Travel Writing Research Articles

The influence of social prestige on Pino Cacucci’s work: A corpus-based study

This paper analyses Pino Cacucci’s work as a translator and travel writer in order to assess the influence of social prestige on his behaviour when facing otherness. Both translation and travel writing relate different linguistic and cultural contexts to one another. The textual elements representing such linguistic and cultural encounters are foreign words, and their treatment —in terms of maintenance or adaptation— can be used as an indicator of the author’s position towards the foreign. From here, the study examines the treatment of foreign words identified in three novels written or translated by Cacucci. Following a corpus-based methodology, the techniques used to transpose foreign words from the source to the target context are determined and related to exoticism (if they maintain the original form) or domestication (if the foreign element is translated or adapted to the target language). Finally, the results are contrasted with the current literary canon. The outcomes reveal a greater acceptance of otherness in the most prestigious novels, in terms of textual practice (translation/travel writing) and linguistic variety (peninsular/Argentinian Spanish), showing the influence of social prestige on the author’s behaviour and suggesting some reflections about the relationship between social recognition and acceptance of otherness.

PRIMERI EVROPSKIH IZVORA NA ROMANSKIM JEZICIMA U SLUŽBI KULTURNE BAŠTINE LESKOVCA I OKOLINE

e period of the establishment of fruitful trade relations between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, from the 15th to the 18th century, is actually the period when many envoys and travel writers wrote in their reports about the Balkans, including the south of Serbia, which was under foreign rule at that time. Speaking about the sources important for the study of Leskovac and its surroundings, we can say that they represent a fertile and very diverse material and we can categorize them into travel reports, travel diaries, chronicles, epistles, dictionaries and lists. Their charm is all the greater because they are written in different European languages. The largest number of sources are in the Latin language, while a certain number of sources were written and published in other Romance languages, such as French, Spanish, Portuguese, as well as in varieties of the Old Italian language. This fact sheds light on some new research that goes beyond previous conclusions based only on the analysis of Ottoman and Cyrillic sources and opens the door to some new research based on the study f sources on Roman sources that are important testimonies and an important part of the cultural heritage of the South of Serbia

Travel and Imperialist Nostalgia in Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa

This paper examines the politics of travel and imperialist nostalgia in Ernest Hemingway’s memoir Green Hills of Africa. Informed by recent theoretical contributions to travel and postcolonial studies, this paper investigates ways in which the representation of travel and nostalgia in this memoir speaks to the colonial and imperialist rhetoric. Unlike previous studies, this paper suggests that the travels and nostalgia of Hemingway for Green Hills of Africa reflect certain ideological and historical determinants of the interwar politics that dominated modern American literature. While Hemingway seems to distance himself from the rhetoric of the empire, his reflections on travelling in Africa and his nostalgia for it are arguably entangled by it. This paper demonstrates that Hemingway’s narrative extends a dichotomy between the East and West constructed by 19th century (American) orientalist travel writers and critiqued by Edward Said..

Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire, 1830–1940 by Pramod K. Nayar

Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire, 1830–1940 by Pramod K. Nayar

Gold Rush in the Cold: Russian Far East Expeditions in Russian-American Travel Writing, 1898–1900

Gold Rush in the Cold: Russian Far East Expeditions in Russian-American Travel Writing, 1898–1900

The meeting of a Russian with Europe in the travel writings of Peter the Great’s era (A.A.Matveev)

The paper revises the traditional view at the travel writings of the era of Peter the Great. They are usually considered as naive works, and content of these works as identical to the biographies of it’s authors. The method of historical and linguistic research of V.M.Zhivov on the language of Russian writing is applied to the material of travelogues. The main purpose is to account for the pragmatics of the utterance in travel literature as in a phenomenon synthesizing heterogeneous features in principle and in the transitional Peter’s Era in particular. The paper is focused on the notes of the diplomat A.A.Matveev, compiled by him for himself as a result of his journey from the Hague to Paris (1705–1706). The narrative technique in Matveev’s text is examined (descriptions of the monuments of the French capital and the inscriptions to them in Latin), and it is shown that we should not reduce the function of Matveev’s work to purely diplomatic tasks of his actual journey. The descriptions recorded in Matveev’s text were politically charged: the author not only collected samples of inscriptions, but also demonstrated a new way for Russia to glorify the reigning monarch. This peculiar collection of Matveev is also considered in the context of cultural phenomena that were relevant at the beginning of the 18th century: private and court collections of rarities, embossing of commemorative medals, etc. The conclusion is made that borrowed elements change their function in the travelogue. In the historical and literary perspective, we must bring such works as Matveev’s notes out of the zone of marginal literary phenomena. In general, this allows us to see the key trends of the transitional period of the history of Russian literature. It is more appropriate to consider these processes not to state the Western European origin of individual elements of culture, but to analyze their pragmatics associated with the demarcation from the old Russian culture.

