Travel Literature

Co-written with I. Kaya Şahin (University of Indiana Bloomington). Renaissance Quarterly 69 (Spring, 2016): 80-115.

This article revisits Anthony Sherley’s autobiographical travel narrative, Relation of his trauels into Persia (1613), by reading the text within the larger context of early modern Eurasia. In analyzing Sherley’s Relation, this essay highlights the ways in which at least one European traveler sought and found not alterity, but commensurable structures, social roles, political ideologies, and personal motivations in the Islamic polities to the east and emphasized these connections to his European readers. Furthermore, in making the case that Sherley’s narrative is informed by local actors in Safavid Persia, it maintains that the presence of “Eastern” knowledge within “Western” texts from this period is present and awaits scholarly attention. The result of collaboration between a historian of early modern Islam and a European literary critic, this article argues that multidisciplinary readings of early modern texts may help reveal the commensurability of numerous intellectual trends in early modern Eurasia.

This article examines the materials around François le Gouz de la Boullaye, a French gentilhomme (gentleman or minor aristocrat) from the Anjou Province of western France, who visited India twice, once in the late 1640s, and again in the mid-1660s. The result of his first visit, in which he mostly spent time in Surat and Goa, was an extended travel-narrative, the Voyages et Observations, of which two editions appeared in 1653 and 1657. On this basis, Boullaye became a fairly well-known 'expert' on Islamic and Indian affairs in Louis XIV's France. Because of his reputation, he was then chosen as a member of an embassy sent to open trading relations with Safavid Iran and Mughal India in 1664 on behalf of the French Compagnie des Indes. This second visit was not a great success on account of misconceptions regarding diplomatic protocols and because of deep rivalries and divisions amongst rival French actors, including celebrated travellers like Bernier and Tavernier.

Empire of Magic offers a genesis and genealogy for medieval romance and the King Arthur legend through the history of Europe's encounters with the East in crusades, travel, missionizing, and empire formation.

The book argues that romance arose in the 12th century as a cultural response to the trauma and horror of taboo acts—in particular the cannibalism committed by crusaders on the bodies of Muslim enemies in Syria during the First Crusade. From such encounters with the East sprang the fantastical episodes featuring King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle, The History of the Kings of England, a work where history and fantasy collide and merge, each into the other, inventing crucial new examples and models for romances to come.

After locating the rise of romance and Arthurian legend in the contact zones of East and West, Empire of Magic demonstrates the adaptability of romance and its key role in the genesis of an English national identity. Discussing Jews, women, children, and sexuality in works like the romance of Richard Lionheart, stories of the saintly Constance, Arthurian chivralic literature, the legend of Prester John, and travel narratives, the book shows how fantasy enabled audiences to work through issues of communal identity, race, color, class and alternative sexualities in socially sanctioned and safe modes of cultural discussion in which pleasure, not anxiety, was paramount.

Romance also engaged with the threat of modernity in the late medieval period, as economic, social, and technological transformations occurred and awareness grew of a vastly enlarged world beyond Europe, one encompassing India, China, and Africa. Finally, the author suggests that romance locates England and Europe within an empire of magic and knowledge that surveys the world and makes it intelligible—usable—for the future.

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The transportation professionals integrated the concept Green in various dimensions of transportation, such as, green vehicle, green highway. The current study has established a new dimension to green transportation, which is called Green Driver as whom substantially contributes to less emission and fuel consumption, and higher-safety. The research established the driver's Green Adaptive Travel Behaviors (GATB), in particular, that is referred to voluntary personal and lifestyle behaviors on less energy consumption and emission. The methodology was designed into two phases. Phase one was to investigate driver's GATBs through systematic literature review process and content analysis method. The second phase was to verify greenery value impact (GVI) of the finalized list of drivers' GATBs through an expert input study and Grounded Group Decision Making (GGDM) method. Total twenty six (26) GATB factors have been determined. Amongst, the factor 'F27-Dangerous overtaking' has received the highest value (97%) followed with 'F3-Slow once realizing bike lanes for cyclist crossing' (91%). In contrast, 'F4-Realize visual Obstacles to manage the speed' and 'F21-Brake with smooth deceleration' has received the lowest value (77%) among other factors. Two of the initial factors;'F5-Use traffic calming devices' (55%), and 'F24-Change highest possible gear' (69%) could not reach the 70% saturation; hence, they have been dropped from the list of GATB factors. Indeed, the GATB efforts are not limited to technology and practice; but also can include education and enforcement to driving regulations in order to interconnect driver, technology, environment, and vehicle. The research concluded with an innovative technique used as the decision support tool to evaluate the greenery grade of any individual driver on committing to less emission, less fuel consumption, and higher safety in traveling. As future study, the Green driver behaviour index assessment model will be developed based on this study outputs.

