Travel, Discovery, Transformation
By: Gabriel R. Ricci
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 350
ISBN-13: 9781351301169
Subjects: Travelers' writings; History and criticism; Travel in literature; Écrits de voyageurs; Histoire et critique; Voyage dans la littérature
Description: "This latest volume in the Culture & Civilization series gathers interdisciplinary voices to present a collection of essays on travel and travel narratives. The essays span a range of topics from iconic ancient travel stories to modern tourism. They discuss travel in the ancient world, modern heroic travels, the literary culture of missionary travel, the intersection of fiction and travel narratives, modern literary traditions and visions of Greece, personal identity, and expatriation. Essays also address travel memoirs, the re-imagining of worlds through travel, transformed landscapes and animals in travel narratives, diplomacy, English women travel writers, and pilgrimage and health in the medieval world. The history of travel writing takes in multiple pursuits: exploration and conquest, religious pilgrimage and missionary work, educational tourism and diplomacy, scientific and personal discovery, and natural history and oral history. As a literary genre, it has enhanced a wide range of disciplines, including geography, ethnography, anthropology, and linguistics. Moreover, twenty-first-century interests in travel and travel writing have produced a global framework that promises to expand travel's theoretical reach into the depths of the Internet, thus challenging our conventional concept of what it means to travel. The fact that travel and travel writing have a prehistory that is embedded in foundational religious texts and ancient narratives of journey, like the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, makes both travel and travel writing fundamental and essential expressions of humanity. Travel encourages writing, particularly as epistolary and poetic chronicling. This is clearly a history and tradition that began with human communication and which has kept pace with our collective development."--Provided by publisher.
Table of contents: title: Cover; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Table of Contents; Introduction; I The Allure of Ancient Greece; 1 "More Like Odysseus": Playing House in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient; 2 "If Peopled and Cultured": Bartram's Travels and the Odyssey; 3 Commodifying Antiquity in Mary Nisbet's Journey to the Ottoman Empire; 4 The Journey to Greece in the American and the Greek Modernist Literary Imagination: Henry Miller and George Seferis; II Women's Voices; 5 A Protestant in Foreign Catholic and Muslim Spaces: The Turkish Embassy Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.; title: 6 Frameworks of Freedom and Fear: Authorizing the Voice in Women's Travel Writing7 Self-Transformation through Dangerous Travel: Mary Morris's Nothing to Declare and Audrey Schulman's The Cage; 8 "That Wonderous Medusa-Face": Goethe's Italian Journey, George Eliot, and G.H. Lewes; III Traveling with God; 9 The Literary Culture of Missionary Travel; 10 On the Road to Health: Pilgrimage in Medieval England; IV New Worlds; 11 Culture, the Caribbean Landscape, and Environmental Change; 12 "A Scale of Hideousness": Snakes and Other Reptiles in the New Worlds of the Long Eighteenth Century.; title: 13 Bitter Laughter and Colonial Novellistica in Galeotto Cei's Relazione delle IndieV Modern Journeys; 14 Pneumo Prose: National Socialism as a Helvetic Disease; 15 Plato's Parable of the Cave and the Transformative Power of Travel in Mediterranean Cinema; 16 Ryszard Kapuściński's Polyphonic Travels; Contributors.