Writing Travel as Janus: Cultural Translation as Descriptive Category for Travel Writing

Abstract: The intersection of the study of travel writing and the study of translation produces two major perspectives: travel writing in translation and translation in travel writing. The first one looks into how the travel narrative is reshaped in a different linguistic and cultural context; the other looks into the translational character of the travel narrative, as the traveller is constantly moving between languages and cultures. Though the conceptual analogy between traveller and translator has been long noted, the linguistic dimension that marks the language difference in travel narrative is rarely underlined. In this essay, in order to explore the possibility of foregrounding both the conceptual link between travel and translation and the linguistic dimension of travel narrative, I propose to integrate an attention to language difference into a reinvention of the contested yet promising term ‘cultural translation’. The American writer Peter Hessler’s travel account Country Driving is cited as a case study.

Othering Europe: Ambivalence in Moroccan Discourse Towards Modernity under the Dogmatic Understanding of Islam and the Political Affiliation to the Monarchy

This paper is a study of the reaction of the Moroccan intellectual elite against/towards European modernity in the nineteenth century. The primary focus is on the Moroccan failure to formulate and develop a positive and reasonable response to European expansionism and menace. This threat may seem military in its core as it was related to colonialism, yet the encounter was essentially cultural and the reaction of the Moroccan elite took its grounds from religious and cultural stands. This is simply because Europe was not only a colonizing Other, but also a cultural opponent with which Morocco had armed conflicts, long-standing rivalries, and even cultural dialogues. This paper develops an argument that the Moroccan intellectual elite exemplified via ambassadorial travel writers, the Makhzen’s envoys to Europe, failed to see Europe as a possible model or at least to open some horizons of cultural dialogue and encounter. Due to cultural reasons and historical circumstances, this intellectual elite rejected Europe and modernity. The present paper limits itself to the question of ambivalence shown by Moroccan ambassadorial travel writers in their narratives. It argues that their travel accounts were torn between the writers’ religious thinking and political affiliations. It postulates that ambassadorial travel writers showed ambivalence in their connection to the idea of modernity. Their narratives were governed by the dichotomy of admiration of the material progress of Europe and rejection of Europe as a possible cultural model.

대서양 흑인 여성의 이산 경험과 정체성

Autobiographies and travel writings of Mary Prince, Nancy G. Prince, and Mary J. G. Seacole, in the early nineteenth century show transatlantic diaspora journey of colored women. They constructed mobile subjectivity based on experiences in West Indies, America, Russia, and Europe, meeting diverse people of nation and race. Mary Prince, a West Indies slave, showed strong racial solidarity with slaves while adapting and resisting to slavery, and chose Antigua rather than England as her place. Seacole and Nancy Prince had a strong desire to leave homeland crossing national boundaries to live in Russia and work in Crimean Peninsula, landing in England and the United States. Their attitudes toward Atlantic black community differed in that Seacole didn’t care much about racial enhancement of West Indies while showing strong affinity toward U.S blacks. Nancy Prince had a great concern for Jamaicans helping their betterment, but failed to build up racial trust. This tells us the challenge to which black cosmopolitanism faced. They also crossed gender norms of Victorian domesticity realizing public persona in social activities, and showed gender identity of strong confidence in self-independence of widows.

Специфика «художественного сознания» в женском травелоге первой половины XIX века (на материале записок Е. А. Авдеевой)

The aim of the research is to highlight and characterize the variants of fictionalization of documentary travelogue, the methods of orientation towards precedent texts as a means of expressing the subjective and personal attitudes of the writing subject. The article, based on the notes of E. A. Avdeeva (“Notes and Remarks about Siberia” and “Memories of Irkutsk”), clarifies the specificity of the author’s special strategy - a woman’s view of the journey itself and the way of describing it, reveals the mechanism of text generation of a story about a journey from the point of view of the author’s “artistic consciousness”; the researcher substantiates the legitimacy of studying the female author’s strategy in documentary travelogue against the background of the literary tradition (the development of female literary creativity during the period of emancipation). The scientific novelty of the research lies in studying the specificity of the female author’s strategy in Russian documentary travelogues of the first half of the XIX century (based on the notes of E. A. Avdeeva). As a result, it was proved that in female documentary travelogue of the first half of the XIX century, an analysis of the methods of fictionalization makes it possible to determine the specifics of the “artistic consciousness”, the implicit orientation of the travel writer towards the “feminist literature” of this period.

