text:
THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO TRAVEL WRITING

As many places around the world confront issues of globalization, migration and postcoloniality, travel writing has become a serious genre of study, reflecting some of the greatest concerns of our time. Encompassing forms as diverse as field journals, investigative reports, guidebooks, memoirs, comic sketches and lyrical reveries; travel writing is now a crucial focus for discussion across many subjects within the humanities and social sciences.

An ideal starting point for beginners, but also offering new perspectives for those familiar with the field, _The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing_ examines:

• Key debates within the field, including postcolonial studies, gender, sexuality and visual culture

• Historical and cultural contexts, tracing the evolution of travel writing across time and over cultures

• Different styles, modes and themes of travel writing, from pilgrimage to tourism

• Imagined geographies, and the relationship between travel writing and the social, ideological and occasionally fictional constructs through which we view the different regions of the world.

Covering all of the major topics and debates, this is an essential overview of the field, which will also encourage new and exciting directions for study.

**Carl Thompson** is Senior Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University, UK.
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First published 2016
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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_Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business_

© 2016 selection and editorial matter, Carl Thompson; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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_British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data_
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

_Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data_
The Routledge companion to travel writing / [edited by] Carl Thompson.
pages cm. — (Routledge companions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Travelers' writings, English—History and criticism. 2. Travelers' writings, American—History and criticism. 3. Travel in literature. 4. Travel writing—History. I. Thompson, Carl (Carl Edward) editor.
PR756.T72R68 2015
820.9′32—dc23
2015015928

ISBN: 978-0-415-82524-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-36612-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Goudy
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
CONTENTS

_List of Figures_

_Notes on Contributors_

_Acknowledgements_

_Introduction_

CARL THOMPSON

[**PART I
Key Debates and Critical Approaches**](../Text/part1.xlink.html)

** 1 Truth, Lies and Travel Writing**

DANIEL CAREY

** 2 Inner Journeys: Travel Writing as Life Writing**

SIMON COOKE

** 3 Travel Writing and Postcolonial Studies**

CLAIRE LINDSAY

** 4 Travel Writing and Gender**

DÚNLAITH BIRD

** 5 Travel Writing and Sexuality: Queering the Genre**

CHURNJEET MAHN

** 6 Travel Writing and Ethics**

CORINNE FOWLER

** 7 Travel and the Body: Corporeality, Speed and Technology**

CHARLES FORSDICK

** 8 Travel Writing and Visual Culture**

MARGARET TOPPING

** 9 Travel Writing: Reception and Readership**

ROBIN JARVIS

[**PART II
Historical Overviews**](../Text/part2.xlink.html)

**10 Travel Writing in the Ancient Mediterranean**

WILLIAM HUTTON

**11 Chinese Travel Writing**

JAMES M. HARGETT

**12 Indian Travel Writing**

SHOBHANA BHATTACHARJI

**13 Arabic Travel Writing, to 1916**

NABIL MATAR

**14 European Travel Writing in the Middle Ages**

ANTHONY BALE

**15 Western Travel Writing, 1450–1750**

MATTHEW DAY

**16 Western Travel Writing, 1750–1950**

BARBARA KORTE

**17 African Travel Writing**

AEDÍN NÍ LOINGSIGH

**18 Travel Writing Now, 1950 to the Present Day**

CARL THOMPSON

[**PART III
Styles, Modes, Themes**](../Text/part3.xlink.html)

**19 Pilgrims**

LAURA NENZI

**20 Discoverers and Explorers**

PAUL SMETHURST

**21 Travellers and Tourists**

ZOË KINSLEY

**22 Picturesque Travel: The Aesthetics and Politics of Landscape**

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

**23 Guidebooks**

SCOTT LADERMAN

**24 The Romantic Literary Travel Book**

C.W. THOMPSON

**25 Modernist Travel Writing**

DAVID FARLEY

**26 Postmodernizing Travel Writing**

MANFRED PFISTER

**27 Travel Blogs**

KYLIE CARDELL AND KATE DOUGLAS

**28 Dark Tourism**

JUSTIN D. EDWARDS

**29 Gay Travel Writing: An Unstable Category?**

GREGORY WOODS

[**PART IV
Imagined Geographies**](../Text/part4.xlink.html)

**30 Ultima Thule / The North**

GRAHAM HUGGAN

**31 Europe**

WENDY BRACEWELL

**32 North America / USA**

SUSAN L. ROBERSON

**33 Latin America**

JENNIFER HAYWARD

**34 The Middle East**

EVA JOHANNA HOLMBERG

**35 India / South Asia**

TABISH KHAIR

**36 China**

JULIA KUEHN

**37 Australia**

RICHARD WHITE AND JUSTINE GREENWOOD

**38 Sub-Saharan Africa**

LAURA E. FRANEY

**39 The Polar Regions**

JANICE CAVELL

**40 Deserts**

RUNE GRAULUND

**41 Mountains**

SIMON BAINBRIDGE

**42 The Sea**

STEVE MENTZ

_Index_
FIGURES

22.1 'Portrait of Speelman, a Hottentot'.From William J Burchell, _Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa_. Courtesy of Harold Strange Library of African Studies, Johannesburg, South Africa.

22.2 'Wentworth Street, Whitechapel'. From Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, _London, a Pilgrimage_. Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.
CONTRIBUTORS

**Simon Bainbridge** is Professor of Romantic Studies in the Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Lancaster. He has published widely on the British literature of the Romantic period, especially as seen in relation to its historical context,and is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled _Romanticism and Mountaineering: The Literary Cultures of Climbing, 1760–1837_.

**Anthony Bale** is Professor of Medieval Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He has recently published a new translation of _The Book of Margery Kempe_ (Oxford World's Classics, 2015), and his current research is concerned with pilgrimage and reading in late medieval Jerusalem and Palestine.

**Shobhana Bhattacharji** taught at Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi for 40 years. She is the editor of _Indian Travel Writing_ (Sahitya Akademi, 2008), and of student editions of _Othello_ , _The Heart of Mid-Lothian_ , _Mansfield Park_ , and Romantic poetry; she has also published articles on mountain travel writing.

**Dúnlaith Bird** is a Lecturer at the Université Paris Sud, researching travel writing, _vagabondage_ , gender, and colonialism. Her publications include _Travelling in Different Skins: Gender Identity in European Women's Oriental Travelogues, 1850–1950_ (Oxford University Press, 2012) and 'Selling the Skirt: Women's Travel Writing and the Literary Market' in the edited volume _Women Matter: Femmes Matière_ (Peter Lang, 2013).

**Elizabeth A. Bohls** of the University of Oregon is the author of _Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean 1770–1833_ (Cambridge University Press, 2014); _Romantic Literature and Postcolonial Studies_ (Edinburgh University Press, 2013); and _Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1717–1818_ (Cambridge University Press, 1995), as well as numerous articles on travel writing and the novel. She co-edited the anthology _Travel Writing 1700–1830_ (Oxford World's Classics, 2005) with Ian Duncan.

**Wendy Bracewell** is Professor of Southeast European History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London.She has written and edited a number of works on East European travel writing, particularly in the framework of the _East Looks West_ series (Central European University Press, 2008–2009).

**Kylie Cardell** is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Creative Arts at Flinders University, South Australia. She is the author of _Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary_ (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) and (with Kate Douglas) _Telling Tales: Autobiographies of Childhood and Youth_ (Routledge, 2014).

**Daniel Carey** is Director of the Moore Institute and Professor of English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His publications include _Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006); edited collections on _Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe_ (Ashgate, 2012); _The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory_ (Oxford University Press, 2009); and _Asian Travel in the Renaissance_ (Blackwells, 2004). He is co-general editor of Richard Hakluyt's _Principal Navigations,_ _V_ _oyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation_ (1598–1600), in preparation for Oxford University Press.

**Janice Cavell** is a historian working for the Canadian government and an adjunct research professor at Carleton University. She is the author of _Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818–1860_ (University of Toronto Press, 2008) and co-author of _Acts of Occupation: Canada and Arctic Sovereignty, 1918–25_ (University of British Columbia Press, 2010).

**Simon Cooke** is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature in theDepartment of English at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of _Travellers' Tales of Wonder: Chatwin, Naipaul, Sebald_ (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

**Matthew Day** is an Associate Dean at Newman University and works on the print culture and reception history of early modern travel literature. He is currently working on a reception history of Richard Hakluyt's _Principal Navigations_ (1589, 1598–1600, forthcoming) and is co-editor of volume IX of the Oxford University Press edition of Hakluyt's work (forthcoming).

**Kate Douglas** is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Creative Arts at Flinders University. She is the author (with Kylie Cardell) of _Telling Tales: Autobiographies of Childhood and Youth_ (Routledge, 2014), _Contesting Childhood_ (2010), and (with Gillian Whitlock) _Trauma Texts_ (Routledge, 2009).

**Justin D. Edwards** is Professor of English at the University of Surrey. He has held research fellowships at Churchill College, University of Cambridge and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge. His books on travel writing include _Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of US Travel Literature, 1840–1930_ (University of New Hampshire Press, 2001) and _Mobility at Large_ (co-authored with Rune Graulund, Liverpool University Press, 2012). He is also co-editor of _Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations_ (also with Rune Graulund, Palgrave, 2011).

**David Farley** is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Writing Studies at St John's University, New York. His book _Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad_ (University of Missouri press) was published in 2010. He has written articles on William Butler Yeats, E.E. Cummings, Ezra Pound and Anton Chekhov's travels to Siberia.

**Charles Forsdick** is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool and Arts and Humanities Research Council Theme Leadership Fellow for 'Translating Cultures'. He has published on exoticism, travel writing, postcolonial literature and the Francophone Caribbean (especially Haiti).

**Corinne Fowler** is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. She is author of _Chasing Tales: Travel Writing, Journalism and the History of British Ideas about Afghanistan_ (Rodopi, 2007); co-editor of _Travel and Ethics: Theory and Practice_ (Routledge, 2013); and co-author of _Postcolonial Manchester: Diaspora Space and the Devolution of Literary Culture_ (Manchester University Press, 2013).

**Laura E. Franey** is Associate Professor of English at Millsaps College, USA. She is the author of _Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence: British Writing on Africa, 1855–1902_ (Palgrave, 2003).

**Rune Graulund** is Associate Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Centre for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He is the co-editor of _Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations_ (Palgrave, 2011); the co-author of _Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing_ (Liverpool University Press, 2012); and has published widely on desert travel writing.

**Justine Greenwood** is a doctoral candidate and Associate Lecturer at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her work, which explores the intersections between immigration and tourism, has been published in _History Australia_ , the _Journal of Tourism History_ , the _Sydney Journal_ , and in Richard White and Caroline Ford's _Playing in the Bush: Recreation and National Parks in New South Wales_ (Sydney University Press, 2012).

**James M. Hargett** teaches Chinese language and literature at the University at Albany, State University of New York. His primary research interest is the relation between literature and geography during the Song dynasty and his most recent book is _Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea_ : _The Natural World and Material Culture of Twelfth-Century South China_ (University of Washington Press, 2010). He is currently preparing a book-length history of travel writing in ancient China.

**Jennifer Hayward** is Professor of English at The College of Wooster, Ohio. She has published essays on nineteenth-century British travellers in Latin America as well as _Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soaps_ (University Press of Kentucky, 1997) and scholarly editions of Maria Graham's 1824 _Journal of a Residence in Chile_ (University of Virginia Press, 2003) and _Journal of a Voyage to Brazil_ (Parlor Press, 2011, co-editor Soledad Caballero).

**Eva Johanna Holmberg** is a cultural historian of travel and ethnographic knowledge in the early modern period. A Fellow of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, she is the author of _Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination_ (Ashgate, 2011) and several articles on early modern English travel writing.

**Graham Huggan** teaches in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. The author of _Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing_ (University of Michigan Press, 1998, co-written with Patrick Holland) and _Extreme Pursuits: Travel/Writing in an Age of Globalization_ (University of Michigan Press, 2009), he currently leads the EU-funded international research project 'Arctic Encounters: Contemporary Travel/Writing in the European High North'.

**William Hutton** is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. He is the author of _Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias_ (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and is currently working on an annotated translation of Pausanias.

**Robin Jarvis** is Professor of English Literature at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He is the author of _Wordsworth, Milton and the Theory of Poetic Relations_ (Palgrave, 1991), _Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel_ (Palgrave, 1997); _The Romantic Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1789–1830_ (Routledge, 2004); _Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel: Expeditions and Tours in North America, 1760–1840_ (Ashgate, 2012); and numerous shorter pieces on Romantic literature and travel writing.

**Tabish Khair** is a critic, novelist, poet and, currently, an Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. Studies written or (co)edited by him include _Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels_ (Oxford University Press, 2001); _Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing_ (Indiana University Press, 2005); and _The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness_ (Palgrave, 2010).

**Zoë Kinsley** is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool Hope University. Her work explores the literary representation of travel, space and landscape, and she has a particular interest in British home tour travel writing of the long eighteenth century. She has published variously on these themes, and is the author of _Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812_ (Ashgate, 2008).

**Barbara Korte** is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her publications include _English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations_ (Palgrave, 2000); _The Penguin Book of First World War Stories_ (Penguin, 2007); and _Poverty in Literature_ (Palgrave, 2014).

**Julia Kuehn** is Associate Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. Her publications in the area of travel writing include numerous journal articles and the co-edited collections _Diasporic Chineseness after the Rise of China_ (University of British Columbia Press, 2013); _China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces_ (Hong Kong University Press, 2009); _Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility_ (Routledge, 2008); and _A Century of Travels in China_ (Hong Kong University Press, 2007).

