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Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century

Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century

Tim Youngs

(2006)

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Abstract

Long popular with a general readership, travel writing has, in the past three decades or so, become firmly established as an object of serious and multi-disciplinary academic inquiry. Few of the scholarly and popular publications that have focused on the nineteenth century have regarded the century as a whole. This broad volume examines the cultural and social aspects of travel writing on Africa, Asia, America, the Balkans and Australasia. An additional key feature of the volume will be its inclusion of different types of traveller. Several types of travellers and travel texts are considered in the collection. The volume includes studies of explorers, missionaries, artists and writers, Romantics and socialists, colonialists and indigenes. It covers, therefore, a range of travels, travellers, and travellers' texts, and aims to establish some of the contexts in which travel took place. This volume is as much about departure points as it is about destinations, revealing the prejudices and precepts of the nineteenth-century traveller.


Long popular with a general readership, travel writing has, in the past three decades or so, become firmly established as an object of serious and multi-disciplinary academic inquiry. Few of the scholarly and popular publications that have focused on the nineteenth century have regarded the century as a whole. This broad volume examines the cultural and social aspects of travel writing on Africa, Asia, America, the Balkans and Australasia.


'This volume will be required reading for anyone seriously interested in nineteenth-century concepts of culture and civilization.' —David Seed, Chair of American Literature, University of Liverpool


Tim Youngs is Professor of English and Travel Studies at Nottingham Trent University, where he is Director of the Centre for Travel Writing Studies. He is the author of 'Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues 1850-1900' (Manchester University Press, 1994) and editor of 'Writing and Race' (Longman, 1997).

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Front Matter\r 1
Half Title\r 1
Series Page\r 2
Title\r 3
Copyright\r 4
Contents\r 5
List of Illustrations\r 7
Notes on Contributors\r 9
Acknowledgements\r 13
Main Body\r 15
1. Introduction: Filling the Blank Spaces, By Tim Youngs 15
Blank spaces 15
Girdling the Earth\r 18
Tourism\r 20
Rolling-stock\r 21
Photography\r 24
The essays\r 25
Works Cited\r 30
2. The Balkans in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Writing, by Vesna Goldsworthy\r 33
Introduction: Where exactly are the Balkans?\r 33
On the shores of Illyria: British travellers in the Balkans in the 1800s\r 36
Fighting the Balkan Wars\r 41
Writing the Balkans: experience and imagination\r 45
Notes\r 47
Works cited\r 47
3. Touring in Extremis: Travel and Adventure in the Congo, by Stephen Donovan\r 51
Exploring and pioneering, 1870 to 1900\r 54
Sport, science and spectacle, 1890-1910\r 59
Tourism after 1910\r 63
Notes\r 64
Works cited\r 65
4. Politics, Aesthetics and Quest in British Travel Writing on the Middle East, by Geoffrey Nash\r 69
Favoured and less-favoured peoples and nations\r 73
Individual travellers and their quests\r 75
Conclusion\r 79
Notes\r 80
Works cited\r 81
5. Imperial Player: Richard Burton in Sindh, by Indira Ghose 85
Notes\r 98
Works cited\r 99
6. Early Indian Travel Guides to Britain, by Michael H. Fisher\r 101
Early travellers and travel accounts: Europe and India\r 102
The authors and their chosen genre\r 104
The authors' multiple role and readers \r 108
Representations of Britons\r 111
Conclusion\r 114
Notes\r 116
Works cited\r 117
7. A Princess's Pilgrimage: Nawab Sikandar Begam's Account of Hajj, by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley\r 121
Introduction: women travellers, Muslim travellers\r 121
Bhopal, paramountcy and the Indian pilgrimage\r 124
Writing a Muslim journey in a colonial environment\r 126
Defining the Self against a Muslim Other\r 131
An alternative construction of 'the Orient'\r 134
'Viewing things from an Oriental point of view': conclusions\r 137
Notes\r 139
Works cited\r 139
8. A Yankee in Yucatan: John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Cities of America, by Nigel Leask\r 143
Discovering, describing, purchasing\r 143
Travel writing and the politics of federation\r 148
'They rise like skeletons from the grave ...'\r 150
Death, decay, resurrection\r 153
Notes\r 157
Works cited\r 157
9. George Lewis and the American Churches, by Alasdair Pettinger\r 159
Introduction\r 159
Slavery, abolitionism and travel writing\r 161
Weeping\r 163
Listening\r 168
Conclusion\r 172
Notes\r 174
Works cited\r 174
10. Strategies of Travel: Charles Dickens and William Wells Brown, by Tim Youngs\r 177
Chewing on slavery\r 177
The strategic traveller\r 180
The travelling slave\r 186
Notes\r 190
Works cited\r 191
11. Missionary Positions: Romantic European Polynesias from cook to Stevenson, by Sarah Johnson\r 193
Paradise found\r 193
Fertile imagination\r 198
The Fall of Tahiti\r 199
Love in idleness\r 201
All work and no play...\r 204
Re-shaping, re-writing\r 205
From sexuality to sentimentality\r 208
Notes\r 210
Works cited\r 211
12. Writing the Southern Cross: Religious Travel Writing in Nineteenth-Century Australasia, by Anna Johnston\r 215
British visions of Australasia\r 216
Religious travellers and narratives\r 219
Religious travel writing and representation\r 223
Conclusion\r 229
Notes\r 229
Works cited\r 230
13. A Young Writer's Journey into the New Zealand Interior: Katherine Mansfield's 'The Urewera Notebook' by Anne Maxwell 233
Aesthetic versus realist style\r 234
An authentic New Zealand\r 238
Mansfield and the Tuhoe\r 242
Mansfield and settler culture\r 244
A modern sensibility: Old world versus New\r 246
Notes\r 247
Works cited\r 249
End Matter\r 251
Further Reading\r 251
Index\r 255