Morocco in Colonial Photography

This article represents an attempt to approach the notion of colonial discourse and photography more closely with the exigencies that put Morocco under the zoom of the colonial lens. This photographic documentation shows that nations, Morocco, in this case, were annexed to imperial powers through the utilization of various means of representation. This annexation was carried out not only by military officers, missionaries and spies but also by cartographers, travel writers and photographers who never ceased to polish the lens of their cameras so as to be able to represent indigenous identities, as well as their social lifestyles, and cultures. Therefore, the purpose of the present work is to sketch the colonial experience that links the imperializers with the imperialized through chronological documentation of colonial power and domination. Therefore, the main interest centres around the question of rereading this colonial history by analyzing and questioning colonial photography and its role in colonial expansion over Morocco. Besides, it is to unmask the alleged objective embedded in this country's 'civilizing mission'.

D. H. Lawrence’s Travel Writing: Concept of Nudity and Sexuality with a Difference

In that he spent most of his life outside Britain, D. H. Lawrence often seems the least British of the British Modernists. His interest in and willingness to be influenced by Italy, Sicily, the American Southwest, Mexico and Australia can be easily explored in his travel books. Whereas his novels are too didactic in nature, his philosophies get naturally matured as he travels and they are expressed very succinctly in his travel writing. In various parts of his four travel books, namely Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia (1921), Morning in Mexico (1927), Sketches of Etruscan Places (1932) Lawrence depicts the difference between nudity and nakedness and how they influence him. The other contrast here is between art and life, with the nude standing for art and nakedness for life with the section on Florence and the art there. The essay focuses on how Lawrence views art differently when actually experiencing these works himself during his travels. I show different phases in his response to nudity/nakedness as shown in his four travel books and what accounts for these changes. The thesis is the examination of Lawrence’s belief that the touch of amateurism and primitivism can inject new freshness into our lives and can salvage them from the clutches of habit, and the mechanized civilisation. Nudity and sexuality as part of primitive modes of life can balance and heal what Freud termed the discontents of civilisation. Situated on the thin line between nudity and sexuality, D.H. Lawrence’s travel writing recounts man’s true relationship with the cosmos. And finally, the paper shows some misunderstanding on the part of the second wave feminists on his representation of masculinity in nakedness.

Travel Writing, Literature, and Romance: Polixéna Wesselényi’s Travels in Italy and Switzerland

Abstract Polixéna Wesselényi’s Travels in Italy and Switzerland, the first travel narrative that was written by a woman in Hungary and Transylvania, is a work little known to the wider international public, as it was published in Hungarian in 1842, seven years after her tour. There are few travel narratives written by East-Central European women in the first half of the nineteenth century. This essay attempts to reflect upon Wesselényi’s personal motives, her intellect and literary craftsmanship, as well as the cultural constraints she had to encounter. The romantic nature of the relationship between Wesselényi, a married woman, and the fellow travel writer John Paget, is also mirrored by the text. Travels in Italy and Switzerland not only offers an insight into the relatively favourable situation of Transylvanian women of the aristocracy in the 1830s but also shows that it had the power to inspire the works of celebrated Hungarian novelists after its publication. Although Wesselényi’s style conforms to the picturesque and sentimental travel writing published by European women in the period, it justly demands a place for itself on the list of distinguished nineteenth-century European travel writing by women.

Chinese Folklore for the English Public: Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 Translation of Pu Songling’s Classical Tales

Chinese Folklore for the English Public: Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 Translation of Pu Songling’s Classical Tales

Katrina O’Loughlin. Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century.

Katrina O’Loughlin. <i>Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century</i>.