**Scott Laderman** is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, USA. He is the author of _Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory_ (Duke University Press, 2009) and, most recently, _Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing_ (University of California Press, 2014).

**Claire Lindsay** is Reader in Latin American Literature and Culture at University College London. She is the author of _Locating Latin American Women Writers_ (Peter Lang, 2003) and _Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America_ (Routledge, 2010), and is currently working on a book about illustrated magazines and tourism in Mexico.

**Churnjeet Mahn** is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey. Her primary areas of research are the interface between tourism and heritage, and transnational studies of sexuality. Her publications include _British Women's Travel to Greece, 1840–1914_ (Ashgate, 2012).

**Nabil Matar** has taught in Lebanon, Jordan and the United States, where he is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. His most recent publications are _Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam_ (Columbia University Press, 2013) and _British Captives in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, 1563–1760_ (Brill, 2014). His most recent book is _An Arab Ambassador in the Mediterranean World: Muhammad ibn Uthman al-Miknasi, 1779–1788_ (Routledge, 2015).

**Steve Mentz** is Professor of English at St John's University in New York City.He is the author of _At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean_ (Continuum, 2009) and _Romance for Sale in Early Modern England_ (Ashgate, 2006). He is co-editor of _Rogues and Early Modern English Culture_ (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and _The Age of Thomas Nashe_ (Ashgate, 2013).His book, _Shipwreck_ _M_ _odernity: Ecologies of Globalization_ ; 1550–1719, was published in 2015 by the University of Minnesota Press.

**Laura Nenzi** is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee. A specialist in the social history of early modern Japan, she is the author of _Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan_ (University of Hawaii Press, 2008) and _The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko: One Woman's Transit from Tokugawa to Meiji Japan_ (University of Hawaii Press, 2015).

**Aedín Ní Loingsigh** is Lecturer in French at the University of Stirling. She has written widely on travel writingin the context of francophone West Africa, including _Postcolonial Eyes: Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African Literature_ (Liverpool University Press, 2009).

**Manfred Pfister** held the chair of English at the Freie Universität Berlin until 2008. Next to theory, theatre and poetry, one of his main areas of research is travel writing. His book publications in this field are _'The Fatal Gift of Beauty': The Italies of British Travellers_ (1996); _Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds_ (Brill/Rodopi, 1999); and an edition of Bruce Chatwin's _In Patagonia_ (Reclam, 2003). He is also a translator of poetry, including Pound's _Cantos_ (Arche, 2012).

**Susan L. Roberson** is Professor of English and Assistant Dean at Texas A&M University–Kingsville, USA. She is the author of _Antebellum American Women and the Road: American Mobilities_ (Routledge, 2011) and _Emerson in His Sermons: A Man-Made Self_ (University of Missouri Press, 1995). She is the editor of _Women, America, and Movement: Narratives of Relocation_ (University of Missouri Press, 1998); _Defining Travel: Diverse Visions_ (2002); and _Essays Exploring the Global Caribbean_ (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013).

**Paul Smethurst** is Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong, where he teaches place-writing and contemporary fiction. His publications include _The Bicycle: Towards a Global History_ (Palgrave, 2015); _New Directions in Travel Writing Studies_ , co-edited with Julia Kuehn (Palgrave, 2015); _Travel Writing and the Natural World_ (Palgrave, 2012); _Travel Writing, Form and Empire: The Politics of Mobility_ , co-edited with Julia Kuehn (Routledge, 2009); and _Asian Crossings_ , co-edited with Steve Clark (Hong Kong University Press, 2008).

**Carl Thompson** is Reader in English Literature and Travel Culture at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of _The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination_ (Oxford University Press, 2007); and _Travel Writing_ (Routledge, 2011); and the editor of _Romantic-Era Shipwreck Narratives: An Anthology_ (Trent Editions, 2007); _Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day_ (Routledge, 2013); and _Sarah Atkins Wilson: The Fruits of Enterprise_ (Pickering and Chatto, 2014).

**C.W. Thompson** is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Warwick. He is the author of _French Romantic Travel Writing, Chateaubriand to Nerval_ (Oxford University Press, 2012); _Walking and the French Romantics_ (Peter Lang, 2003); and ' _Lamiel' fille du feu: essai sur Stendhal et l'énergie_ (L'Harmattan, 1997). He has also edited _L'Autre et le sacré: surréalisme, cinéma, ethnologie_ (L'Harmattan, 1995).

**Margaret Topping** is Professor of French Literary and Visual Cultures, and Dean of the Graduate School, at Queen's University, Belfast. Her research takes an interdisciplinary approach to debates on travel, tourismand migration, andto the ethics and aesthetics of cross-cultural representation. Her publications include _Proust's Gods: Christian and Mythological Figures of Speech in the Works of Marcel Proust_ (Oxford University Press, 2000); the edited collection _Eastern Voyages, Western Visions: French Writing and Painting of the Orient_ (Peter Lang, 2004); and articles on the French travel writer Nicholas Bouvier.

**Richard White** was formerly Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. His publications include _Inventing Australia: Images and Identity_ (Allen and Unwin, 1981); _The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing_ (Oxford University Press, 1996); _On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia_ (Pluto Press, 2005); _Symbols of Australia_ (NewSouth Publishing, 2010); and _Playing in the Bush: Recreation and National Parks in New South Wales_ (Sydney University Press, 2012).

**Gregory Woods** is Emeritus Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University, UK. He is the author of _Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry_ (1987) and _A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition_ (1998), both from Yale University Press. His poetry is published by Carcanet Press.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the shaping and editing of this volume, I have drawn upon the expertise and support of more people than I can possibly acknowledge here. Special thanks are due, however, to Polly Dodson, Liz Levine, and Ruth Hilsdon at Routledge, first, for commissioning the _Companion_ and then for their patient assistance at every stage of the project. Thanks are also due to Colin Morgan of Swales & Willis and Denise Bannerman for their help in the production stages of the volume. Rebecca Smith has been similarly very generous in her support and advice. Finally, I would like to thank the many NTU students who have taken the 'Travel Writing: Texts, Contexts, Theory' module I co-convene with my colleague Tim Youngs; their questions, and their enthusiasm, each year provide stimulating new perspectives on the travel writing genre.
INTRODUCTION

_Carl Thompson_

Travel writing studies is a burgeoning field of academic enquiry. With many societies around the world confronting complex issues of globalization, cultural hybridization and the large-scale flow of populations both within and across national borders, scholars have been increasingly impelled to historicize and theorize these and related phenomena. The rise of a 'postcolonial' agenda and methodology across many disciplines has similarly directed scholarly attention to how knowledge of other regions and societies is acquired and circulated, and the different forms of interaction and exchange that can exist between cultures. These are concerns for which travel writing past and present is a vital resource and focus. As a consequence, a genre once viewed dismissively in the academy has in recent decades received sustained scrutiny and investigation. Indeed, it is probably now impossible to study any branch of the humanities or social sciences without at some stage being required to utilize and reflect upon travel writing in one or other of its many guises –a lthough this is of course also partly a result of the prolific and highly protean nature of the genre, which encompasses forms as diverse as the field journal, investigative report, guidebook, personal memoir, comic sketch and lyrical reverie.

Travel writing studies first began to emerge as a distinct field in the 1980s, largely in the wake of Edward Said's _Orientalism_ (1978), a foundational work in postcolonial studies. The early 1990s then saw a wave of seminal works, by Sara Mills (1991), Dennis Porter (1991) Mary Louise Pratt (1992), James Buzard (1993) and Tim Youngs (1994) among others; these consolidated the field, putting travel writing firmly on the academic map, so to speak, and leading by the end of the decade to the first scholarly journals wholly dedicated to the form, _Studies in Travel Writing_ (launched in 1997) and _Journeys_ (launched in 2000). Useful student introductions to the genre were produced in the early 2000s by Barbara Korte and Casey Blanton, whilst 2002 also saw the publication of Hulme and Youngs' highly influential _Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing_ , an important, multi-contributor collection of essays which has been for more than a decade the standard entry-point to the field for both new researchers and students.

Since 2002, however, travel writing studies have proliferated, diversified and grown more historically nuanced and theoretically sophisticated. Many of the critical frameworks underpinning research in the 1980s and 1990s have been interrogated and refined. For example, the feminist recovery of women's travel writing – another major stimulus to the initial emergence of the field – has continued apace, and our growing knowledge of the sheer volume and variety of travelogues by women has done much to problematize early assumptions about their supposedly limited presence in the genre. Similarly, while many recent studies continue to view travel writing through a postcolonialist lens, that lens has been widened and refocused, thereby offering a richer and more complicated picture of the genre's historical role and ongoing influence. Said and Pratt still frame much of the debate, with the latter especially providing a critical vocabulary – of 'contact zones', 'anti-conquest', the 'monarch-of-all-I-survey scene' and so forth – utilized by most researchers in the field. Yet in keeping with developments in postcolonial studies more generally, their work now usually provides not so much a critical orthodoxy as a jumping-off point for further analysis, often requiring recalibration if not outright revision in light of the specific local circumstances of individual travellers and their texts. Recent scholarship and theory has of course remained highly mindful of, and extensively focused on, the intersections that may exist between travel writing, knowledge and power, especially in the era of Western imperial dominance from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Yet it has also increasingly recognized the diverse roles performed by the genre and its multivalent aims, effects and consequences, acknowledging that 'if identities and meanings are sometimes imposed on others in and through travel writing, they are as often unsettled, questioned and mediated' by the form, in complex and not always oppressive ways (Youngs 2013: 12).

This refinement of the early terms of postcolonialist analysis has been partly the consequence of a significant broadening of travel writing studies, to encompass a much wider range of periods and cultural/linguistic traditions. As many leading figures in the field acknowledged at the time, the seminal studies of the 1980s and 1990s were overwhelmingly and somewhat limitingly Anglophone, in the dual sense that they were both mostly written in English and chiefly focused on English-language texts from the imperial and post-imperial eras. Since 2000, however, travel writing studies as a field has itself 'travelled', to be taken up by numerous researchers beyond the Anglo-American academy and embracing as a consequence a greater variety of both primary and secondary material. Much more has now been written about the travel writing produced in other European languages such as French, Italian and German; more strikingly still, scholars have begun to recognize and assess the often extensive and venerable traditions of travel writing that exist in many non-Western cultures, thereby countering the impression often inadvertently given in earlier studies of the form, that mobility and cross-cultural curiosity and commentary were somehow uniquely Western phenomena. Much of this research is still at the early 'recovery' stage, in which key texts and lines of influence are identified and mapped, yet scholars such as Nabil Matar (2003 and 2008), Roxanne Euben (2008), Emma Jinhua Teng (2006), Laura Nenzi (2008), Simonti Sen (2005) and Aedín Ní Loingsigh (2009) have recently offered highly insightful accounts of, variously, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and African travel writing. As well as travelling geographically in this way, across cultural and national borders, travel writing studies has in a sense travelled temporally, as numerous scholars have extended our understanding of the genre's forms and functions in earlier periods. This is a widening of perspective which again requires some adjustment of stock postcolonialist paradigms as we move back in time to consider the pre-imperial writings of medieval and early modern Europe, or the diverse works produced under the empires of the ancient world. Finally, many wholly new concerns and topics have emerged in the last decade, as researchers ponder the impact and likely influence of new media and new forms, such as the online travel blog, or else seek to explicate and historicize new patterns of travel and tourism, such as the growing taste for so-called 'dark tourism'.

Cognisant of this wealth of recent scholarship in the field, _The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing_ offers a new prospectus to the genre. It highlights some of the most important new areas of research and debate which have so far emerged in the twenty-first century, whilst simultaneously revisiting long-established topics so as to reflect the latest thinking on these themes. No single volume of this type, of course, can ever be completely comprehensive, accommodating every facet of either travel writing as a genre or travel writing studies as a field. Yet in bringing together a diverse array of current perspectives and approaches, _The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing_ hopefully provides an updated overview or map of both genre and field, thereby enabling researchers and students to orientate themselves in this flourishing and productive area of academic enquiry, whilst also directing them towards the primary and secondary materials most relevant to their own interests.

The _Companion_ 's structure accordingly reflects the various ways in which new researchers and students are likely to approach the travel writing genre. The volume is organized into four parts: I Key Debates and Critical Approaches; II Historical Overviews; III Styles, Modes, Themes; and IV Imagined Geographies. Part I addresses some of the major debates perennially attendant on travel writing, and, linked to these, the main critical approaches which have in recent decades underpinned scholarship on the genre; simultaneously (and especially in the chapters by Mahn, Forsdick, Topping and Jarvis) it foregrounds what seem to be emergent concerns and critical methodologies, in the hope of promoting further research in these areas. Part I therefore offers readers a theoretically focused overview of key debates and developments across the field of travel writing studies as a whole.

Part II then provides a series of historical surveys tracing the evolution of travel writing as a genre over time and across cultures. The main narrative here is of what one can loosely term 'Western' travel writing: i.e., the writings produced by travellers hailing from Western Europe and in due course North America, once the latter region had been colonized by European emigrants. Yet this narrative is deliberately interspersed by accounts of travel writing traditions in several other cultures, thereby showcasing the important work that has been done in this area in recent years. The aim here is partly to counter any assumption that only the West has produced noteworthy travellers and travelogues, whilst simultaneously complicating any critical model that views all travel writing as – inherently and inevitably – a medium of empire and colonization. At the same time, however, it is hoped that this interweaving of multiple generic histories can point the way to a project that is perhaps not yet quite possible, but which is at least beginning to come into view: namely, a global history of travel writing, which can generate a properly comparative account of the intersections, correspondences and contrasts that exist between different cultural traditions.