Through an analysis and historical contextualization of Gujarati writer Karsandas Mulji's Travels in England (1866), this article makes two interrelated arguments. First, Indian liberals' efforts to translate notions of liberty exposed the gap between liberalism's subtractive and additive projects, its abolition of customary constraints on the subject and its imposition of new constraints. Second, Mulji's travelogue suggests the complexity of anthropology in post-1850s India, when an amateur form of social science persisted alongside the emergence of the ethnographic state. As an amateur ethnologist, Mulji drew freely on source material from Henry Mayhew to Samuel Smiles to present England as a moral template for India. His turn to self-help or self-improvement literature, moreover, suggests the global scope of a mid-Victorian ethical culture that set the stage for the ethical concerns of anticolonial thinkers like M. K. Gandhi.

Foreshadowing Tourism aims to hone or even to upset our understanding of the genesis of tourism. It has long been assumed that nineteenth-century tourism was rooted in the early modern Grand Tour. However, Netherlandish travel diaries, along with some literature from England, Germany, and France, evidence a missing link in this regard. The late seventeenth century witnessed the coming of divertissante somertogjes (pleasurable summer trips) that were in fact poles apart from a classic Grand Tour. By scrutinizing modern features of this novel form of travel (such as its brief and seasonal timing, and the fact that its main motivations were leisure and cultural interests) and more obsolete traits (such as the lack of recurrence or the relatively exclusivity of such touring parties) I seek to restore these speelreysjes (pleasure trips) to their rightful place within the genealogy of travel and tourism. I will also evaluate the potential effects of a transport (r)evolution, cultural development, and a rise in living standards on early modern travel behavior.

Ottoman Antioch, a marginalized outpost by the late 18th century, attracted French travelers thanks to its illustrious Roman, Early Christian, and crusader histories. To make sense of the city, these travelers relied either on previous travelogues or on their own observations of the built environment. This article sheds light on the inter-textual relationship among travelogues, and on how both the built environment of Ottoman Antioch and representations of the pre-Islamic city and its monuments shaped the travelers’ narratives. The dramatic contrast between the insignificance of Ottoman Antioch and the grandeur of the pre-Islamic city prompted the travelers to reflect on the glories of Greco-Roman antiquity and the ‘decadence of the Oriental civilizations’. I focus on four French travelers who visited Antioch between 1780 and 1914, and argue that they turned the state of the city’s architecture and urban fabric into a critical tool to imagine their historical connections to the region, reproduce the Orientalist stereotypes in circulation in Europe at the time, and, thereby setting the tone for the colonization of the region. http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.201

While it is dangerous to generalize about so vast a field as Homeric scholarship, it is perhaps safe to say that before the 1970s interpretation of the Wanderings of Odysseus was dominated by the larger question of the Odyssey's moral and theological coherence, particularly as this pertains to the justice of Odysseus' and his companions' sufferings. The controversy between Analysts and Unitarians did much to determine how this question was asked and answered, with Analysts viewing moral incoherence as a symptom of multiple authorship and Unitarians striving to demonstrate coherence. 1 First-generation anthropology introduced the idea that incoherence might reflect not (only) different authors, but (also) different stages of cultural development. This development was conceived mainly as an advance from primitive 'savagery' to more enlightened 'humanity', albeit with a tinge of nostalgia for savagery's more holistic ecological consciousness. 2 A different approach to the Wanderings, popular though also much maligned, involved the attempt to map Odysseus' itinerary onto real-world geography. 3 Malkin has given a new and fruitful twist to this largely barren geographical approach, showing how ancient explorers and colonists may have imagined themselves as retracing the routes of Odysseus' and others' nostoi. 4 However,