Is the Great Barrier Reef dead? Satire, death and environmental communication

An obituary for the Great Barrier Reef (the Reef) by travel and food writer Rowan Jacobsen (2016) commemorated its ‘lifetime accomplishments’ in Outside, the US outdoor recreational magazine. ‘News’ of the Reef's demise went viral and the economic and political furore that followed was immense. Tourism industries, especially reliant on international arrivals, were impacted as potential visitors accepted the Reef's passing as fact. Politicians scampered to reassure Australians and the globe that the Reef was indeed still alive and beautiful. In the Australian public sphere, climate science deniers, alongside those advocating for climate action, collided over the impacts of global warming to Reef health. Subsequent mass coral bleaching events in 2016, 2017 and 2020 sustained at the very least, the idea that the Reef was, or was soon to be, dead. Our paper follows the idea of a ‘dead Reef’ in the context of historical and recent debates about Reef protection. Using Google Trends, we identify Jacobsen's article as the source of increased Australian and global ideation of a ‘dead Reef’. As a site of local and global environmental communication – where human relations to nature are expressed and understood - the Reef holds extraordinary story telling power. At the current junction then, the way we communicate the Reef is critical to public understanding and political action on climate change. We conclude Jacobsen's article is an example of the problems of satirical communication, serving to amplify existing conflicts and undermine efforts to foster to climate action.

In Byron’s Footsteps, through Byron’s Eyes: Literary Tourism and ‘Imagined Geographies’ of Southern Albania

ABSTRACT In his famous poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Lord Byron represents Albania as an exotic and Oriental place, and as a suitable ‘stage’ for the ‘performance’ of adventurous travel. In this paper, I explore the various ways in which literary tourists following ‘in the footsteps of Lord Byron’ in Albania reproduce and/or challenge and change ‘imagined geographies’ of that country. This is carried out through discourse analysis of their written accounts of their travels. The texts analysed include published travelogues, newspaper travel articles and travel blogs written by those who have travelled through southern Albania ‘in the footsteps of Byron’. I argue that these tourists do not, in general, simply reproduce Byron influenced ‘imagined geographies’ of Albania in their travel writings but rather represent Albania as they find it, often highlighting the big differences between the Albania of Byron’s day and the Albania of today. And I also argue that, while some tourists find that the encroachment of modernity into the lands described by Byron disrupts their ability to perform ‘Byronic travel’, others find it quite possible to maintain a ‘Byronic’ spirit of travel in the Albania of today.

Worldmaking in Sri Lankan Heritage Design: The Case of Travel Writers

This article develops an analytical model to examine how heritage tourism mobilities are designed by travel writers. Using Sri Lanka as an example, we thematise professional activity in heritage tourism through a blend of Margaret Archer’s work on reflexivity in late modernity and Keith Hollinshead’s ‘worldmaking authority/agency’ to understand the factors driving tourist design. Our model replaces Jensen’s focus on ‘design’ as a fixed creative property with ‘designing’ as creativity in motion, here collaborative and solidary, there conflictual and endorsing creative inequalities. Our theoretical blend informs the organisation of Sri Lankan heritage tourist professionals into three active categories: ‘communicatives’ (with an emphasis on developing closed-communal solidarity), ‘autonomous’ (with an emphasis on virtual reconstitutions of community beyond geographical fixity that may support tourist entrepreneurialism), and ‘meta-reflexives’ (with an emphasis on bringing tourist markets and communities in a dialogue beneficial for the latter) This typology accommodates disparate worldmaking vistas and forms of tourist design agency that then feed back into authorial tourist scripts, promoted by institutions, organisations and even communities. Thus, agency develops both self-reflexively and through negotiations with independently existing authorial forces driving tourist design managed by the nation state and its own biographical records. Keywords: agency, designing mobilities, reflexivity, heritage tourism, worldmaking

Improving Experiences: Eighteenth-Century European Encounters with Arabs

ABSTRACT This article shows how some early-modern British travellers found in the idea of travelling among and writing about Arabs an opportunity to reflect on a changing society at home. In Enlightenment Britain, many philosophers and writers thought of economic achievements as the roadmap to civility, humanity and progress. Many conservative moralists and clergymen of the period, however, protested this ideology and associated excessive materialism with moral decline, but they were not the dominant force in society. British travel writings about Arabs during the period confirmed and unsettled this dominant discourse. In these accounts, the images of primitive and polite Arabs appeared as screens upon which British anxieties about improvement were projected. This paper concludes with the contention that British travel writers appeared more concerned about their own society than about those about whom they wrote.

Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism

Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism