Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2021.2006878
P. Crowley
ABSTRACT Jean-Paul Kauffmann is a travel writer whose work obliquely interrogates his long and difficult confinement as a hostage in Beirut from May 1985 to 4 May 1988. His work engages, in part, with sites and traces of French imperialism that sponsor a reflection upon confinement and freedom and on a self that is ruptured from the past and in search of the reparative. This article examines traces of French colonialism within Kauffmann's work, tracking them, in particular, in La Maison du retour (2007). It is argued that his engagement with the colonial is a self-limiting, if paradoxically doubling, discursive exploration that explicitly rejects the horizontal expansion of the rhizome towards an oppressed other in favour of the root's verticality that might offer a connection across the void of his crushing experience, and gravitational pull, of confinement. His work offers a restricted form of microspection that, understandably, shores up the self.
{"title":"Traces of empire: travel and Jean-Paul Kauffmann's allegories of confinement","authors":"P. Crowley","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2021.2006878","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2021.2006878","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Jean-Paul Kauffmann is a travel writer whose work obliquely interrogates his long and difficult confinement as a hostage in Beirut from May 1985 to 4 May 1988. His work engages, in part, with sites and traces of French imperialism that sponsor a reflection upon confinement and freedom and on a self that is ruptured from the past and in search of the reparative. This article examines traces of French colonialism within Kauffmann's work, tracking them, in particular, in La Maison du retour (2007). It is argued that his engagement with the colonial is a self-limiting, if paradoxically doubling, discursive exploration that explicitly rejects the horizontal expansion of the rhizome towards an oppressed other in favour of the root's verticality that might offer a connection across the void of his crushing experience, and gravitational pull, of confinement. His work offers a restricted form of microspection that, understandably, shores up the self.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"179 - 194"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45862631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2022.2052568
Juanjuan Wu
ABSTRACT Focussing on Florence Ayscough’s A Chinese Mirror (1925), this article examines the potential for vertical travel to have political and ethical implications. Born in China, Asycough was a Shanghai-based sinologist who garnered an international reputation for translating Chinese literature and culture. Well-qualified for this task through her extensive knowledge of local history, language, literature and culture, Ayscough revises the horizontal axes of travel and writing that were dominant in the 1920s, turning her life in Shanghai and her journey along the Yangtze River into vertical travels involving new modes of microspection. The article argues that Ayscough’s writing demonstrates how vertical travel could be deployed to resist and critique imperial aspirations and their reliance on violence, domination and existing hierarchies of culture and nature, self and other. It reveals the significance of verticality in her critique of British imperialism and her self-representation as a cosmopolitan with cultivated distance from Eurocentrism.
{"title":"Vertical travel and cosmopolitanism in Florence Ayscough’s A Chinese Mirror (1925)","authors":"Juanjuan Wu","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2052568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2052568","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Focussing on Florence Ayscough’s A Chinese Mirror (1925), this article examines the potential for vertical travel to have political and ethical implications. Born in China, Asycough was a Shanghai-based sinologist who garnered an international reputation for translating Chinese literature and culture. Well-qualified for this task through her extensive knowledge of local history, language, literature and culture, Ayscough revises the horizontal axes of travel and writing that were dominant in the 1920s, turning her life in Shanghai and her journey along the Yangtze River into vertical travels involving new modes of microspection. The article argues that Ayscough’s writing demonstrates how vertical travel could be deployed to resist and critique imperial aspirations and their reliance on violence, domination and existing hierarchies of culture and nature, self and other. It reveals the significance of verticality in her critique of British imperialism and her self-representation as a cosmopolitan with cultivated distance from Eurocentrism.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"145 - 160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48071779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2021.2005837
A. Pettinger
ABSTRACT Whenever the forward movement of the narrative slows down – or stops completely – travel writing often realigns its representation of other people. Instead of a mobile protagonist who notes the existence of largely static and featureless by-standers with no history to speak of, the polarities are reversed, so that it is the travellees who are the ones who move, passing by – or revolving around – a traveller who stays put with apparently little choice but to engage with them at length or in depth, if only on the page. This article examines different ways “people watching” figures in non-fiction writings in which the “I” barely moves and the impact this has on the forms of characterisation they use and the relative importance assigned to the observer and observed. Examples are drawn from texts by Alain de Botton, Roger Green, Sophie Calle, Annie Ernaux and Behrouz Boochani.