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Despite his growing popularity, the Dutch writer Auke Hulst (1975), whose oeuvre ranges from multimedia travel books to science fiction-like novels, has remained under-researched in academic scholarship. This paper provides an introduction to this author and an analysis of his work, examining Hulst's self-presentation, his poetics, his (non-)fictional books and his place within contemporary Dutch literature. The image of the outsider, which is of vital importance for Hulst's authorship, runs as a continuous thread throughout the discussion. The first section uses several assertions made in interviews, public talks and forewords to elaborate on Hulst's 'autobiographical' poetics and to elucidate how the author often presents himself as a 'literary' outsider (positioning himself outside the constraints of Dutch literature) and as a 'social' outcast (in relation to his traumatic childhood). The second section deals with Hulst's travel books, in which he conjures up the image of a solitary traveler , who flees from the burdens of home and society in search for freedom, authenticity, insight and connectedness. The third section discusses Hulst's novels, which are centered on outcasts, the (inner and outer) worlds they find refuge in, and the obstacles they are confronted with. In the final section, Hulst's outsider position in Dutch literature is critically revisited by connecting his oeuvre with twenty-first-century literary trends.

The genre of sea narratives assumed a significant role in the rise of early modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. This article considers the place of Yiddish sea narratives--adapted from Campe's Reisebeschreibungen and in Hasidic writings--in the early nineteenth century. Both enlightened and Hasidic authors played a part in shaping modern Yiddish and Hebrew prose.

This paper is an autoethnographic exploration of a tourist’s experience. Through interpreting qualitative material, in the form of a poem I wrote in 1994 about a short familial excursion to an Israeli seaside resort city (Eilat), the research seeks to sensitively describe the intricacies of travel experience. The research explores the advantages of the autoethnographic method of inquiry, and discusses tourism-related emotions and memories in the context of performance and representation. The paper joins recent efforts in attempting to challenge and loosen the grip of positivist epistemologies and discourses on mainstream tourism studies, by illustrating the emotional complexities and contradictions in the travel experience of tourists. In line with traditions of critical research in sociology, the exploration sheds light on the materiality of texts and on the role language plays in tourism, viewing the poem read in this paper (‘Quiet Eilat’) simultaneously as a representation, performance and material object of discourse.

The railway is often characterised as one of the crucial innovations of the nineteenth century which transformed patterns of space and time, exposed people to the mechanical power of the industrial revolution, led to the formation of a panoramic perception of the world, and changed the economic circulation. In China, the new technology was adopted later than in Europe and America, and its development took place in a semi-colonial context. As such, the railway experience took on a different dimension there. Based on a corpus of Polish and Serbian travel writings about China, this article examines how travellers represented railways in the Middle Kingdom. Five main topics are discussed: (1) the railway as an icon of modernity; (2) the railway as a “purely European invention”; (3) Polish and Serbian patriotism as linked to the Chinese Eastern Railway; (4) the train as a space of interactions; (5) panoramic visions of China.

Although the construction and amplification of touristically celebrated peoples’ Otherness on global mediascapes has been well documented, the genesis of touristic imagery in out of the way locales, where tourism is embryonic at best, has yet to be examined. This article explores the emergent construction of touristic imagery on the small, sporadically visited Eastern Indonesian island of Alor during the 1990s. In examining the ways in which competing images of Alorese people are sculpted by both insiders and outsiders, this article illustrates the politics and power dynamics embedded in the genesis of touristic imagery. Ultimately, I argue that even in remote locales where tourism is barely incipient, ideas and fantasies about tourism can color local politics, flavor discussions of identity and channel local actions.

This paper examines the textual and performative functions of early women's writings on the example of three accounts of the pilgrimage to Mecca written during the Qajar era by Mehrmāh Khānom ʿEsmat al-Saltaneh (1880-81), the anonymous Hājiyeh Khānom ʿAlaviyeh Kermāni (1892-94), and Sakineh Soltān Vaqār al-Dowleh Esfahāni Kuchak (1899-1901). It ponders on the relationships between the female writers and textuality, their readers and, finally, the diary personas they created. It claims that their writings emerged in the process of negotiating the then existing, masculine models of textuality and authorial authority. By rejecting the monologic authoritativeness of literature and textuality, the women diarists transformed their texts into a space for dialogue-including dialogue with themselves.