With regard to Western travel writing, the chapters in Part II also cater to readers exploring the travel writing of a specific period and seeking a synchronic assessment of travel and travel accounts at that date. Other readers, however, will be more interested in specific destinations, and so want a diachronic overview of the travelogues associated with and descriptive of a given region or locale. Part IV speaks to this requirement. Its title, 'Imagined Geographies', reflects the fact that all places are to some extent imaginative constructs, which exist for us through a complex interaction of personal experience (if we have actually visited the destination in question) and a tangled web of culturally-mediated prior associations, expectations and images. Tracking travel writing's role in producing these imaginative geographies, or alternatively using the form to reveal the mental maps and cultural baggage that travellers have carried with them as they travelled, has been since Said's _Orientalism_ a major concern in travel writing studies. In surveying the history principally of Western travel writing about specific regions around the world, then, the chapters in Part IV simultaneously aim to trace both continuities and also key shifts and ideological adjustments in the Western depiction of those regions; where appropriate, moreover, reference is made to the alternative imaginings of place and identity proffered in local traditions of travel writing, again so as to counter any sense of travel and travel writing being solely a Western preserve. The last three chapters of Part IV then extend this focus to three distinctive environments or topographies which have each given rise to significant sub-genres of travel writing – deserts, mountains and the sea – while to underscore the point that destinations are as much _produced_ as _recorded_ by the accounts of travellers, the section begins with a reflection on a location which is wholly fictitious, yet which has nevertheless generated a rich tradition of travelogues. And in exploring the ongoing influence and legacy of the mythical Ultima Thule, Graham Huggan offers an important meditation not only on the idea of 'the North' in European culture but also on the very concept of 'imagined geographies'.

Part II, then, enables a synchronic overview of specific periods, while Part IV offers a diachronic account of how various 'imagined geographies' have evolved over time and travel writing's role in either maintaining or adjusting those geographies. Positioned between these sections of the book, Part III chiefly addresses a variety of topics, motifs and sub-genres which cut across conventional period boundaries whilst also taking in multiple destinations and locales. At the same time, these chapters also aim to counterpoint the surveys provided in Parts II and IV by exploring their themes through a series of close readings, working from two or three representative travel texts to offer broader reflections on an important strand or cross-section of the genre. For this reason, Part III also includes chapters addressing three key phases in the evolution of an overtly literary mode of travel writing, thereby enabling a more detailed analysis of the tropes and rhetorical strategies characteristic of Romantic, Modernist and post-Modernist travelogues.

Once again, it must be stressed that none of these sections claims to be exhaustive and all-encompassing. There are other well-established traditions of travel writing that might feature in Part II: Japanese travel writing, for example, or the many texts produced over the centuries by Jewish travellers (although readers will find some discussion of Japanese texts in Laura Nenzi's chapter in Part III; for Jewish travel writers and travel writing, see Garrett 2003; Hezser 2011; Jacobs 2014). Equally, the 'imagined geographies' through which we apprehend and organize the world are endlessly fractal and multiple: the broad continental or subcontinental groupings adopted here might of course be subdivided further, to address individual nations or even regions and localities within nations, while there are many more terrains and topographies that have arguably generated their own distinctive sub-genres of travel writing (the jungle, for example, or the city). And in a single volume it is of course not possible even to acknowledge, let alone discuss in detail, every recent development in travel writing studies, or every manifestation of the travel writing genre and the many different questions that have historically been asked of the form. Yet the _Routledge Companion to Travel Writing_ offers a representative cross-section of the latest scholarship in the field, drawn from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives; where there are gaps in its coverage, it is hoped, first, that these will be a spur to further research and scholarship, and second, that existing chapters provide models and resources that can assist in these ongoing enquiries.

**Select bibliography**

Blanton, C. (2000) _Travel Writing: The Self and the World_ , London: Routledge.

Buzard, J. (1993) _The Beaten Track: European Tourism Literature, and the Ways to 'Culture', 1800–1918_ , Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Euben, R. (2008) _Journeys to the Other Side: Muslim and Western Travellers in Search of Knowledge_ , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Garret, L. (2003) _Journeys Beyond the Pale: Yiddish travel Writing in the Modern World_ , Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Hezser, C. (2011) _Jewish Travel in Antiquity_ , Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Hulme, P. and Youngs, T. (2002) _The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jacobs, M. (2014) _Reorienting the East: Jewish_ _T_ _ravellers to the Medieval Muslim World_ , Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Korte, B. (2000) _English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Matar, N. (ed.) (2003) _In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century_ , London: Routledge.

Matar, N. (2008) _Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727_ , New York: Columbia University Press.

Mills, S. (19911) _Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism_ , London: Routledge.

Porter, D. (1991) _Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing_ , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Pratt, M.L. (1992) _Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation_ , London: Routledge.

Nenzi, L. (2008) _Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan_ , Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Ní Loingsigh, A. (2009) _Postcolonial Eyes: Intercontinental_ _T_ _ravel in Francophone African Literature_ , Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Sen, S. (2005) _Travels to Europe: Self and Other in Bengali Travel Narratives, 1870–1910_ , New Dehli: Orient Longman.

Teng, E.J. (2006) _Taiwan's Imagined Geographies: Chinese Colonial_ _T_ _ravel Writing and Pictures_ , Cambridge, MA: Harvard university Press.

Youngs, T. (1994) _Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900_ , Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Youngs, T. (2013) _The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Part I

KEY DEBATES AND CRITICAL APPROACHES

Truth, Lies and Travel Writing

_Daniel Carey_

The capacity of travel writers to distort the truth – amplifying their observations, claiming credit for what they never witnessed or inventing fabulous narratives wholesale from the imagination rather than experience – has always been recognized. The richness of possibility in this domain did not escape the notice of Thomas More, William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift. At the dawn of early modern travel and exploration, More's _Utopia_ (1516) features an imagined traveller, Raphael Hythlodaeus, who ostensibly makes his way on the fourth voyage of Amerigo Vespucci to the New World before setting off on his own and encountering an island whose actual existence he insists upon, despite the name Utopia indicating itself (to readers with sufficient Greek) as _ou topos_ , no place. In the next century, Shakespeare's Othello dazzles Desdemona with tales of 'antres vast', cannibals and men with heads between their shoulders – a predilection condemned by Iago as nothing more than 'bragging and telling her fantastical lies' (II.i.226). By the time we reach Gulliver in 1726, the potential for abusing one's readership with untruths has become so familiar that Swift reinvented it on a grand scale, providing his hero with an engraved portrait in the second edition supported by the motto 'splendide mendax' (splendid or glittering liar; for a reproduction see Barchas (1998: 268)).

These famous examples speak to a long tradition of suspicion about the veracity of travel writing, registered in a widely echoed proverb that 'travellers lie by authority'. In other words, the lack of witnesses competent to dispute their claims meant that they enjoyed a licence to invent what they liked and to impose it on a credulous audience. Among the many commentators on the art of travel – as the practice developed its modern, secular form in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – it was common to condemn the tendency to engage in fabrication and to urge those who ventured abroad to adopt a more circumspect approach. As Francis Bacon put it in his essay 'Of Travel' (1626), the returned traveller should remain 'rather advised in his answers, than forward to tell stories' (Bacon 1999: 42). However, the problem has never really gone away and remains endemic in modes of storytelling based on a supposedly factual foundation. Any narrative form of this kind invites doubt and scrutiny, even as we find ourselves drawn, in the case of travel, to the extraordinary and remarkable in reports from exotic climes.

How then have travel writers, committed to telling the truth, sought to demonstrate their trustworthiness and so protect themselves from the accusation of lying? Focusing especially on the period between 1500 and 1800, when travel writing in its modern Western form took shape, this chapter explores the procedures and rhetorical gestures travel writers have used to reassure readers and authenticate their accounts. At the same time, it considers how recipients of travel narrative – among them, some of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment – have negotiated the problem and determined for themselves what to rely on and what to reject.

**Telling the truth**

Given the built-in problem of verifying the claims of travellers, their routine insistence on truthfulness has often constituted little more than a bare assertion. Title pages provided an opportunity for some authors to advance the claim and convince their audience of the reliability of the information they purveyed. Thomas Harriot, the distinguished mathematician and agent of Sir Walter Ralegh in his scheme for settlement in North America, presented his famous account as _A Briefe and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia_ (1588). Some thirty years earlier, the German soldier Hans Staden published a widely circulated narrative of his captivity in Brazil, enlivened as the title page noted by its description of _Wilden Nacketen, Grimmigen Menschfresser-Leuthen_ (wild, naked, grim men-eating people). These sensational scenes were nonetheless part of what he designated a _Warhaftige Historia_ (1557), a true history.

Within the text itself, a number of strategies existed for handling the problem of engaging belief, but the prefatory materials remained the most obvious venue for addressing the issue in a forthright fashion. The implicit pressure to do so appears early on. Marco Polo's travels, related while in prison to Rustichello da Pisa in 1298–99, survive in numerous manuscript versions and textual traditions. At the outset, the reader is told that the book will contain the 'greatest marvels' and 'diversities' of the countries Polo traversed, which he relates because he 'saw them with his own eyes'. Yet it is quickly acknowledged that other information reported by Marco Polo derives from what he heard, cited from worthy sources, with the promise that the distinction between his own witness and that of others will always be made clear. The volume also comes with the assurance that it remains 'right and truthful with no falsehood' so the 'things said may not be counted fables' (Polo 1938: I, 73).

In this early instance, we see several key concerns put in play. The first is the repetitive emphasis in travel accounts on eyewitnessing as a criterion of truth. Of course this is an insufficient guarantor for a number of reasons, not least because it presupposes that the reality observed by travellers is somehow pellucid. In the case of reportage on the existence of exotic creatures, self-authenticating statements might carry some weight, even where they posed the challenge of conveying the unfamiliar. But it is not so clear that describing the meaning and history of complex customs (for example, sati: see Carey 2014) becomes any easier simply by being present at their performance. In any case, the invitation to believe the traveller is typically circular – the text invites its own verification rather than supplying an external means for doing so. The second key concern is that despite the common insistence on personal witness, few travellers ever confine themselves to this narrow compass. Often the source of what they report is acknowledged along with reassurance of the reliability of the individual(s) who informed them, which has its own element of circularity. Elsewhere, authors often provide information beyond their experience without stating it; indeed they sometimes give it the appearance of arising from their lived encounters. Finally we have the worry over the fabulous. These forms – 'authentic' accounts of travel and their fictional counterparts – were always in the process of converging in the early modern period, as in the case of _Robinson Crusoe_ (1719).

In light of these dilemmas, what resources could be deployed to engage the confidence of readers? One way to preempt accusations of falsehood and fabrication was to take note of the proverb that questioned the truthfulness of travellers and to make this issue a matter of open discussion. William Parry, who published an account in 1601 of his journey to Persia as part of the retinue of Sir Anthony Sherley, quoted it in his opening sentence. As he framed the issue, the problem was whether such distrust arose from actual lies or rather from the unwillingness of some to believe anything that exceeded their own experience. He offered an elaborate reply (based, I suggest, on Plato's allegory of the cave): the person raised in the confines of a cave would have no conception of the 'glorie and great magnificence of the visible, celestiall, and terrestriall globes'. Given this predicament, the 'home-bred' man was bound to experience wonderment when exposed to the 'eminent and opulent places of the world' (Parry 1601: A3r). In recognition of the problem, he vowed to report only what his eyes had seen.

For legitimate travellers keen to shore up their credibility, another tactic involved pointing to authorities outside the text that were capable of authenticating its contents. The Jesuit Christoval de Acuña, who ventured into the Amazon in a royally sponsored mission in 1639, acknowledged in his Preface that 'Novelty and Unbelief' were, as he put it, 'twins of one birth': the delight in knowing things of new vintage was undermined by perplexity and doubt. To address this concern, he included a certificate signed by the leader of the expedition, Pedro Texeira, who testified to Acuña's participation in the journey and his diligence in making observations 'to which entire credit should be given' (de Acuña 1859: 43, 44). In a similar vein, Robert Knox's _Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon_ (1681) – a report of his captivity of nearly twenty years on the island – came with a number of endorsements, including a preface by the prominent Royal Society scientist Robert Hooke, an opening testimonial from Christopher Wren, who stated that it 'seems to be Written with great Truth and Integrity' and another from Knox's effective employer, the East India Company, which declared his report 'worthy of Credit' (Knox 1681: n.p.; see also Shapiro 2000). We can make a distinction here between the certification of Acuña made by Texeira – another participant in the expedition, and so a fellow eyewitness to the events described – and the various endorsements of Knox, which essentially constitute a series of character references. For travellers of lower social status especially, such testimonials from people of note were an important means of establishing their general trustworthiness. Yet they also offered an important strategy even for travellers of higher social status. Knox's contemporary, Richard Ligon, had the standing of a gentleman, which he called attention to on the title page of his _True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados_ (1657), although he wrote the work in a debtor's prison. He nonetheless included not only a dedication (to Brian Duppa, then Bishop of Salisbury), a conventional method for seeking patronage, but also a letter from Duppa himself in which the bishop remarked that he had read a number of previous relations of the New World and found Ligon's excelled them (in an echo of the title) as more 'exact'. He praised Ligon's descriptions as 'so drawn to the life, that I know no Painting beyond it' (ibid.: b1r). Duppa's status as a churchman lent him credence which he could transfer to Ligon, but the dilemma remains that of determining how precisely he could certify the accuracy of the account, however 'true' and 'exact' it claimed to be.