{"title":"People watching: the static “I” and mobile travellees","authors":"A. Pettinger","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2021.2005837","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2021.2005837","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Whenever the forward movement of the narrative slows down – or stops completely – travel writing often realigns its representation of other people. Instead of a mobile protagonist who notes the existence of largely static and featureless by-standers with no history to speak of, the polarities are reversed, so that it is the travellees who are the ones who move, passing by – or revolving around – a traveller who stays put with apparently little choice but to engage with them at length or in depth, if only on the page. This article examines different ways “people watching” figures in non-fiction writings in which the “I” barely moves and the impact this has on the forms of characterisation they use and the relative importance assigned to the observer and observed. Examples are drawn from texts by Alain de Botton, Roger Green, Sophie Calle, Annie Ernaux and Behrouz Boochani.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"212 - 226"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44245962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2022.2051320
Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
ABSTRACT This introduction outlines the background of our special issue of Studies in Travel Writing, which emerged from reflections on travel and the travelogue in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It details the impact of this global public health crisis on questions of mobility and foregrounds the confinement to which travellers have been subject. The introduction argues that such changes should not be confined to the hypercontemporary moment but need also to be subject to active historicisation across a broad corpus of texts. The aim is to explore in this context the concept of “vertical travel”, tracking its elaboration in the work of scholars such as Kris Lackey, Michael Cronin and Alasdair Pettinger, and explaining the meanings it has acquired. The introduction then sets out the taxonomies of this practice and highlights the various forms it takes. It concludes with a brief summary of the selection of articles included in this issue.
{"title":"Vertical travel: introduction","authors":"Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2051320","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2051320","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This introduction outlines the background of our special issue of Studies in Travel Writing, which emerged from reflections on travel and the travelogue in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It details the impact of this global public health crisis on questions of mobility and foregrounds the confinement to which travellers have been subject. The introduction argues that such changes should not be confined to the hypercontemporary moment but need also to be subject to active historicisation across a broad corpus of texts. The aim is to explore in this context the concept of “vertical travel”, tracking its elaboration in the work of scholars such as Kris Lackey, Michael Cronin and Alasdair Pettinger, and explaining the meanings it has acquired. The introduction then sets out the taxonomies of this practice and highlights the various forms it takes. It concludes with a brief summary of the selection of articles included in this issue.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"103 - 109"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43992609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2022.2052612
Joanne Brueton
ABSTRACT This article explores the travel writings of dissident, anti-nationalist French writer, Jean Genet (1910-86) and argues that they use the geometry of place to resist the violence of political cartography. Traversing diverse geographies, from the domestic (Chartres) to the distant (Palestine, Japan, and Vietnam), it focuses on how Genet's vertical signifiers reveal an oppressively monolithic vision of a homeland. Genet encourages the reader's microspection into the flattening orthodoxies of a native soil to make visible the exploitation of those without a home. This emphasis on verticality helps him delve into the 1970s Palestinian revolution, his geometric writing excoriating the demarcation lines of imperial rulers seeking to appropriate, know, and dominate a non-Western other. This article reads Genet's vertical travel in two ways: a microscope into the hierarchies of oppressed peoples; and a voyage into travel writing itself, a literary process of “unearthing” that locates home in a perennial departure.
{"title":"Jean Genet’s vertical geographies: on travel, politics, and form","authors":"Joanne Brueton","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2052612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2052612","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the travel writings of dissident, anti-nationalist French writer, Jean Genet (1910-86) and argues that they use the geometry of place to resist the violence of political cartography. Traversing diverse geographies, from the domestic (Chartres) to the distant (Palestine, Japan, and Vietnam), it focuses on how Genet's vertical signifiers reveal an oppressively monolithic vision of a homeland. Genet encourages the reader's microspection into the flattening orthodoxies of a native soil to make visible the exploitation of those without a home. This emphasis on verticality helps him delve into the 1970s Palestinian revolution, his geometric writing excoriating the demarcation lines of imperial rulers seeking to appropriate, know, and dominate a non-Western other. This article reads Genet's vertical travel in two ways: a microscope into the hierarchies of oppressed peoples; and a voyage into travel writing itself, a literary process of “unearthing” that locates home in a perennial departure.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"161 - 178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41697649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2022.2046836
Anna Dziok-Łazarecka
ABSTRACT This article proposes a discussion of Robert Macfarlane’s travel series The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012) and Underland (2019), with a close focus on pedestrianism. The peripatetic aspect of these books can be understood as a mode of writing in which the rhythm of the walk settles into the rhythm of the text and a mode of locomotion, in which pedestrianism emerges as a vantage point of perceiving the world. At the same time, this interpretation draws upon the concept of verticality, with its key instruments of deceleration, microspection, multisensory engagement in the outer world, physical proximity and confinement. The unorthodox use of tactility, pedestrian senses and privileging of the tactile-kinaesthetic sustain the idea of a body–subject and disrupt the supremacy of sight and a growing sense of disembodiment in the travel genre. By and large, Macfarlane’s celebration of the metaphysics of place questions conventional horizontalism.
{"title":"Verticality in the peripatetic genre: deceleration, microspection and confinement in Robert Macfarlane’s travel books","authors":"Anna Dziok-Łazarecka","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2046836","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2046836","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article proposes a discussion of Robert Macfarlane’s travel series The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012) and Underland (2019), with a close focus on pedestrianism. The peripatetic aspect of these books can be understood as a mode of writing in which the rhythm of the walk settles into the rhythm of the text and a mode of locomotion, in which pedestrianism emerges as a vantage point of perceiving the world. At the same time, this interpretation draws upon the concept of verticality, with its key instruments of deceleration, microspection, multisensory engagement in the outer world, physical proximity and confinement. The unorthodox use of tactility, pedestrian senses and privileging of the tactile-kinaesthetic sustain the idea of a body–subject and disrupt the supremacy of sight and a growing sense of disembodiment in the travel genre. By and large, Macfarlane’s celebration of the metaphysics of place questions conventional horizontalism.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"128 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45943777","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2022.2030284
E. Bond
ABSTRACT The catalogue to Rome-based Palestinian artist Emily Jacir’s Europa exhibition of 2015 includes a short excerpt from Franco Cassano’s Southern Thought entitled “Thinking on Foot”. This article maps key elements of Cassano’s essay, namely the focus on “Mediterranean” values of slowness, contemplation, and conviviality onto readings of Italy-based works by Emily Jacir, Diana Matar and Hisham Matar, all of which provide capacious ways to rethink the idea of pilgrimage. Reflecting on the sites, sights and routes that form the basis of these works, the article shows how they represent pilgrimage as a slow form of contemporary cultural mobility, one concerned with deep contemplation of place as a response to experiences of loss, displacement and exile. Sacred journeying is experienced here through instances of micro-travel, such as walking, standing and looking, and personal transformation is charted through moments of slow thought and memory-work, as captured in multiple, mobile artistic forms.
{"title":"Thinking on foot: New Italian pilgrimages in the work of Emily Jacir, Diana Matar and Hisham Matar","authors":"E. Bond","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2030284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2030284","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The catalogue to Rome-based Palestinian artist Emily Jacir’s Europa exhibition of 2015 includes a short excerpt from Franco Cassano’s Southern Thought entitled “Thinking on Foot”. This article maps key elements of Cassano’s essay, namely the focus on “Mediterranean” values of slowness, contemplation, and conviviality onto readings of Italy-based works by Emily Jacir, Diana Matar and Hisham Matar, all of which provide capacious ways to rethink the idea of pilgrimage. Reflecting on the sites, sights and routes that form the basis of these works, the article shows how they represent pilgrimage as a slow form of contemporary cultural mobility, one concerned with deep contemplation of place as a response to experiences of loss, displacement and exile. Sacred journeying is experienced here through instances of micro-travel, such as walking, standing and looking, and personal transformation is charted through moments of slow thought and memory-work, as captured in multiple, mobile artistic forms.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"110 - 127"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47100204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2022.2041283
Silvia U. Baage
ABSTRACT Frank Smith is a contemporary French author who is known for his poetic writing style, social activism, and attention to detail. This chapter examines Smith’s unconventional approach to the representation of the environmental uncanny he witnesses during his journeys to Louisiana where rising tides and climate change threaten a small island community in the bayous, that of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Native Americans, America’s first climate refugees. The author depicts the non-human and human agency of a complex environmental crisis through figurative and literal forms of verticality. His approach to vertical travel, dwelling, and the fractal diversity of the everyday resonates with Ursula Heise’s descriptions of situated knowledge, sensory perception, and physical immersion as foundations for a sense of place that will be explored here through various types of fragments evident in his work.
{"title":"Vertical travel, the sense of place, and the environmentalism of the poor: climate change in Frank Smith’s Katrina: Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiane","authors":"Silvia U. Baage","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2041283","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2041283","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Frank Smith is a contemporary French author who is known for his poetic writing style, social activism, and attention to detail. This chapter examines Smith’s unconventional approach to the representation of the environmental uncanny he witnesses during his journeys to Louisiana where rising tides and climate change threaten a small island community in the bayous, that of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Native Americans, America’s first climate refugees. The author depicts the non-human and human agency of a complex environmental crisis through figurative and literal forms of verticality. His approach to vertical travel, dwelling, and the fractal diversity of the everyday resonates with Ursula Heise’s descriptions of situated knowledge, sensory perception, and physical immersion as foundations for a sense of place that will be explored here through various types of fragments evident in his work.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"195 - 211"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46305413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2021.1975368
Unita Ahdifard
ABSTRACT This article examines the lives and travel writings of two post-Ottoman women writers, Demetra Vaka Brown (1877–1946), a former Ottoman Greek who immigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century, and Leila Ahmed (1940–), an Egyptian-American scholar whose family was of Turko-Circassian origins. While Vaka Brown's The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul (1923) is a post-World War I memoir that nostalgically reminisces on the Ottoman era, Ahmed's A Border Passage (1999) examines the political twists and turns in twentieth-century Egypt, and their implications for Ahmed's family. Both women grapple with their Ottoman heritage, exploring constructions of gender as they intersect with Ottoman religious beliefs, class strata, and post-Ottoman nationalisms.