This paper crosses the borders of human geography to bring back two related bodies of work from experimental psychology that investigate, in an unusual and refreshingly precise way, long-standing human geographical concerns with tem-porality, place and subject formations, meaning-making and well-being. It is argued that the traffic of ideas and empirical findings between human geography and experimental psychology can be mutually profitable if, and only to the extent that, it encompasses a sustained epistemological, methodological and political critique of the disciplinary practices that have yielded those ideas and findings.

The aim of this article is to reconstruct and present the image of reformed England and the English people as perceived by the inhabitants of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The primary source used is travel literature. The author analyses travellers' impressions with research and educational journeys, "grand tour, " and diplomatic missions related to state or parliamentary activities. Travel literature containing descriptions of England reflect the author's impressions, feelings, judgments and subjective opinions, as well as convey some knowledge about the world acquired not only during the trip, but also as a result of prior knowledge gained through learning and education. Moreover, the article discusses the emergence of a spectrum of perspectives and prejudices both for and against the English people, as well as the formation of national stereotypes.

Increasing youth travel has led to young people being labelled as ‘nomads’. This paper examines the phenomenon of youth nomadism in the tourism literature as well as examining recent empirical evidence. A review of the literature around youth nomadism identifies two major themes: analyses of the growth and development of youth travel niches, such as backpacking, volunteer tourism and educational exchange, and broader approaches linked to the rise of the mobilities paradigm. A major global survey of youth travel (34,000 respondents) indicates three major travel styles related to different forms of ‘nomadism’: the backpacker, the flashpacker and the global nomad. The traditional backpacker can be seen as a form of ‘neo-tribe’, gathering in self-sufficient enclaves. In contrast, the flashpacker, or ‘digital nomad', utilizes existing digital and logistic infrastructure to maintain a fluid, individualized lifestyle. The global nomad, or ‘location independent traveller’, tries to integrate with the local community, while trying to avoid the strictures of ‘system’.

This book poses the question: before the Enlightenment, and before the imperialism of the later 18th century, how did European readers find out about the varied cultures of Asia? The book presents a history of Oriental studies in 17th-century France (c.1643–1715), mapping the place within the intellectual culture of the period that was given to studies of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Chinese texts, as well as writings on Mughal India. The Orientalist writers studied here, such as Melchisédech Thévenot, François Bernier, and Barthélemy D'Herbelot, produced books that would become the sources used throughout the 18th century. They are here placed in their own context as members of the ‘republic of letters’ in the age of the scientific revolution and the early Enlightenment."

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Contents

Introduction: Baroque Orientalism

1 Barthélemy d'Herbelot and the Place of Oriental Learning

2 "Toutes les Curiosités du Monde": The Geographic Projects of Melchisédech Thévenot

3 The Double Eclipse: François Bernier's Geography of Knowledge

4 The Making of d'Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale

5 Printing Confucius in Paris

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Wisdom is at once one of the most elusive and most valued kinds of knowledge. Empirical research shows that, indeed, across cultures, people hope that life experience will eventually make them wiser. The problem is that, to date, the academic study of wisdom and of the processes by which it can be learned has been dominated by psychologists. The first part of the article reviews the state-of-the-art psychological scholarship on wisdom to show how that conceptualization lacks geographical sensitivity and therefore misses some of the crucial geographical mechanisms by which people become wiser. The second part of the article singles out and focuses on one such mechanism, namely, the learning of wisdom through geographical dislocations. By drawing on insights from the study of international migration, exile, and transculturation in postcolonial contexts, the final part of the article suggests specific learning processes that might strengthen the hypothesis that geographical dislocations and the attendant cross-cultural experiences they generate are often conducive to wisdom. La sabiduría es a la vez uno de los tipos de conocimiento más esquivos y más valorados. La investigací on empírica en verdad muestra que en todas las culturas la gente espera que la experiencia de la vida eventualmente los haga más sabios. El problema es que hasta ahora el estudio académico sobre la sabiduría y sobre los procesos por medio de los cualesésta puede alcanzarse ha estado dominado por los psicólogos. La primera parte del artículo revisa el estado del arte de la erudicí on psicoí ogica sobre este particular, para mostrar c ´ omo esa conceptualizací on carece de sensibilidad geográfica y en consecuencia deja de considerar algunos de los mecanismos geográficos cruciales mediante los cuales la gente se hace más sabia. La segunda parte del artículo escoge y se concentra en uno de tales mecanismos, o sea, el aprendizaje de la sabiduría por medio de las dislocaciones geográficas. A partir de la perspicacia del estudio de la migrací on internacional, el exilio y la transculturací on en contextos poscoloniales, la parte final del artículo sugiere procesos de aprendizaje específicos, que podrían fortalecer la hipótesis de que las dislocaciones geográficas y las experiencias culturales de vasto espectro generadas por aquellas a menudo llevan a la sabiduría. Palabras clave: distancia, dislocaciones geográficas, migrací on internacional, aprendizaje visceral, sabiduría.

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As early as the seventeenth century, women have been going from one corner of the world to the other recording their experiences and reasons for publishing. Exploring, working and residing in regions of the East considered ‘safe for dynamic men only’ (Smith 1887, Through Cyprus, Author of ‘Glimpses of Greek life and Scenery, etc’. London: Hurst and Blacket), western women interacted with the peoples of Ottoman society, enjoying their warm and generous hospitality. Their gender allowed them to study, learn and become experts in areas where men had no access: the Ottoman harems, women's daily life, social gatherings and celebrations. Western and eastern women discuss harem slavery, marriage, adultery, childbirth, abortion, divorce, religion and women's rights. In reconsulting primary sources and focusing on the writings of nineteenth-century British women in Asia Minor (Turkey), this article contributes additional evidence on women's alternative representations or less degrading gaze, while revealing a patriarchal system's domestic-social reality that was founded on the institution of slavery. In other words, it differs from other studies in spotlighting the accounts that are illustrative of the polyethnic synthesis of the Ottoman households, i.e. the discourse on the multiethnic harem slavery institution, which distinguished Ottoman society, so as to provide a bigger picture and inspire new discussions.

El presente artículo aborda el carácter central, casi obsesivo, que tiene la literatura para el escritor mexicano Sergio Pitol en los libros de ensayos que integran su denominada Trilogía de la Memoria-El arte de la fuga (1996), El viaje (2000) y el Mago de Viena (2005)-; y el modo en el que esta "sobreabundancia" literaria deforma-por llamarlo de algún modo-, algunas de las categorías que los críticos de Pitol, con mayor o menor suerte, han empleado para definir su obra. Para ello, se han tomado tres de estos conceptos (la Autobiografía, el Viaje y la Memoria) y se ha intentado demostrar cómo ese exceso de literatura, ese empeño de Pitol por "literaturizar" cuanto encuentra a su paso, termina otorgándoles a esas categorías ciertas peculiaridades que las alejan del modo en el usualmente se han comportado en la tradición. Así, la tesis que se sostiene en este trabajo explica en parte la originalidad de la ensayística pitoliana, pues su autor consigue que estas categorías ancestrales parezcan novedosas.

This article takes up the idea of Indian Ocean ‘natural logics’ while shifting attention from ‘cultures of trade’ to leisure culture, and from monsoon winds to waves. Surfers who ride these bands of moving energy describe the experience as one of being ‘stoked’, and the search for stoke has over the past century propelled them around the world ocean in pursuit of the perfect wave. Focusing on the Indian Ocean arena, the article traces three distinct yet not necessarily sequential waves of surf travel therein: the ‘surfari’ and the concealment/exposure of secret spots; enclaves of consumption in the offshore coliseum; and, the swirling shore-break in which the energy parcel conveyed through the ocean is unloaded on the coast. In the process, it explores what insights Indian Ocean studies bring to cultural histories of surfing and how surfing practice has been reshaped as it moves out of its traditional Pacific — and then Atlantic — locations, along with the ways in which surfing has in turn reconfigured the Indian Ocean littoral. The article concludes by shifting mode from critical commentary in order to present the shore-break as a dynamic concept-metaphor for materializing immersed and energised scholarship.