Again, these claims form an important part of the paratextual apparatus, framing the text with reassurances and inviting acceptance of the ensuing content. Within the text itself, further means of consolidating the author's position existed. Learned references performed something of the same function as prefatory allusions to external advocates, providing corroboration of what the traveller purported to witness while establishing intellectual authority and erudition. George Sandys represents a paragon of this tradition. Later to distinguish himself as a translator of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ , his early fame rested on the account of his travels to Egypt and the Holy Land published in 1615, and marked by its elegant and easy range of classical reference. His example encouraged others to follow suit, like Sir Thomas Herbert who embedded his travels from England to Persia in an even denser web of ancient precedent. This humanist-inspired tendency eventually subsided as the observational and scientific focus of travel came to the fore in the eighteenth century – notably in the New World, where such citations lacked relevance. Printing the first account of Niagara Falls, from the Swedish-Finnish naturalist and disciple of Linnaeus Per Kalm, the editor of the volume in which it appeared noted that Kalm's description agreed with the account given by the French Jesuit Charlevoix – an 'Author of good credit' although Charlevoix was 'much less circumstantial' – as well as a report in the _Philosophical Transactions_ (Bartram 1751: vi). Kalm himself did not offer allusions of this kind, but he did dispute the exaggerated measurement of Niagara Falls given by the Franciscan Louis Hennepin, who the Canadians regarded as ' _un grand Menteur_ ', a great liar (ibid.: 84).

The impression of conveying truth relied in part, as this example suggests, on the power of describing 'circumstance', or what we might call situatedness, in a vivid fashion. One of Richard Ligon's great strengths was his virtuosic talent for description. The watermelon, for instance, posed a challenge to get across to English readers but Ligon rose to the occasion, describing it as being as 'big as a Cloakbag, with a suit of clothes in it'. The rind had the appearance of 'polisht glass' in pure green, 'engrayl'd' as he put it with straw-coloured patterns of an infinite variety. The fruit itself was 'waterish and wallowish' in flavour, and was consumed in thick slices, 'cut round about a twelve-penny loafe, an inch thick', replete with purple seeds that dyed the surrounding fruit but slipped out with ease (Ligon 1657: 80). As this example also demonstrates, the unfamiliar – which might lead to readerly scepticism and disbelief – was often negotiated via the use of simile and metaphor, so that the strange was described through reference to the familiar in an enactment of what Anthony Pagden calls the 'principle of attachment' (1993: 17; see also Thompson 2011: chapter 4).

Part of what Ligon achieves, independently of that consideration, is a sense of being there, the actuality of lived experience. This trait he holds in common with a later naturalist, Charles Darwin, whose account of the _Beagle_ voyage appeared two centuries later. Darwin had the benefit of formal training and knowledge of elaborated systems of taxonomy to raise the estimation of his account, but what strikes the reader immediately is his dexterous ability to capture the vibrant quality of nature. In a description of the octopus, he notes the difficulty of catching them:

By means of their long arms and suckers, they could drag their bodies into very narrow crevices; and when thus fixed, it required great force to remove them. At other times they darted tail first, with the rapidity of an arrow, from one side of the pool to the other, at the same instant discolouring the water with a dark chestnut-brown ink.

(Darwin 1913: 7)

He then gives a more minute description of the changing colour of the creature, which altered according to its surroundings. 'These changes', he remarked, 'were effected in such a manner that clouds, varying in tint between a hyacinth red and a chestnut-brown, were continually passing over the body'. He concluded with a scientific analysis that these 'clouds, or blushes as they may be called' resulted from the 'alternate expansion and contraction of minute vesicles containing variously coloured fluids' (ibid.).

In the absence of technical knowledge of this kind, Ligon sought to back up his descriptions with a number of engravings. While forming part of the text, they gave an even stronger impression of ostensive reference, although we know that illustrations (and their transmission and reproduction) provide no guarantee of accuracy in themselves. He also provided a map of Barbados, lending further illustrative conviction to his presence on the island.

Growing recognition of the potential of travel to provide a source of information, valuable enough to merit attention despite doubts about the honesty of travellers, emerges among a range of commentators in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Writers who contributed essays, orations and treatises on the art of travel ( _ars apodemica_ ) focused especially on the utility of political, social and moral description; another tradition, which included Samuel Hartlib, Robert Boyle, and members of the Royal Society, emphasized the benefits of travel for advancing natural history. The Royal Society produced sets of inquiries for various territories around the world in order to direct the attention of travellers to specific issues in need of investigation, while Boyle offered 'General Heads' in 1666 for what to observe when compiling a natural history of any country. A further advantage of producing lists of inquiries, according to the Royal Society's first secretary, Henry Oldenburg, who distributed them via the _Philosophical Transactions_ , was that they facilitated cross-checking. Before truth could be ascertained, 'confirmations' of what travellers reported were required. In the eighteenth century the German biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis adopted this strategy when he prepared instructions for the five members of an Arabian expedition which set off for Yemen in 1761, inviting them to respond to the same set of questions so as to compare information (see Carey 2013).

The 'plain style' famously endorsed by the Royal Society's historian Thomas Sprat in 1667 (although ignored by many) suited those humble travellers who lacked formal education and whose bare records, in journal format, suggested fidelity. This rhetorical approach ostensibly promised an uncompromised relationship between personal witness and textual record. In this way the published travel account was increasingly expected to offer fairly unmediated, unadulterated access to original, on-the-spot observations; this was arguably the generic norm, or at least a strong readerly preference, by the eighteenth century. Such apparent first-hand immediacy was always something of illusion – most travellers wrote up their journals for publication, often with the assistance of editors – yet reviewers were liable to condemn and distrust publications in which retrospective rewriting or stylistic flourishes were too conspicuous. This was famously the fate of the 1773 account of Captain Cook's first voyage of 1768–71, in which the original journals of several actual participants in the voyage were synthesized, and their idiom 'improved', by the editor John Hawkesworth (see Buschmann 2014: 99–101).

The difficulty remained, of course, that rhetorical techniques employed by travellers to convey their truthfulness could be readily exploited by authors of fictional narratives. Daniel Defoe presented _Robinson Crusoe_ (1719) as an authentic first-person account, set before the public by an editor who described it as a 'just history of fact' with no 'appearance of fiction in it'. Defoe partly based the story on the experience of a real-life Scottish sailor, Alexander Selkirk, who spent four-and-a-half years on a deserted South Sea island. The sea-captain Edward Cooke had made Selkirk's story widely known; responding to the interest the story had generated, Cooke commented with unanticipated irony in his second edition that:

It would be no difficult matter to embellish a narrative with many Romantick Incidents, to please the unthinking Part of Mankind, who swallow every thing an Art Writer thinks fit to impose upon their Credulity, without any Regard to Truth or Probability. The judicious are not taken with such Trifles; their end is Information; and they easily distinguish between Reality and Fiction.

(Cooke 1712: I, xix)

Henry Neville's travel hoax, _The Isle of Pines_ (1668), had already called this confidence into question. He told the purportedly veracious story of the peopling of an uninhabited island near Madagascar by an Englishman and his four female companions, shipwrecked in the time of Queen Elizabeth. Discovered a century later by Dutch mariners blown off course, the population had reached ten or twelve thousand descendants. Neville expanded the account with the introduction of an authenticating frame narrative in which a spurious Dutch sailor proclaimed himself 'hateful to divulge Falsities', while preserving his credibility by noting the proverb that travellers lied by authority (ibid.: 30).

What makes Swift's satire so compelling in _Gulliver's Travels_ is his incorporation of many of these textual moves as part of its critique of the genre of travel writing which he characteristically hollows out from the inside. Gulliver uses maps to locate the places he has visited and authenticates himself by making reference to individuals outside the text. He collects specimens of naturalia which can ostensibly be witnessed by visiting the miniature sheep he brought back from Lilliput, now nibbling on Bowling Green in Greenwich, or by attending the cabinet of curiosities at Gresham College (home of the Royal Society) to view the enormous stinger of a wasp encountered in Brobdingnag. He offers careful description in the mode of a naturalist when he encounters the peculiar species of the Yahoo. But Swift's master stroke is to place the protestations of veracity that normally appear paratextually at the start of a travel account in the concluding chapter, that is, at the very stage when the reader has been forced to recognize that Gulliver's travels are fraudulent.

**Reading travel**

Whatever rhetorical techniques travel writers deploy to confirm their integrity, the decision of whether to invest belief in these accounts rests with their readers. The question I will now turn to is how this issue was negotiated by a range of different authors. The first constituency we should reflect on consists of editors who assembled travel narratives and thereby spoke, implicitly or explicitly, for the value of what they anthologized even as they remained in the position of readers. Richard Hakluyt, the great English Renaissance editor of travel, presented the works that he anthologized in his massive _Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation_ (second edn 1598–1600) without extended commentary, largely depriving us of an insight into his evaluation of the truthfulness of the material. The risk of reproducing material that contained errors was of course considerable, whether the mistakes resulted from efforts to deceive or simply from inaccuracies introduced in good faith. Hakluyt drew very little attention to the problem, but he did not ignore it altogether. In his Preface to the reader in Volume 1, Hakluyt made his most direct comment on this difficulty, in connection with his printing of narratives by the medieval friars John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck. If anyone regarded their reports as unbelievable, he answered that 'many true things may to the ignorant seeme incredible'. But even if one supposed that the two of them vouched for things that defied belief, Hakluyt defended them as worthy of pardon, as much as ancient writers like Herodotus, Strabo, Plutarch, Pliny, and Solinus, or their modern counterparts, cosmographers including Münster, Gemma Frisius, Saxo Grammaticus and Olaus Magnus, who reported 'more strange things then the Friers between them both'. He concluded that, with the exception of Holy Writ, no history existed in the world 'whereof we are precisely bound to beleeve ech word and syllable' (Taylor 1935: II, 445–6). Thus he devolved responsibility onto the reader, rather than insisting on the infallibility of what he recorded. Hakluyt's declared editorial intention, 'giving unto every man his right, and leaving every one to mainteine his owne credit' (ibid.: II, 470), takes on different implications in this context. As much as this reassures the reader of his intention to print his sources with accuracy, it also means that the documents themselves make truth claims, not Hakluyt.1 The alternative mode available to him, a cosmographic synthesis provided in his own words, would have made him the authority responsible for any assertions (and mistakes).

Hakluyt's inheritor, Samuel Purchas, was more loquacious and interventionist, both as a compiler of travel and a cosmographer. When he commented on the travels of Anthony Knivet, who was held by the Portuguese in Brazil in the 1590s and travelled extensively inland among the Tupi Indians, Purchas noted that the journey contained 'many things strange, some seeming doubtfull'. If anyone were inclined to reject the account, he advised: 'let them not blame mee, who had rather believe more then this, then to adventure the search amongst those cruell Barbarians' (Purchas 1617: 1033). The French travel editor Melchisédec Thevenot aspired to follow in the tradition of Hakluyt and Purchas in his _Relations de divers voyages curieux_ ( _Accounts of Several Curious Voyages_ , 1663–72). In connection with an improbable story about consuming flying fish reported in the account of the Dutch East India Company Captain Willem Bontekoe, Thevenot nevertheless pronounced it 'tres-avérée' (well-attested) on the basis of an examination of men who had been on the voyage. Once again, the search for something outside the text to validate it lent additional credence.

The predicament of readers, who lacked a secure basis for accepting or rejecting travel narratives, led them to rely on external authorities like editors to evaluate existing printed sources. The most significant indication of the need for this kind of guidance appears in the extensive 'Introductory Discourse containing the Catalogue and Character of Most Books of Travels' prefacing Awnsham and John Churchill's four-volume _Collection of Voyages and Travels_ (1704). The anonymous critical bibliography aimed at comprehensiveness in surveying the field of travel writing (and by implication added authority to the texts selected for inclusion in the Churchill _Collection_ ). Among the many opinions offered in the work, the Portuguese Jesuit Nicolao Godinho was endorsed for refuting the 'fabulous history' of Ethiopia by the Spanish Dominican Luis de Urreta (Churchill and Churchill 1704: I, lxxvi). On the subject of Fernão Mendes Pinto, whose _Pereginação_ (1614) remains disputed in terms of its authenticity, the commentator regarded his travels as 'so fabulous that the general consent of the whole world has exploded them, tho' some few have taken the pains to defend those Chimeras' (ibid.: I, xci). Elsewhere, relying on the opinion of the _Bibliothèque universelle_ , the summary commended the travel book of Jean Thevenot (nephew of Melchisédec but confused here with the uncle) as 'one of the most curious and exact works of this nature hitherto published, and well deserving to be read by all' (ibid.: I, lxxxv). These examples suggest the rather limited criteria brought to bear on the discussion, and the tendency, as the latter example shows, to fall back on the opinion of others and therefore to ground the exercise in a problematic regression of testimonials. This led in one instance to the error of citing Gabriel de Foigny's fictional _La Terre Australe Connue_ ( _The Southern Land, Known_ , 1676) as 'exceeding all that has been writ of it by others' (ibid.: I, lxxxiii) on the basis of the sanction of the _Journal des Sçavans_.

Whatever suspicions continued to hover around travel writing, the form was difficult to ignore altogether, and in certain areas it remained intellectually indispensable. Historians and geographers, for instance, required critical information that could only be derived, in some cases, from the reports of travellers. The geopolitical threat posed by the Ottoman Empire made it essential to assemble and synthesize descriptions of the state. Richard Knolles produced a widely read and admired _Generall Historie of the Turkes_ (1603) which relied on numerous sources, including travel accounts. Among the latter, he drew attention, in his 'Induction to the Christian Reader', to two figures who had been present at the events they recorded: the prominent ambassador Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, who wrote a series of letters based on his experience at the court of Sulyeman the Magnificent, and Nicolas de Nicolay, who travelled to the same court with a French delegation and wrote an account in 1568 after his elevation to the role of royal geographer to Henry II. The fact that one was an ambassador and the other 'the lord of Arfeuile' enhanced their dignity and authority; their status made them worth accepting as sources of testimony, a point that Steven Shapin (1994) has emphasized as a crucial factor in the social evaluation of truth, although as we have seen, travel often widened the circle of accepted voices substantially. The key determinant for Knolles remained eyewitnessing, but he was also prepared to cite information these figures had acquired there second hand (Knolles 1603: A6r). Proximity and access still gave them a privileged position.

Knolles provided a list of his principal sources in the book, a practice also adopted by the great German-born geographer Bernhard Varenius in his _Descriptio regni Japoniae_ ( _Description of the Kingdom of Japan_ , 1649), who similarly had no personal experience of the country. As the title page indicated, he redacted the work from other sources and ordered the material. Among the works he consulted were the writings of Marco Polo; the letters of Francis Xavier and accounts by the Dutch East India Company mariner François Caron, who lived in Japan for over twenty years; the Dutch circumnavigator Olivier van Noort; the Dutch admiral Cornelis Matelief de Jonge; and the famous Dutch traveller Jan Huyghen van Linschoten. Significantly, Varenius also included on his list the Jesuit historian Giovanni Pietro Maffei, who had no first-hand experience of Japan, just as Knolles included the cosmographer Sebastian Münster on his own list as an authority on the Turks.

The leading historian in the Scottish Enlightenment, William Robertson, took what he regarded as a more discriminating approach. In writing his _History of America_ (1777) Robertson viewed with scepticism the pronouncements of 'vulgar travellers' (1777: I, 288) in which he included the likes of sailors, merchants, buccaneers and even missionaries. Instead he favoured the 'philosophical' traveller – someone equipped with knowledge and judgement to guide their observations – such as the French authority Charles Marie de La Condamine, who spent ten years in Ecuador, publishing accounts of his journeys and contributing to the _Encyclopédie_. Such paragons were few in number. Robertson wrote to Joseph Banks confiding his exasperation with the 'many foolish & lying books of travels' he had to wade through (quoted in Pugliese, forthcoming).

Among philosophers themselves, the dilemma of how far to trust travel accounts broke out into open dispute. One of the great advocates for these narratives as a repository of valid information was John Locke. Locke cited a total of sixteen travel sources in the _Essay concerning Human Understanding_ (first edition, 1690) and a range of others in his _Two Treatises of Government_ (1689). The use he made of them in the _Essay_ proved especially controversial, since Locke disputed the existence of innate ideas and principles on the basis of moral diversity observed by travellers and the common reports of entire peoples without apparent knowledge of the divine. Locke's redoubtable critic, Edward Stillingfleet (Bishop of Worcester), impugned the sources Locke relied on, provoking Locke into a rather defensive move to enlist more testimony. In support of his statement that the Hottentots in Southern Africa had no idea of God (a conclusion questioned by Stillingfleet), Locke responded that his source was an English ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, and furthermore that no less a man than Melchisédec Thevenot, 'no ill judge in the case', was at pains to translate it into French and publish it in his respected collection of travels (Locke 1997: III, 496).

In Locke's notebooks, journals and correspondence we get a better sense of what prompted him to accept the veracity of certain travel books. He was especially mindful of the opinions of Robert Boyle, the leading experimental scientist and natural historian of the period, who widely referenced travel accounts in his work. During his travels in France, Locke took advice from the bibliophile Henri Justel. Later, he corresponded at length with French friends and exchanged opinions on travel books with them. Among the most interesting was Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, a young abbé. Locke's letters to him do not survive, but Du Bos's are full of revealing comments in his remarks on works of travel for the English philosopher. Du Bos praised narratives that exhibited 'curiosity' – evidently for the way they engaged the intelligence with novel information. 'Exactness' was another value term for him, together with accounts that were 'circumstanciated' (Locke 1976–89: VI, 531–8; see also Carey 2006). As we have seen, all of these terms were in wide usage during the period in validating travel narratives. The interesting point is that Du Bos hesitates to take the further step of designating these accounts as 'true', for which he lacks the ultimate confirmation of personal experience.

Travel literature evidently had epistemic value and Locke included it among the range of materials worth recommending in his 'Some Thoughts concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman' (1703). One such gentleman, the third Earl of Shaftesbury – whom Locke was responsible for tutoring – remained decidedly unconvinced. After Locke's death, Shaftesbury took aim at him (without stating Locke's name) in _Characteristicks_ (1711), when he satirized the credulity of philosophers prepared to accept reports from a rag-bag of 'trusty travellers' who competed with one another to narrate 'unnatural and monstrous' things. To consolidate his argument that all of this amounted to no more than extravagant fabrication, he referred to Desdemona and her 'wondering appetite', fed by Othello with his tales to her of 'anthropophagi, and men whose heads/Do grow beneath their shoulders' (Shaftesbury 1999: 154–5).

Thus the argument over whether to believe in travel accounts or to dismiss them out of hand as little more than romance continued into the Enlightenment. There is some irony, intended or otherwise, at the end of the eighteenth century in Mungo Park's preface to his _Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa_ (1799). Qualifying the literary merits of the piece, he commented that it had 'nothing to recommend it, but _truth_ '. For him, it was an account without pretension other than to extend the knowledge of African geography. As he put it, the work was 'a plain, unvarnished tale' (Park 2000: 45) – thereby quoting Othello before he embarks on the description of how he wooed Desdemona with his fantastical travel stories.

In taking the story forward historically, what happens to the question of truth and falsehood in travel writing? The advent in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of a romantic mode of travel made the journey as much an inward event as an outward one; that is, the psychological impact of travel had a new significance that could interweave with and sometimes overtake the aspiration to provide authentic information. This pattern appears in the search for sublime landscapes to heighten the impact of travel and the cultivation of a novelistic richness of description. Under these circumstances the truth told in travel is a personal one and the voice has validity to the extent that it can conjure a convincing account of that experience. Henry David Thoreau excelled in this more personal style of writing. His account of _Cape Cod_ (1865) uses as its epigraph some lines from Linnaeus's _De peregrinatione_ ( _On Travel_ , a 1759 university disputation on the purpose of travel), but he is partly ironizing the objective to delineate nature accurately, since this is in practice interpreted as accuracy to his own impression.

Travel writing separates – to some extent – over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the informational strand of the tradition locating itself in emerging disciplines of anthropology, geography and forms of comparative government, religion and society. It becomes subject to professional protocols, stylistic constraints and expectations (not always fulfilled) of accuracy and truth-telling. The more personal engagement with travel resonated with readers looking not so much for reportage qualifying as history, but for an imaginative encounter. At the end of the nineteenth century Mary Kingsley combined these impulses in her _Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons_ (1897). She engaged in a certain amount of self-mocking when she described 'stalking the wild West African idea', as she put in her chapter on the fetish, as 'one of the most charming pursuits in the world' (Kingsley 1897: 430). She discounted the 'facts' she had assembled as 'valueless to the cabinet ethnologist.Some of these may be rank lies, some of them mere individual mind-freaks', and yet she continued the careful and sustained pursuit of the subject over the space of five chapters. Some of this speaks to the challenging position of a female writer entering a male space, but it also suggests the mixed audience for travel writing and the mixed expectations placed on the genre.

The resistance to fabrication in anthropology remains strong precisely because such writings ostensibly offer epistemic insight into human practice, documented with an abiding concern for accuracy. The controversy surrounding the alleged inventions or misinterpretations in Margaret Mead's _Coming of Age in Samoa_ (1928), with accusations lodged against Mead and against her main opponent, Derek Freeman, depend entirely on the commitment to getting it right and not abusing a readership vulnerable to deception (Freeman 1983 and 1996; Shankman 2009 and 2013). Carlos Castaneda's _The Teachings of Don Juan_ (1968) invited suspicion, not least because of the alternative reality explored by Castaneda under a Yaqui guide's peyote-led inspiration. But one might argue that the lack of 'circumstanciation' in the account is what makes it questionable. Subjecting the work to such a critique, however, seems beside the point if it is viewed as a vehicle for individual perception, which sustained the remarkable sales of the book more than its claims to constitute a factual record. As a profession, anthropologists have worked out a compromise in which the serious work of ethnographic description appears in a scholarly monograph, which may then be complemented – as in the famous example of Claude Lévi-Strauss's _Tristes Tropiques_ (1955) – by separately published personal accounts of the same experience.

In the domain of travel writing, readers have long since adapted their expectations to these conditions, with Bruce Chatwin setting the standard for a style of composition wherein traditional markers of veracity give way to storytelling in which truth is not the point. His accounts take an unapologetic interest in the exotic and could not be composed without the productive displacement brought about by travel. Yet in different ways, _In Patagonia_ (1977) and _The Songlines_ (1987) achieve their effect not by convincing us that what he observed is the truth or that we would experience it the same way if we ventured to the same locations, but rather that a richer conception of humanity and being in the world is available if we follow his lead and open ourselves to the unfamiliar.

**Note**

1 The second edition of _The Principal Navigations_ did not include two notable texts that featured in the first edition of 1589 – the travels of Sir John Mandeville, a supposed medieval English knight and pilgrim, and an account from David Ingram, who arrived in the Gulf of Mexico in 1568 and was set on land. Ingram insisted that he walked 2,000 miles along the coast before his rescue a year later by a French ship. Hakluyt gave no hint of the grounds for this editorial elision, but he presumably lost faith in the reliability of these accounts.

**Select bibliography**

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Barchas, J. (1998) 'Prefiguring Genre: Frontispiece Portraits from _Gulliver's Travels_ to _Millenium Hall_ ', _Studies in the Novel_ 30(2): 260–86.

Bartram, J. (1751) _Observations_ [ _._ . .] _Made by Mr. John Bartram, in his Travels from Pensilvania to Onondago, Oswego and the Lake Ontario_ [ _. . ._ ] _To which is annex'd, a curious Account of the Cataracts at Niagara. By Mr. Peter Kalm_ , London: J. Whiston and B. White.

Buschmann, R.F. (2014) _Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507–1899_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Carey, D. (2006) 'Travel, Geography, and the Problem of Belief: Locke as a Reader of Travel Literature', in J. Rudolph (ed.), _History and Nation_ , Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.

Carey, D. (2013) **'** Arts and Sciences of Travel, 1574–1762: The Arabian Journey and Michaelis's _Fragen_ in Context', in I. Friis, M. Harbsmeier, and J.B. Simonsen (eds), _EarlyScientific Expeditions and Local Encounters – New Perspectives on CarstenNiebuhr and 'The ArabianJourney'_ , Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

Carey, D. (2014) 'John Locke and Sati', _Journal of Early Modern History_ 18: 69–100.

Churchill, A. and Churchill, J. (eds) (1704) _A Collection of Voyages and Travels_ , 4 vols, London: Awnsham and John Churchill.

Cooke, E. (1712) _A Voyage to the South Sea and Round the World_ , 2 vols, 2nd edn, London: Printed by H.M. for B. Lintot and R. Gosling, A. Bettesworth, and W. Innys.

Darwin, C. (1913) _A Naturalist's Voyage round the World_ , 1860, London: John Murray.

de Acuña, C. (1859) _A New Discovery of the Great River of the Amazons_ (1641), in _Expeditions into the Valley of the Amazons, 1539, 1540, 1639_ , ed. and trans. C.R. Markham, London: The Hakluyt Society.

Freeman, D. (1983) _Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth_ , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Freeman, D. (1996) _Margaret Mead and the Heretic: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth_ , London: Penguin.

Kingsley, M.H. (1897) _Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons_ , London: Macmillan.

Knolles, R. (1603) _The Generall Historie of the Turkes_ , London: Printed by Adam Islip.

Knox, R. (1681) _An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon_ , London: Richard Chiswell.

Ligon, R. (1657) _A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados_, London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley.

Locke, J. (1997) _Mr. Locke's Reply to the Right Reverend The Lord Bishop of Worcester's Answer to His Second Letter_ , 1794, in _The Works of John Locke_ , 9 vols, London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press.

Locke, J. (1976–89) _The Correspondence of John Locke_ , 8 vols, ed. E.S. de Beer, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

[Neville, H.] (1668) _The Isle of Pines_ , 3rd edn, London: Printed for Allen Banks and Charles Harper.

Pagden, A. (1993) _European Encounters with the New World, from Renaissance to Romanticism_ , New Haven: Yale University Press.

Park, M. (2000) _Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa_ , ed. K.F. Marsters, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Parry, W. (1601) _A New and Large Discourse of the Travels of Sir Anthony Sherley Knight_ , London: Printed by Valentine Simmes for Felix Norton.

Polo, M. (1938) _The Description of the World_ , 2 vols, ed. and trans. A.C. Moule and P. Pelliot, London: George Routledge.

Pugliese, I. (forthcoming) _William Robertson's America_ , Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.

Purchas, S. (1617) _Purchas his Pilgrimage_ , London: printed by William Stansby for Henry Fetherstone.

Robertson, W. (1777) _The History of America_ , 2 vols, London: printed for W. Strahan; T. Cadell, in the Strand; and J. Balfour, at Edinburgh.

Shaftesbury, A.A.C., third Earl of (1999) _Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times_ , ed. L.E. Klein, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shankman, P. (2009) _The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy_ , Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Shankman, P. (2013) 'The "Fateful Hoaxing" of Margaret Mead: A Cautionary Tale', _Current Anthropology_ , 54(1): 51–70.

Shapin, S. (1994) _A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England_ , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shapiro, B.J. (2000) _A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720_ , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Taylor, E.G.R. (ed.) (1935) _The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts_ , 2 vols, London: The Hakluyt Society.

Thevenot, M. (1663–72) _Relations de divers voyages curieux_ , 4 vols, Paris: Sebastien Cramoisy and Sebastien Mabre Cramoisy.

Thompson, C. (2011) _Travel Writing_ , London: Routledge.

Thoreau, H.D. (1988) _Cape Cod_ , ed. J.J. Moldenhauer, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Inner Journeys

Travel Writing as Life Writing

_Simon Cooke_

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

(Borges 2004: 183)

Borges' parable of the map-maker eloquently encapsulates one of the most frequently asserted insights into travel writing: that however much it purports to be an objective report on the world, it is always to some degree, consciously or not, a self-portrait – a record of a subjective individual or cultural point of view. We might thus see travel writing in all its guises – whether intimate travel diaries, ethnographic treatises or guidebooks – as involving a dimension of 'life writing' (that is, a form of autobiographical and/or biographical writing). Yet the degree to which travel writing foregrounds its status as such varies dramatically across its history as well as across its diverse forms. The first section of this chapter therefore provides an overview of the ways in which an autobiographical dimension gradually comes to the fore, to become a prominent feature of the genre in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The second section then offers a more exploratory discussion of some specific kinds of autobiographical life writing that emerge in travel writing from this point on, after the 'inward turn' of the late eighteenth century. The argument – beyond aiming to demonstrate that much can be gained by bringing the fields of travel writing and life writing more closely together – is that travel writing brings to the question of 'how our lives become stories' (Eakin 1999) a range of distinct life-writing possibilities and challenges.

**Travel writing into life writing**

Among the earliest travel writings, interest in the personal biography of the traveller is subordinate to the world exceptionally experienced. For example, we find out very little about Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian often cited as the first travel writer as well as the 'father of history', in the nine volumes of his _Histories_ (fifth century BCE). Personal experience is certainly proffered as the essential foundation for his account. But it is primarily as a claim to the authority of the eyewitness, to validate his observations: 'So much for what the Persians and Phoenicians say', Herodotus writes, 'and I have no intention of passing judgement on its truth or falsity. I prefer to rely on my own knowledge' (2003: 5). While we can infer personal dimensions in his writing, all he himself seeks to tell of his own biography, or convey through his rhetorical stance, is that he did indeed see and hear the things he tells of in his account of his travels beyond the borders of Greece, and can be trusted as a reliable reporter.

A more overtly personal note enters into the travel account of the medieval Spanish pilgrim Egeria (see Campbell 1991). Egeria went on a pilgrimage from Spain to the Holy Land of the Levant between 381 and 384 CE; her _Peregrinatio_ ( _Pilgrimage_ ) is her letter home to her 'sisters'. It is deeply invested autobiographically and biographically, in that the fundamental object of her journey is to be there, herself, in the places described in the Bible. She travels to the 'Mount of God where the Law was given', for example, to listen to a reading from the Book of Moses 'on the very spot!' (Egeria 1999: 109–10). But for all that the self is vividly present, and the journey consciously mediated through personal experience, Egeria rarely turns in on herself or places herself under scrutiny. Thus, while Egeria represents an important stepping stone towards a more autobiographically inflected form of travel writing, her _Travels_ differs markedly from one of the touchstone texts of life writing dating from the same period, Augustine's _Confessions_. His account of his spiritual journey from sinfulness to salvation offers only the most cursory descriptions of his itinerant geographical travels. When he writes, 'I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled about me' (2006: 37), we hear nothing of how he came to Carthage and little of Carthage in itself; but we do plumb the spiritual and psychological depths to which the cauldron subjected his soul. Travel writing and life writing thus remain quite distinct forms.

Many medieval and early modern travel writers follow (and extend) the examples set by Herodotus and Egeria. The prologue to Marco Polo's _Description of the World_ ( _c_. 1298) is exemplary of the ongoing auto-optic principle: as Rustichello, the traveller's interlocutor and scribe, writes, Polo 'saw [. . .] with his own eyes' the 'marvels' he relates (Polo 1976: 73). As with Herodotus, the presentation of the self here, and in the later travels of early modern explorers like Columbus, Drake and Ralegh, largely serves to legitimize the authority of the eyewitness account. However, there is also a development of the more personal dimension evident in Egeria's pilgrimage. For while European travellers during this period and after were keen to present themselves as credible witnesses, they also often sought to project themselves in the role of the questing heroes of chivalric romance, overcoming adversity in the service of their respective realms (Greenblatt 1991: 132–3). In recording his (failed) expedition to find 'El Dorado' (the mythical city of Manoa), Sir Walter Ralegh prefaces his _Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana_ (1596) with the express hope that it be received as the 'gracious construction of a paineful pilgrimage' (Ralegh 1997: 121), and foregrounds the trials and ordeals of the journey, fashioning himself as the hero of his tale. Yet in such travel writing, the first-person self and its transformations through travel are not the focus of the account. The stylized self-projection serves largely as a rhetorical technique primarily geared towards gaining the trust and approval of readers (most particularly, to win monarchical favour and patronage); Ralegh does not seek to explore within the text the transformative experience implied by invoking the motif of pilgrimage in his Preface.

The tradition of the Grand Tour – stretching roughly from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, and reaching a peak in the 1700s – plays an important role in creating the context for the emergence of a more reflectively autobiographical form of travel writing. If the travellers discussed thus far had been attempting to bear witness to peoples and places not experienced by their audience, Grand Tourists, conversely, sought to experience for themselves the sites and sights considered essential to a European upper-class young man's cultural education. The accounts of Grand Tourists were offered as documents of the individual traveller's personal development, and the individual traveller's impressions, and how they compared with those of predecessors, were thus at issue. However, while earlier travel accounts of the Grand Tour stress the individual's specific responses and judgements, they remain largely object-focused, rather than introspective. As Carl Thompson points out, the impersonal narratorial stance of Joseph Addison's _Remarks on Several Parts of Italy_ (1705), in which 'snippets of first-person narration serve simply to frame much longer passages of general observation and speculation', contrasts markedly with 'the more personal and expressive register' of his private correspondence from the tour (2011: 102). It is in the letters, not the published account, that Addison divulges his experience of his 'troublesome journey over the Alps', leaving him with his 'head [. . .] still giddy with mountains' and appealing to his friend: 'you can't imagine how much I am pleased with the sight of a plain' (quoted in Thompson 2011: 102). This is indicative of the ways in which travel writing at this point was still seen primarily as a genre aimed at conveying knowledge about the world.

During this period, however, several aspects of Enlightenment thought put pressure on travel writers to acknowledge and explore the subjective perspective of their accounts. The first is empiricism: the idea that all knowledge derives from the senses, and that advancements in human knowledge must be based on empirically verifiable experience – a philosophical area of inquiry advanced in works such as Francis Bacon's _The Advancement of Learning_ (1605) and John Locke's _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ (1690), and exerting a profound influence over eighteenth-century thought. The second is the rise of a culture of sentiment and sensibility, with its belief that moral behaviour is based upon our feelings and on our sympathy for fellow beings: a theory put forward most directly in Adam Smith's _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ (1759). While these two contexts might seem to be in tension, the culture of sensibility, with its emphasis on feeling, can at times strangely coalesce with a more scientifically empiricist agenda in travel writing. In _A Voyage Round the World_ (1777), for example, Georg Forster writes:

I have sometimes obeyed powerful dictates of my heart, and given voice to my feelings; for as I do not pretend to be free from the weaknesses common to my fellow creatures, it was necessary for every reader to know the colour of the glass through which I looked.

(Forster 2000: 9)

Scientific rationalism during the eighteenth century, then, with its emphasis on observational rigour and objective inquiry, could lead to a heightened consciousness of the perspectivalism of a travel account. But, if in Forster this admission serves to reinforce the authority of an ostensibly object-focused empirical enterprise – extending the rhetoric of the credible eye-witness discussed earlier – elsewhere the rise of sensibility introduces a far more direct interest in the 'lens' itself as subject.

Laurence Sterne's _A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr Yorick_ (1768), though fictionalized, is perhaps the prime example for travel writing's engagement with this movement, and powerfully influenced subsequent travel writers, such as John Ledyard and Mungo Park (Thompson 2011: 112). Writing in 'an age so full of light, that there is scarce a country or corner of Europe whose beams are not crossed and interchanged with others' (Sterne 2005: 14), Sterne's first-person narrator Yorick recognizes that as many European destinations become better known through proliferating travel accounts, the travel writer wishing to write about these places must put more emphasis on his or her distinctive sensibility, perspective or persona. Sterne's literary agenda thus shifts attention from the places being visited to the visitor's private thoughts and feelings along the route. Whether Sterne's attitude to his traveller-protagonist is entirely sincere or subtly satirical, we see a complete inversion of the object-dependent approach taking place. Indeed, while place-names frequently serve as chapter headings, this is often the only way the reader might know where the action takes place. In Paris, for example, rather than visiting the capital's famous sites, Yorick at one point slips into a passageway where he finds a starling 'hung in a little cage' crying, "I can't get out – I can't get out"' (Sterne 2005: 69). This encounter prompts him to return to his room to 'figure to myself the miseries of confinement' – a problem which gives 'full scope to [his] imagination' (ibid.: 70). He imagines the life of a slave, and (in his mind's eye) 'look'd through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture' (ibid.: 70), before abruptly breaking off the narrative: '– But here my heart began to bleed – and I was forced to go on with another part of the portrait' (ibid.: 71). Upon departing for Versailles, Yorick decides that 'as there was nothing in this road, or rather nothing which I look for in travelling, I cannot fill up the blank better than with a history of this self-same bird', which, he reports, he chooses as the crest to his coat of arms (ibid.: 71–2). In this way Sterne creates not so much a document of the journey or place, as a reflective inner voyage through the emotional and imaginative experience of the traveller himself.

**Autobiographical explorations in post-1800 travel writing**

Travel writing since the inward turn of the late eighteenth century has often engaged more directly, and in diverse and distinctive ways, with life writing. Indeed, while more impersonal types of travel writing have remained part of the corpus, much travel writing across the period can be categorized precisely in terms of its specific life-writing form – as travel diaries and travel journals (written on the journey), as travel memoirs (written retrospectively at varying temporal distances from the journey described), or letters of travel; and even, more recently, as travel blogs. Given a time span of over 200 years, cutting through the major literary and cultural shifts involved in Romanticism, the Victorian period, modernism, and postmodernism, ideas about selfhood and the degree of personal and autobiographical disclosure deemed appropriate or possible have of course varied significantly. And one of the features of travel writing as life writing across the period is the degree of flexibility it offers in terms of the autobiographical. In the journal on which _Travels with a Donkey_ (1879) is based, for example, Robert Louis Stevenson had written: 'As I walked beside my donkey on this voyage, I made a prayer to myself, which I here offer to the reader [. . .]. A voyage is a piece of autobiography at best' (quoted in Holmes 2005: 33). Stevenson recorded the prayers in the journal but excised them from the published account because, as Richard Holmes suggests, they were 'just too personal and became part of an emotional "autobiography" he was not prepared, at that date, to deliver up to his readers' (ibid.: 33). But for Stevenson, as for many travel writers after 1800, the possibility that 'a voyage is a piece of autobiography at best' is inescapably a question to contend with, and a possibility to explore.

One of the most self-evident but crucial features of travel writing as life writing is that it tends to concern the self when away, abroad, elsewhere, focusing on encounters more than relationships. This spatial dislocation has a temporal counterpart. While autobiographies and biographies are often presented figuratively in terms of travel ('life is a journey', as the cliché has it), travel writing rarely presents a cradle-to-grave (or rather, cradle-to-the-present) account, at least not in a linear fashion. Rather, it usually focuses on a portion of life. Travel writing can thus sometimes seem like an excursion out of the life, or an episode in a life that is distinct yet resonant in terms of the life-story as a whole, or a clearing in the life from which the arc as a whole can be surveyed. A fundamental thematic puzzle in travel writing as life writing, therefore, is that it is a genre which, almost by definition, documents experience away from the trappings of one's 'normal' life. For some, the discovery afforded may be that we are helplessly ourselves. In _The Art of Travel_ (2003), Alain de Botton describes how he travelled from London to Barbados for a holiday, but upon looking at a view he recognized from the brochure, finds his appreciation 'weakened by a number of other, incongruous and unrelated elements' – a sore throat, work worries, needing the toilet – and concludes: 'A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making its first appearance: that I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island' (2003: 20). Yet, such paradoxes of travel aside, travel writing often does present more transformative episodes and experiences. The journey of self-discovery or self-transformation is perhaps the most powerful form such resonant episodes can take. Robert Louis Stevenson's _Travels with a Donkey_ is an influential example:

The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind.And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?

(Stevenson 2004: 35–6)

Stevenson here celebrates a kind of escape from a life preoccupied with affairs – an excursion out of the life – but ultimately his experiences on the trek lead to a renewed commitment and loyalty to friendship, love, and religious creed (ibid.: 92–3). This resonance of the experience of the journey over the sense of the life as a whole is a recurrent motif. Peter Matthiessen's _The Snow Leopard_ (1978), for example, is on one level an account of a journey to Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep, but also a deeply personal 'pilgrimage, a journey of the heart' (1987: 3) – a work of mourning after the death of Matthiessen's wife the previous year, in which he journeys towards a Buddhist acceptance of death and suffering, perceiving his own life afresh through an unexpected teacher who lives 'his life in the moment, in freedom from attachments, and in the simplicity of his everyday' (ibid.: 316). Similarly, Robyn Davidson's _Tracks_ (1977) is an exploration of Aboriginal Australian life and culture, which leads Davidson to a new sense of her own life:

strange things do happen when you trudge twenty miles a day, day after day [. . .]. It was a giant cleansing of all the garbage and much that had accumulated in my brain, a gentle catharsis. And because of that, [. . .] I could now see more clearly into my present relationships with people and with myself.

