel writings to make his case. Relocating Why Not Eat Insects? in this context throws into relief how issues of class and colonialism were constitutive of a wider discussion about eating insects in English-speaking prints in the nineteenth century. To explore this, the article also investigates responses from readers in the 1880s and 1890s, through reviews published in the British Isles, Australia, and the United States. Ultimately, examining these aspects alerts us to the dangers of celebrating Holt as a pioneer of insect food and an inspiration for the twenty-first century, for Holt partook in what Lisa Heldke terms ‘cultural food colonialism’, which we are at risk of reproducing when using his text uncritically and without regard to its social and colonial context.

“THE MYSTERY OF THIS JOURNEY”: DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE’S CREATIVE QUEST TO DISCOVER TRUE CIVILIZATION

David Herbert Lawrence is famous for telling us to trust the tale, not the artist. When we read the notoriously varied and vital Lawrence, there are many places where he seems to over reach, if not to outright contradict himself. This essay focuses on much of the complexity and ambiguity of Lawrence’s thought and its constantly evolving and even self-contradictory nature. Lawrence understands civilization with his utmost creativity and originality – finding the sun and relating it to the sexual vitality of the man – develops over the various travels. And in this essay, I focus on how this creative development is reflected in the travel writings. The more he travels, the more he discovers the subjugation of the self and the subsequent mechanization of it. The creative struggle to overcome this impotence informs Lawrence’s travel literature. His four travel books, namely Twilight in Italy (originally published in 1916), Sea and Sardinia (originally published in 1921), Mornings in Mexico (originally published 1927), and Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays (originally published 1932) are reflective of different stages in Lawrence’s journey to understand how human beings relate to the world they are integrally part of. Lawrence uses his travel to transcend his own nationality too. Lawrence goes on to assert that he belongs to no country. Surely this relates ironically to his belief in the “spirit of place”. The essay deeply focuses on his continued movement from place to place with deep consideration of this complex belief.

Moving Home: Gender, Place, and Travel Writing in the Early Black Atlantic

Moving Home: Gender, Place, and Travel Writing in the Early Black Atlantic

“OTHERNESS” DEPICTED IN TRAVELOGUES: MACEDONIA IN GERMAN-LANGUAGE TRAVELOGUES

In the German-language travelogues, the term Macedonia is mostly used almost exclusively as a geographical designation. The reasons for this lie in the author’s perception, which is basically burdened by his own mission, cultural background and already (subtly) imposed stereotypes built on the basis of previous knowledge (information that is also shaped according to these factors). The missions are different: economic, political, natural-scientific, religious, sociological-ethnological, in some cases literary-scientific. That is why it is difficult to identify the literary genre in one of the established literary frameworks. What can be confirmed about this genre with absolute certainty is its multidisciplinary approach, and it will be investigated from this perspective. In this paper, the factors that influence the perception of the travel writer during his creation will be considered. The aim is to present the representation of Macedonia in German-language travelogues, focusing centrally on the travel writer and covering all the factors influencing his work as he presents Macedonia in his works.

The Influence of Information Systems on Tourist Arrival in the Gambia

This paper examines the new futures that develop because of using information systems in the Gambia's tourist and hospitality industries, focusing on the increase in visitor arrivals. Information systems have increased the number of tourists visiting The Gambia by promoting the country, providing information about its attractions and amenities, and making it easier to plan and book trips. This has enabled potential tourists to make well-informed decisions. The study uses the qualitative method with a review of the literature and primary data. According to the study, the functionality of information systems applications offers users data about hotels, travel information, and the allure of recreational products. The Gambia Tourism Authority (GTA) was established in 1982 to promote the Gambia as a tourist destination. It worked with tour operators to create holiday packages and relied on advertising and public relations to promote the Gambia. It participated in international travel fairs and exhibitions to showcase its attractions and culture and engaged in press releases and familiarization trips for travel writers. The Gambia's tourism industry has expanded its marketing efforts with information systems to include digital channels, such as internet websites and social media platforms, to promote the Gambia's natural beauty, cultural heritage, and hospitality. Personalization, localization, user-generated content, and integration can be used to attract tourists to the Gambia. Also, the information system aids in maintaining outstanding client contacts, fostering positive relationships, and ensuring longevity because of the new value chain. The global tourism industry has a complicated value chain, with IBTOs, OBTOs, and travel agencies responsible for overseeing how tourists interact with and experience each tourist site. E-commerce can both change an industry's structure and provide new business options, leading to the emergence of smart marketplaces.