Between 1250 and 1350, in the aftermath of the Mongol conquests, Western travelers brought back new information on the Eastern religions of China, Tibet and India.  By 1350, medieval views on religion were quite complex and nuanced; they did not just look at the East and group it all together as a vague “paganism.” This paper, then, examines what medieval authors thought they knew about Eastern religions in all their aspects (theological, ritual, institutional, material), and how these views relate to larger medieval ideas about the concept of religion itself.  This paper will not seek either to determine the truthfulness of Western views of the East or to suggest what Eastern religious ideas or practices are being referenced. Instead, it will focus on the image of Eastern religions in the minds of Latin Christians.

The main goal of the paper is to show how a discourse on the so-called ‘yellow race’ functioned in the Polish and Serbian travel writing from the second half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. An analysis of the semantics of the term ‘yellow race’ is also proffered.
Paying attention to Serbian and Polish authors can broaden our understanding of the imperial and racial dimension of representation of China. In the modern period, Poland and Serbia did not take part in exploitation of China; on the contrary, these countries themselves became objects of imperial domination. Nevertheless, when travellers from Poland or Serbia visited China, they often represented imperial institutions of foreign powers, e.g. as soldiers in the Russian army. Their outlook on the world was formed by intellectual trends born in Western Europe, like Darwinism. However, Poles and Serbs, being victims of imperialism themselves, were in a better position to understand the people of this East Asian nation. Therefore, we find an interesting ambivalence. Additionally, choosing Polish and Serbian travel writings also allows us to see whether representatives of a Catholic Slavic nation and an Orthodox Slavic nation had different attitude towards race issues

Through a close reading of contemporary Japanese novelist Murakami Haruki’s accounts of his travels in Southern Europe, the United States, and Australia, this article analyses the ways in which this author uses travel writing to promote his self-image as a cosmopolitan and culturally sensitive writer. At the same time, examining the complex dynamics of identification and differentiation at play in the narratives, it highlights the texts’ potential to generate critical reflections on both Japanese and global cultural and social formations. By looking at Murakami’s distinctive combination of self- promotion and cultural critique, the article’s overarching goal is to complicate the current understanding of the genre travel writing and its colonial legacy.

In this article, I argue that Jesmyn Ward deploys a road trip in her 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing as a literary formula through which she demonstrates the immobilizing effects of racism and incarceration on contemporary black lives. The association of the American road-trip novel with freedom and free movement is strong in the American imaginary, and Ward manipulates this association to explore what happens when automobile travelers are precarious rather than privileged. The road trip in Ward's novel makes visible various forces of mobility and immobility that differentiate citizens by race. She conjures two dimensions of the African American experience that are immobilizing: the carceral system and the risk of “driving while black.” Sing, Unburied, Sing already critiques the traditional road trip in its plot and narrative structure; for Ward, it is the linkages of dimensions of African American immobilization around the road trip that are powerful. Ward's novel demonstrates that black automobility, or the unique experience of the road for racialized drivers, reveals the political and social dynamics that shape our conception of the road for all drivers. Furthermore, I analyze how the road trip within the novel “unburies” a story about the violence of incarceration. I explore how Ward finesses that iconic American narrative trope, the journey by car that ought to be freeing, to heighten her critique of racist, anti-black structures of oppression in the United States.

In spite of the increased profile of Welsh national identity in the post-devolutionary age, the role of travellers and in particular travel writers in representing Wales beyond its borders remains largely unstudied. This essay explores the contrasting constructions of Wales, Welsh political structures and cultural landscapes at the dawn of the twenty-first century offered by two francophone travel narratives by Quebecois Dominic Ménard-Bilodeau (2004) and Breton Jean-Yves Le Disez (2006). It investigates how the travellers' divergent discursive axes and respective emphases on heritage and ethnic tourism result in polarised perceptions of contemporary Wales as a romanticised and mysterious forgotten world on the one hand, and a vibrant and dynamic model to be emulated by non-state nations on the other. By examining the extent of the travellers' political awareness of Wales, the essay probes the possible effects of devolution on travellers' evolving perceptions of Wales and its representation in travel literature.