(Davidson 2012: 189)

In each of these travel texts, then, the autobiographical experience of the journey itself is inextricable from the view it affords over the life as a whole.

For many commentators the modern travel book derives its value from such twinnings of outer and inner journeys. Lawrence Durrell, responding to Freya Stark, remarked that a 'great traveller is a kind of introspective: as she covers the ground outwardly, so she advances inwardly' (quoted in Morris 2007: 9). For Norman Douglas, the reader of 'a good travel-book is entitled not only to an exterior voyage [. . .] but to an interior, a sentimental or temperamental voyage, which takes place side by side with that outer one' (Douglas 1925: 9). And Rebecca West, in her elegy to D.H. Lawrence, recalls finding the author soon after his arrival in Florence already writing a response to the city. Though West at first thought that Lawrence was thus 'tapping out an article on the state of Florence at that moment without knowing enough about it to make his views of real value' she later came to believe 'that he was writing about the state of his own soul at that moment', and that 'the city of Florence was as good a symbol as any other' (West 1977: 393). There are complex issues involved in this twinning of inner and outer journeys however, especially in the modernist period. Writing in the wake of Freud's hugely influential work in psychoanalysis, modernist writers were faced with the idea that the self, far from being an autonomous entity transparent to itself, was governed by complex, unconscious desires and fears, and thus largely opaque to itself. Freud himself wrote a short autobiographical travel narrative, 'A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis' (1936). This offers a psychoanalytic reading of Freud's sense of unease on fulfilling a long-cherished desire to visit the Acropolis in Athens, concluding that:

a sense of guilt was attached to the satisfaction in having gone such a long way: [. . .]. It seems as though the essence of success was to have got further than one's father, and as though to excel one's father was still something forbidden.

(Freud 2006: 76)

Such inquiries into the unconscious drives influencing one's experience of travel contribute to an increased sense of the subjectivity of travel writing, but simultaneously render the enterprise more difficult in that the self is not regarded as unproblematically available to autobiographical expression. Graham Greene's _Journey without Maps_ (1936) is a classic example (see Blanton 2002: 59–70). Greene twins an exterior journey – a four-week visit to Liberia – with a psychoanalytically probing interior journey. As he reflected later, '[t]he account of a journey – a slow footsore journey into an interior literally unknown – was only of interest if it paralleled another journey' (Greene 1999: 48). The trek into the Liberian interior 'for which no maps were to be bought' (Greene 2006: 9) stands as a metaphor for Greene's parallel, tortuously unmapped voyage into himself, his memory and his childhood. Indeed, Greene explicitly figures the 'motive for the journey' in psychoanalytic terms:

It is not the fully conscious mind which chooses West Africa in preference to Switzerland. The psychoanalyst [. . .] finds that some images have immediate associations; to others, the patient can bring out nothing at all; his brain is like a cinema in which the warning 'Fire' has been cried; the exits are jammed with too many people trying to escape; [. . .] and when I say that to me Africa has always seemed an important image, I suppose that is what I mean, that it has represented more than I could say.

(Ibid.: 8)

Greene's journey into the African and psychological interior thus becomes an effort to bring to consciousness a 'knowledge not only of one's present but of the past from which it has emerged' (ibid.: 7), with the (to Greene) unknown Liberia operating as both theatre of memory and metaphor for the unknown depths of the self. D.H. Lawrence's posthumously published _Sketches of Etruscan Places_ (1932) is a poignant example of this. Lawrence conducts a kind of inversion of the Grand Tour: instead of Rome, an essential destination for Grand Tourists, Lawrence explores the world of the Etruscans, 'whom the Romans wiped out' and about whom 'we know nothing [. . .] except what we find in their tombs' (Lawrence 2007: 331). In the course of his celebration of the Etruscans, to whom 'the whole universe lived: and the business of man was himself to live amid it all' (ibid.: 374) and for whom death 'was a natural continuance of the fullness of life' (ibid.: 341), Lawrence finds both a culture which expresses and enlivens his own sense of life – an ethic of how to live – and a way of exploring the gathering sense of his own mortality.

Such parallel journeys, in which place provides a vehicle for self-exploration, can take on a volatile political aspect. Greene's figuring of Liberia as a metaphor for self-exploration is open to the same critique that Chinua Achebe levelled against Joseph Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_ (1901): 'Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in [. . .] reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty human mind?' (Achebe 2006: 344). It is thus important to note that such twinnings of inner and outer journeys take on a different, and newly urgent autobiographical dimension in postcolonial travel writing. V.S. Naipaul's _Area of Darkness_ (1964), for example, applies to India the vocabulary of darkness found in earlier travellers such as Greene and Conrad. But here there is not only a symbolic parallel between the inner and outer journey. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, of Indian descent – his grandparents had emigrated from the Caribbean as indentured labourers in the 1880s. Naipaul's exploration of India as 'an area of darkness' in his own knowledge is thus also a profound exploration of his own inheritance – an area of darkness and ignorance within himself – as well as a reflection on the impact of colonialism.

If such journeys might be classed as journeys of self-discovery, much postmodern travel writing brings this very possibility into doubt. The postmodern sensibility which comes to prominence in the period after the Second World War involves a heightened sense of the subjectivity and relativity of all knowledge, combined with sometimes playful doubt about whether the self exists as more than a fiction or whether it is less a cohesive entity than a confluence of cultural, historical and linguistic discourses. Roland Barthes's _Empire of Signs_ (1982) is a paradigmatic example. An account of a journey to Japan, it is 'in no way claiming to represent or analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse)' but rather explores 'this system of signs which I call: Japan' (1983: 3). In doing so, Barthes' text is less a record of Japan than a European 'history of our own obscurity' (ibid.: 4). It is thus an enterprise in which self-reflexivity is paramount, but offering something closer to cultural than personal autobiography. Bruce Chatwin's _In Patagonia_ (1977) is another text often cited as exemplary of postmodern tendencies in travel writing, in part because the narrator is teasingly reticent in terms of personal disclosure, rather than emotionally introspective. The first chapter of the book does provide an autobiographical reminiscence on the writer's childhood: the memory of a piece of skin in his grandmother's cabinet, which the child had believed to be 'a piece of brontosaurus' (Chatwin 2003: 1), sent from Patagonia. And the narrative includes the expression of a profound desire – 'Never in my life have I wanted anything as I wanted that piece of skin' (ibid.: 2) – which, implicitly, frames the ensuing journey as a kind of quest to find a replacement for the (since lost) skin. But the narrative involves no direct introspection into the nature of this longing, and while the object of the quest is accomplished, there is no account of a transformative epiphany beyond the narrator's laconic recollection of sitting down, 'immensely pleased' (ibid.: 194).

While _In Patagonia_ does not explicitly address the autobiographical implications of Chatwin's journey, the book is deeply concerned with memory. The 'piece of skin' recalls not only the Golden Fleece (the object of Jason's quest) but also Proust's madeleine, as an object inspiring memory. It is also concerned with cultural memory, in that the text travels through a vast and eclectic body of texts inspired by Patagonia – from Shakespeare's _The Tempest_ to Darwin's _Voyage of the Beagle_ – as well as through Patagonia itself. This dimension of _In Patagonia_ points up another crucial aspect of travel writing as life writing: its relationship to memory and to what is sometimes called 'memory-work' (Haug 1987). The latter term derives from feminist sociology, where it was coined to describe a research method in which groups of researchers took their own memories as the basis for exploring and questioning the social structures shaping (female sexual) identity – an active approach to memory and identity much at issue in studies of life writing more generally (see Olney 1998). As we have seen in the examples of Stevenson, Matthiessen and Davidson, travel writing often involves not only recounting the journey itself, but also a kind of more active memory-work, as the life of the traveller is remembered, sometimes in new ways, through the journey. This project can take different forms; in Joseph Brodsky's _Watermark_ (1992), for example, a sequence of visits to one place, Venice, over the course of many years, provides a thread through the memories of a life. Irrespective of such variations, and irrespective also of the distance of time between the journey and the writing of it, one distinct feature that emerges is that travelogues allow for a non-chronological or episodic (re)arrangement of memory: the journey, rather than the life, provides the structural momentum. Travel writing also has important links to cultural or collective memory – an area of research pioneered by scholars such as Maurice Halbwach (1950). It is not only that travel writing contributes to generating cultural capital around certain sites which then become key 'sites of memory' (Nora 1996) in the wider culture – that is to say, sites such as memorials and monuments which can be seen as the 'vestiges, the ultimate embodiments of a commemorative consciousness' (ibid.: 6). More urgently, at the other end of the spectrum – as implicit in the title of Raja Shehadeh's _Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape_ (2007) – travel writing can mine personal memory as a way of drawing attention to that which is in danger of being lost. Equally, as with Chatwin's intertextual wandering in _In Patagonia_ , travel writing is often a 'travelling in traces' (Pfister 2007), or a following in the 'footsteps', both geographic and textual, of others.

This intertwining of personal and cultural memory points toward the interaction of 'self' and 'other' in travel writing. Studies in life writing often use the term 'auto/biography', not only as a convenient written shorthand in discussions concerned with both autobiography and biography, but to suggest that writing one's own life almost inevitably involves writing about other people, just as writing a biography involves an autobiographically inflected point of view (Marcus 1994: 273–4). Among the most acute ethical issues in any example of travel writing is the question of the degree to which it acknowledges, and the ways in which it responds to, its status as a form of life writing in both senses, not only acknowledging the autobiographical dimension now customary in the form but also affording a biographical dimension to the people encountered by the travelling self. W.G. Sebald's _The Rings of Saturn_ (1998) is especially pertinent here. Ostensibly an account of a walking tour of Norfolk and Suffolk, the narrative frequently departs from the geographical itinerary, associatively digressing through memories, dreams and disquisitions on literary and cultural history. Yet while the journey is highly and self-reflexively memoiristic, it is largely composed of biographical excursions into the lives of others: portraits of living colleagues and friends or figures from the past. The most immediately striking feature of the prose is the way in which it incorporates the voices of the biographees into the narrative without speech marks or changes in diction and register indicating to whom the voice belongs, such that the self becomes compound and diffuse, as if in a fusion of identities. Thus travel, autobiography and biography, once considered so clearly distinct, can blur to the point of being inextricable, indicating the ways in which just as our attempts to map the world inevitably involve a form of more or less indirect autobiography, so we can trace in our self-portraits the image of our travels and our encounters with others.

**Select bibliography**

Achebe, C. (2006) 'An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_ ', in J. Conrad, _Heart of Darkness_ , ed. P.B. Armstrong, New York: Norton.

Augustine (2006) _Confessions_ , Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett.

Barthes, R. (1983) _Empire of Signs_ , New York: Hill and Wang.

Blanton, C. (2002) _Travel Writing: The Self and the World_ , London: Routledge.

Borges, J.L. (2004) _The Aleph and Other Stories_ , London: Penguin.

Botton, A. de (2003) _The Art of Travel_ , London: Penguin

Campbell, M.B. (1991) _The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600_ , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Chatwin, B. (2003) _In Patagonia_ , London: Penguin.

Davidson, R. (2012) _Tracks_ , London: Bloomsbury.

Douglas, N. (1925) _Experiments_ , New York: Robert McBride and Company.

Durrell, L. (1971) _Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel_ , London: Faber and Faber.

Eakin, J.P. (1999) _How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves_ , Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press.

Egeria (1999) _Egeria's Travels_ , trans. J. Wilkinson, Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips.

Forster, G. (2000) _A Voyage Round the World, Volume I_ , Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

Freud, S. (2006) 'Letter to Romain Rolland (A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis)', in A. Phillips (ed.), _The Penguin Freud Reader_ , London: Penguin.

Greenblatt, Stephen (1991) _Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World_ , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Greene, G. (2006) _Journey without Maps_ , London: Vintage.

Greene, G. (1999) _Ways of Escape_ , London: Vintage.

Halbwach, M. (1992) _On Collective Memory_ , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Haug, F., Hausmann, M., and Sauer, B.(1987) _Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory_ , London: Verso.

Herodotus (2003) _The Histories_ , London: Penguin.

Hirsch, M. (1997) _Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory_ , Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Holmes, R. (2005) _Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer_ , London, New York, Toronto and Sydney: Harper Perennial.

Lawrence, D.H. (2007) _D.H. Lawrence and Italy: Twilight in Italy, Sea and Sardinia, Sketches of Etruscan Places_ , eds Simonetta de Filippis, Paul Eggert, Mara Kalnins, with an Introduction by Tim Parks, London: Penguin.

Marcus, L. (1994) _Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice_ , Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Matthiessen, P. (1987) _The Snow Leopard_ , 1978, London: Penguin.

Morris, M. (ed.) (2007) _The Illustrated Virago Book of Women Travellers_ , London: Virago.

Nora, P. (1996) _Realms of Memory: Volume I_ , New York: Columbia University Press.

Olney, J. (1998) _Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing_ , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pfister, M. (2007) 'Travellers and Traces: The Quest for One's Self in Eighteenth- to Twentieth-Century Travel Writing', in _Life Writing: Autobiography, Biography, and_ K. Melikoğlu (ed.), _Travel Writing in Contemporary Literature_ , Stuttgart: Ibidem.