{"title":"“Each race in its proper sphere”: understanding Ottoman nation, race, and class in the travel narratives of Demetra Vaka Brown (1877–1946) and Leila Ahmed (1940–)","authors":"Unita Ahdifard","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2021.1975368","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2021.1975368","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the lives and travel writings of two post-Ottoman women writers, Demetra Vaka Brown (1877–1946), a former Ottoman Greek who immigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century, and Leila Ahmed (1940–), an Egyptian-American scholar whose family was of Turko-Circassian origins. While Vaka Brown's The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul (1923) is a post-World War I memoir that nostalgically reminisces on the Ottoman era, Ahmed's A Border Passage (1999) examines the political twists and turns in twentieth-century Egypt, and their implications for Ahmed's family. Both women grapple with their Ottoman heritage, exploring constructions of gender as they intersect with Ottoman religious beliefs, class strata, and post-Ottoman nationalisms.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"50 - 64"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46018658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2021.1994221
Sarah Busch
tour narratives play in consolidating the generic norms for Highland travel writings in the period. Pennant’s works are a combination of both a topographical survey and a full account of “curious travel”, based on miscellaneous knowledge gained during his actual journeys including engravings by his “artist servant” Moses Griffith. Their legacy is manifest, for example, as an “elusive presence” in the better-known Dr Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands (1775). Johnson’s work was inspired by Pennant’s, yet at the same time called into doubt what Pennant describes as a unionist vision incorporating “North” and “South” Britain. In Chapter Five, Leask calls attention to the presence of a female landscape aesthetics in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour in Scotland and Sarah Murray’s Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland (1799), both unusual in the context of the male-dominated picturesque tours of the 1780s. The most intriguing of the authors he discusses is Dorothy Wordsworth, in whose writing he finds a self-effacing aesthetic subject and an empathy with local people developed across lines of nationality and class. Different aspects of local landscapes and people were foregrounded by these women tourists’ works, whose underlying values reflected, confirmed and challenged the conventional framework of masculine tourist narratives about the Highlands. The two final chapters revisit the relationship between “romance” and “improvement” in Walter Scott’s verse romances and novels, highlighting their notable contribution to creating the romanticised view of the Highlands which influenced the imaginations of a mass readership. In summary, Leask addresses more than a century’s worth of literary and visual representations of the Highlands, and provides his readers with a rich and nuanced picture of the Scottish Highland tour of 1720–1830. Readers are not only informed of rapid and forced modernisation brought to the region as perceived by the travellers, but are also further inspired to think about the relations between landscape, improvement schemes, and the shaping of British, Scottish, and Gaelic identities.
{"title":"Anxious Journeys: Twenty-First-Century Travel Writing in German","authors":"Sarah Busch","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2021.1994221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2021.1994221","url":null,"abstract":"tour narratives play in consolidating the generic norms for Highland travel writings in the period. Pennant’s works are a combination of both a topographical survey and a full account of “curious travel”, based on miscellaneous knowledge gained during his actual journeys including engravings by his “artist servant” Moses Griffith. Their legacy is manifest, for example, as an “elusive presence” in the better-known Dr Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands (1775). Johnson’s work was inspired by Pennant’s, yet at the same time called into doubt what Pennant describes as a unionist vision incorporating “North” and “South” Britain. In Chapter Five, Leask calls attention to the presence of a female landscape aesthetics in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour in Scotland and Sarah Murray’s Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland (1799), both unusual in the context of the male-dominated picturesque tours of the 1780s. The most intriguing of the authors he discusses is Dorothy Wordsworth, in whose writing he finds a self-effacing aesthetic subject and an empathy with local people developed across lines of nationality and class. Different aspects of local landscapes and people were foregrounded by these women tourists’ works, whose underlying values reflected, confirmed and challenged the conventional framework of masculine tourist narratives about the Highlands. The two final chapters revisit the relationship between “romance” and “improvement” in Walter Scott’s verse romances and novels, highlighting their notable contribution to creating the romanticised view of the Highlands which influenced the imaginations of a mass readership. In summary, Leask addresses more than a century’s worth of literary and visual representations of the Highlands, and provides his readers with a rich and nuanced picture of the Scottish Highland tour of 1720–1830. Readers are not only informed of rapid and forced modernisation brought to the region as perceived by the travellers, but are also further inspired to think about the relations between landscape, improvement schemes, and the shaping of British, Scottish, and Gaelic identities.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"95 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46450037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：