This article looks at the Oriental travel writing by Fürst Hermann von Pückler-Muskau as flânerie as articulated by both literary historians of the nineteenth-century French flâneur literature and, later on, Walter Benjamin. Pückler’s narrator, who is placed at the center of the Aus Mehemed Alis Reich, the travel text in question, bears resemblance to the  flâneur in several aspects, such as his perspective in regard to the position he assumes within the scenario that he depicts through his narrative, his relative detachment from the events around him and the general trajectory of the narrative as being anecdotal and entertaining in nature. This narrative style provided the readers of the mid-nineteenth century with both a new type of travel text and an unusual narrator, who through his particular social status was able to access different social spheres and enjoy different travel experiences than the majority of travel writers, who were mostly middle class.

Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands (Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln, 2009) constructs an alternative knowledge of the world in a globalization age. The article analyzes the text’s propositional world-knowledge as it appears on a discursive level as well as its non-propositional world-knowledge as produced through the text’s aesthetic form. The article analyzes how Schalansky’s short prose texts develop an alterity-oriented world-knowledge. It then shows how Atlas’s literary-visual form foregrounds selectiveness, inexhaustibility, and heterogeneity, and demonstrates the text’s relative independence from the need to organize places and events through a narrative progression in time and space. These thematic and formal properties enable the text to construct a world-knowledge that presents readers with an alternative to extant globalization narratives insofar as it resists their drive towards a comprehension of the planet in terms of completeness, homogenization, abstraction, and totalization.

A pesar del alto volumen de viajeros a la República Popular China y América Latina durante la Guerra Fría, este continúa siendo un tema poco estudiado. Tomando como marco general los textos publicados por los protagonistas de estos viajes, este artículo explora la novela de la escritora chilena Mercedes Valdivieso Los ojos de bambú (1964) Escrita en tono autobiográfico, la novela nos permite conjeturar un rescate de la experiencia de una mujer del periodo, permitiendo un acercamiento a las experiencias tanto de los viajeros latinoamericanos como de una mujer y sus experiencias de hospitalidad en la China maoísta. Tomando en consideración las formas elegidas para la publicación del testimonio sobre el viaje a la China del periodo, se aborda la novela como fuente útil para la comprensión de la experiencia de las visitas a China en los sesenta, y ¿ como expresión de la diplomacia cultural.

Despite the high number of travelers to the People's Republic of China and Latin America during the Cold War, this continues to be an understudied topic. Taking the texts published by the travelers themselves as a general framework, this article explores the novel by the Chilean writer Mercedes Valdivieso Los ojos de bambú (1964) [“Bamboo Eyes”]. Written in an autobiographical tone, the novel reveals the experience of a woman during the period, allowing us to analyze the experiences of Latin American travelers along with those of a woman and her hospitality experiences in Maoist China. Considering the means chosen to publish testimonials of China trips then, the novel is here considered a useful source to understand the experience of travel to China as well as an example of cultural diplomacy.

Focusing on the body as a site of rupture and signification, this book shifts the paradigm for the study of modernity in the Arab context from questions of representation, translation, and cultural exchange to an engagement with a genealogy of symptoms and affects. Trials of Arab Modernity traces a series of experiences and encounters arising from leaving home, aversion to food, disorientation, anxiety attacks, and physical collapse embodied in travelogues, novels, poetic fragments, and anecdotes from the nineteenth-century to the present. Tarek El-Ariss thus reframes Arab modernity [ḥadātha] as a somatic condition, which takes shape through accidents and events [aḥdāth] emerging in and between Europe and the Arab world, the literary text and political discourse. This study challenges the prevalent conceptualizations of modernity, both those that treat it as a Western ideological project imposed by colonialism, and others that understand it as a universal narrative of progress and innovation. Instead, El-Ariss offers a close reading of the simultaneous performances and contestations—or trials—of modernity staged in works by authors such as Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Tayeb Salih, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, and Ahmad Alaidy. In dialogue with affect theory, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, this book reveals the unfolding of these trials as a violent and ongoing confrontation with and within modernity, decentering yet also redefining and producing it. El-Ariss’s theoretical and comparative approach offers a new configuration of Arab modernity at the intersection of historical, cultural, and aesthetic frameworks. The first study of its kind to bridge the gap between Nahda or the so-called Arab project of Enlightenment, or Renaissance, and postcolonial and postmodern fiction, this work is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Middle Eastern and Arabic Studies, Comparative Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Islamic Studies, Intellectual History, and Anthropology.

Artículo que presenta un texto prácticamente inédito de literatura de viaje, En Tokio, escrito en 1899 por el mexicano Ramón G. Pacheco –tercer secretario de la representación mexicana en Japón de 1899 a 1901, además de enviado extraordinario y ministro plenipotenciario de México en ese país de 1907 a 1913–, y contiene sus impresiones personales sobre el Japón de finales del siglo XIX. Este texto tiene doble interés: refleja las percepciones de un diplomático que años después de haber escrito el libro habría de convertirse en elemento clave de las negociaciones comerciales ante Japón, como embajador plenipotenciario de nuestro país; por otro lado, la obra de Pacheco es una rareza bibliográfica impresa en Japón en un tipo de papel crepé y con una encuadernación tradicional que lo hace quizá uno de los primeros textos de su tipo impreso por un mexicano en Japón.

This paper presents a practically unknown travel literature text,  En Tokio, written in 1899 by Mexican diplomat Ramón G. Pacheco, third secretary of  the Mexican Embassy in  Japan from 1899-1901,  and special envoy and ambassador from 1907 to 1913.  His work contains personal impressions of  Japan in the late 19th  century. It  has  a  double  relevance:  it  reflects  the  perceptions  of  a  diplomat  that,  years  after writing this book,  as ambassador,  became a key element in Mexican and  Japanese commercial negotiations, and it is also a bibliographical rarity,  printed in  Japan on crepe paper and with a traditional  Japanese binding that makes it one of  the f irst books of  its kind printed by a Mexican in  Japan.

This essay examines Zilpha Elaw’s Memoirs and her peripatetic theology as acts of resistance against British print culture. In 1827, Elaw began an itinerant Methodist ministry in Burlington County, New Jersey and traveled extensively from Maine to Virginia. She moved to England in 1840, wrote and published her Memoirs, and continued her ministry into the 1860s.  Elaw remarried in 1850, establishing a permanent home in London where she lived until her death in 1873. Both her written and her oral work were rejections of a British press that was overzealous in its depictions of American enslavement and its self-congratulatory representations of England as a bastion of free and enlightened civilization.  The essay reads news articles, advertising, and ephemera in local papers of London and northern England as both a means of consumption of and knowledge production about American slavery.  Elaw gets scripted by but writes her way out of those boundaries and redefines her own place in the print culture of nineteenth-century religious diaspora.

The article interprets "New Atlantis" by Francis Bacon and reads it as a hypertext of "Instauratio Magna", the project of restoration of sciences, which the philosopher failed to carry out fully. The author seeks to discover the interrelations between the discursive, rhetorical and literary modes of writing that shaped the early stages of modern science. In his opinion, empirical science does not establish its starting point only with its own new instruments, but it also deploys contemporary patterns of narrative fiction (for example, the modal frame of travel story) and rhetorical probability (also allegory). The power of this composite renders its own origin coherent.

W artykule poddano interpretacji "Nową Atlantydę" Francisa Bacona, odczytując ją jako hipertekst projektu odnowy nauk ("Instauratio Magna"), którego filozofowi nie udało się w pełni zrealizować. Autor podejmuje próbę odpowiedzi na pytanie, jaki model relacji między rejestrami dyskursywnym, retorycznym i literackim legł u początków nowożytnego kształtowania nauki. Jego zdaniem nauka empiryczna nie ustanawia swojego początku wyłącznie własnymi nowymi narzędziami, wykorzystuje natomiast sobie współczesne wzorce fikcji narracyjnej (np. ramę modalnościową opowieści podróżniczej), retorycznego prawdopodobieństwa (oraz alegorii) i siłą wynikającą z ich kompozytu nadaje spoistość własnej genezie.