Polo, M. (1976) _The Description of the World_ , New York: AMS Press and London: Routledge.

Ralegh, W. (1997) _The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana_ , Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Sterne, L. (2005) _A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy_ , 1768, London: Penguin.

Stevenson, R.L. (2004) _Travels with a Donkey in the C_ _évennes_ , London: Penguin.

Thompson, C. (2011) _Travel Writing_ , Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

West, R. (1977) 'Elegy [D.H. Lawrence]', in S. Hynes (ed.), _Rebecca West: A Celebration,_ London: Macmillan.

Travel Writing and Postcolonial Studies

_Claire Lindsay_

Travel writing and postcolonial studies are common bedfellows, the first (a 'genre') a staple source for the second (a scholarly enterprise, if not a bordered discipline). Their relationship has been soldered by historical circumstances. As Mary Baine Campbell points out,

The interest in travel writing – across a wide political spectrum – was part of the necessary reimagining of the world first occasioned by the post-World War Two resistance movements and wars of liberation in the former European colonies, as well as by the waves of immigration that followed.

(Campbell 2002: 261)

Developments in the publication, reception and study of travel writing and their accumulation into an academic field of enquiry can thus be seen as a successive consequence of those material processes of independence from colonial rule, in the aftermath of which postcolonial scholars scrutinized an array of writing about 'foreign' and 'exotic' places in attempts to make sense of that rupture from imperial history. Travel writing not only had volume, popularity and reach during the colonial era, due to its capacity to generate curiosity, excitement and adventure, it was also instrumental in the economy and machinery of Empire: if the imperial centre depended on representations of its peripheries and others to know itself, and to provide a sense of ownership, entitlement and legitimacy, travel writing served up plenty of material for that purpose. The widespread collapse (though not complete erasure) of colonial orders and structures across the world thus re-ignited general and scholarly interest in travel writing as a discrete category, although in academe, as Steve Clark observes, it was regarded, initially at least, with a degree of stigma, 'as a kind of love that dare not speak its name' (Clark 1999: 3).

Postcolonial studies – and its theoretical branch in particular – prioritized travel as 'a live and urgent issue' (ibid.: 4), not only by identifying the articulation of a colonial epistemology in the accounts of pilgrims, soldiers and industrialists, among many others who travelled in service of Empire, but also by encouraging the identification and formulation of a post-imperial voice in this mode. In addition to their historical kinship, travel writing and postcolonial studies share a number of other striking features, more conceptual in nature. For example, a mutual preoccupation of both studies of travel narratives and enquiries into the condition of postcoloniality is the question of canon, along with a concern about the persistence of and resistance to orthodox forms and epistemologies. There is also the issue of 'hybridity', both a central tenet of postcolonial theory and a defining characteristic of the 'literature of travel', whose putatively promiscuous relationship with a number of kinds of writing (ethnography, history, autobiography, fiction, to name just a few) problematizes claims of a bounded genre. In both instances, heterogeneity can be perceived as a strength: if travel writing's generic and stylistic volatility results in 'a hybrid genre that straddles categories and disciplines' (Holland and Huggan 2000: 8), the insistence on multiplicity in postcolonial theory and the porosity of postcolonial scholarship constitute an invigorating and resistant strategy to hegemony in its variegated forms. Notwithstanding the debates that have emerged in and about postcolonial studies in recent decades (to which I refer below) and the resistance of some to the discipline's definitional 'fuzziness', its heterogeneity also ensures a seemingly endless capacity for renewal and reinvigoration of both epistemology and form. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to track the role of travel writing in and alongside developments in postcolonial studies and, in doing so, to illuminate the ways in which our understanding of each of these categories has, since that original moment of historical coalescence, become increasingly more complex and expansive.

**Travel writing in early postcolonial studies**

It was Edward Said's highly influential but controversial study _Orientalism_ (1995 [1978]), one of the foundational works of postcolonial thought, which first explicitly identified the centrality of travel writing to the colonial project and cemented its place as a primary source in and for postcolonial studies. Influenced by the ideas of Michel Foucault, Said conceived of Orientalism as a complex cultural and ideological discourse, 'a Western style for dominating, restricting, and having authority over the Orient' (for his purposes, this is the region of the Near Orient, comprising the Arab and Islamic countries, rather than the Far Orient of India, Japan and China) (Said 1995: 3). The role of travel narratives, which emerged from 'innumerable voyages of discovery' and prolonged contacts made through trade and war, was central to the Orientalist enterprise for obvious reasons, given that they were often the principal accounts of 'other' places and peoples to be circulated to an audience back home. That is not to say, however, that they were the only accounts: indeed, Said's own corpus includes 'works of literature, political tracts, journalistic texts, travel books, religious and philological studies' (ibid.: 23), its range speaking to Orientalism's indiscriminate reach, which achieved its apogee during the nineteenth century, when French and British imperial interests in the region advanced substantially. For Said, however, Orientalism is not only a question of representation: as a mechanism which articulates and accounts for imperial expansion, it has corresponding institutional support and is irrevocably tied to socio-economic and political structures. Based on a distinction between 'the Orient' and 'the Occident', which served to shore up the authority, superiority and strength of European identity at the expense of non-European peoples and cultures – which were seen 'as a sort of surrogate and even underground self' (ibid.: 3) against which the West has defined itself – Said claims that the persistence and pervasiveness of Orientalism was such that no one writing, thinking or acting on or about the region in the post-Enlightenment period could do so without taking it into account. As a result, there is a high degree of intertextuality involved in this discourse, so that the value of any written statement about the region scarcely depends on the place itself: thus, Orientalism is 'but a _re-presence_ , or representation [. . .] a system for citing works and authors' (ibid.: 21, 23). The evidence of Orientalism transpires in the very narrative voice adopted, and in structure, as well as the use of particular imagery, themes and motifs in any given text, although in essence it finds expression in a set of regularly circulated and consistently reiterated ideas, or 'othering' practices, which include associations of the region with 'sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, intense energy' (ibid.: 118) and notions of the Oriental as 'irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, "different"' and strange (ibid.: 40).

The influence of Said's book on postcolonial studies and on the analysis of travel accounts (which are always representations of the cultural 'other') has been huge, notwithstanding the risks and pitfalls entailed in his avowedly ambitious endeavour. Said himself anticipates some of his critics' complaints in the early pages of _Orientalism_ , acknowledging that the heterogeneity of his primary corpus poses the risk of generalization, 'distortion and inaccuracy' (ibid.: 8), and admitting to the risk that his proposal potentially narrows the conception of Oriental cultures – insofar as they were seen to be 'acted upon' by this enduring and amoebic form of imperialism – as somehow 'demeaned' or 'denigrated'. (Said does concede _en passant_ that the constraints of Orientalism were not uniformly adverse but could potentially have an affirmative effect.) Said's detractors have in turn characterized his work as 'theoretically promiscuous', deeming his use of Foucault to be at odds with his use of Antonio Gramsci. He has also been accused of being obfuscatory on a key question central to travel writing, namely: whether it is possible to attain a true knowledge of the Other. For example, historian Dane Kennedy argues that, 'For Said to charge that the West's representations of the Orient are distorted seems to suggest that he regards an undistorted representation as attainable' (Kennedy 1996: 348). Yet this position is never articulated or apparently entertained by Said, and Kennedy fundamentally misreads the Palestinian author when he attributes to him a 'post-structuralist insistence that the Orient is nothing more than a discursive phantasm' (ibid.: 348): a misconception that will be obvious even from the brief account of Said's work offered above. More persuasive perhaps are the charges of homogenizing and essentializing the West in no less a distorting fashion than the West's tendency to do so of the Orient, with the effect that the colonized Other is always a completely undifferentiated and an unknowable category (Kennedy 1996). The absence of any consideration of how power is exercised in the colonial context is also a concern of critics. In his defence, however, Said alludes to 'embarrassingly incomplete' tasks beyond the scope of his 1978 study, which, he acknowledges, include a consideration of 'alternatives to Orientalism' (1995: 24), among them the question of how to study other peoples and cultures from a non-repressive perspective.

Said's legacy can be traced in subsequent works of postcolonial scholarship on travel and its narratives, in studies such as Ali Behdad's _Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution_ (1994) and David Spurr's _The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration_ (1993) which continue the Foucauldian discourse analysis of their precursor, but address some of its perceived shortcomings. Ali Behdad underscores the enduring significance of Said's 'postcolonial antidisciplinarity', which exposes how seemingly specialized discourses (ordinarily regarded and studied separately) are in fact associated in ways that allow for, and even enable, the complexities of Western hegemony (Behdad 1994: 5–6). Nevertheless, Behdad distances himself from the essentialism of his predecessor's conception of Orientalism, which he, like others, considers as coextensive with the logic of colonialism. Behdad invokes the work of another postcolonial theorist, Homi Bhahba, in his analysis of French and British late colonial travel writing on the Arab world, which he claims evinces a heterogeneity of textual strategies based on 'principles of discontinuity' (ibid.: 13), an approach that treats past events and discourses as contradictory internally as well as of one another. David Spurr's methods are more taxonomical than Behdad's, which on one level seems ironic given the ways in which the act of classification (especially in the natural sciences, a subject of one of his own chapters) was bound up in imperialist ideology (see also Pratt 2008: chapter 6). Nevertheless, Spurr draws on Derrida's notion of the 'violence of the letter', and the popular but not unproblematic metaphorical equation between writer and colonizer, to frame his study of the processes by which one culture subordinates another in acts of naming, representation and interpretation – although this is an assumption which tends to disregard the potential instability of language itself as well as the basic democracy of the activity of travel writing, a genre in which, as Wendy Bracewell helpfully reminds us, 'all that's needed is to have gone somewhere and to be able to write' (2009: xv).

Spurr identifies twelve rhetorical modes of writing about non-Western peoples which originate and are repeated in the course of the establishment and maintenance of colonial authority: among them, discursive mechanisms of surveillance, appropriation, debasement, negation, eroticization and aestheticization. The risk of levelling that accompanies such generalizing projects, to which Said alluded (and, in his critics' eyes, was himself guilty of), rears its head once again, insinuating a uniformity, even 'grim predictability' (Duffy 1996: 307), to those colonial tropes identified. Spurr does devote a final chapter of his study to considering alternatives to colonial discourse and their own challenges, drawing particular attention to the issues of literal and political translation which arise when seeking out the testimonies of those who have been excluded to date (Spurr 1993: 193). However, notwithstanding his final affirmation of difference (a position underpinned by concepts invoked from the work of Jacque Derrida and Julia Kristeva), Spurr himself sidesteps the issue of precisely why literal translation is a 'barrier' to hearing alternatives to colonial discourse, although his comments hint at the balance that needs to be struck between the dominance of English and attempts to disseminate texts in diverse languages otherwise available only to specialists. In doing so, Spurr effectively reiterates the very practice he critiques, a symptom of a broader, recursive dilemma in postcolonial studies, incipient in Said's study. If postcolonial studies as a discipline depends on the impossibility of representing the Other or knowing the 'reality' of their lived experience, in doing so it in turn risks reinforcing the authority of the colonial archive: 'Hence, postcolonial criticism suffers from the gesture by which the material ground to which it could appeal for its critical authority is cut off in advance' (Duffy 1996: 304). Enda Duffy's scepticism about Behdad's and Spurr's 'polite postcolonialism' rests on their failure to adequately historicize their critiques: for him, the term 'colonial' is effectively fetishized in arguments which 'imply that different kinds or even degrees of colonial oppression can never be enunciated, which suggests that new mutations of discourse can never in the final instance be judged against the real conditions they actually purport to represent' (ibid.: 314).

**Postcolonial critiques of travel writing**

Mary Louise Pratt's _Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation_ (1992), which was written in the wake of _Orientalism_ but is curiously devoid of reference to it, addresses some of the perceived methodological contradictions of the work of Said and his disciples and has in turn taken its place in the canon of postcolonial studies on travel literature. Unlike Said, Pratt delimits her corpus exclusively to travel books and narratives, in this case about Spanish America, the Caribbean, and West and Central Africa from 1750 onwards. Fundamentally, where Pratt builds on Said's work, is in her consideration of voices hitherto absent from the archive, the experience and works of those in whose lives Empire intervened (the 'travellee'), such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, an Andean who wrote a revisionist account of the conquest documenting Spanish abuses. This example illustrates how those on the receiving end of imperialism 'did their own knowing and interpreting, sometimes [. . .] using the European's own tools' (Pratt 2008: 7). Pratt's study has become significant not only for its more expansive methodological model but also on account of its singular theoretical vocabulary, which has since become common currency in this and other fields of study. Among the key terms devised or utilized by Pratt in _Imperial Eyes_ are 'contact zone' to describe the site of colonial encounter, a space and time where subjects 'previously separated by geography and history are co-present [. . .] often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination' (ibid.: 8), and the 'monarch-of-all-I-survey' scene, which is self-explanatory. Other expressions which have passed into the postcolonial lexicon include 'anti-conquest', an epistemological strategy of avowed innocence in the very enunciation of European superiority (usually made by a category of traveller Pratt pejoratively calls the 'seeing-man'); 'autoethnography', to denominate works in which colonized subjects, such as Poma de Ayala, represent themselves in ways which engage with and appropriate the terms of the colonizer; and 'transculturation', 'a phenomenon of the contact zone', to depict 'how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture' (ibid.: 7).

Pratt's study, which considers not only the experience and production of the colonized subject but also of questions of gender, redresses some key exclusions in earlier postcolonial studies of travel writing. Indeed, attention to such issues coincides with a wider critique of postcolonial theory and a broader questioning of the focus, scope and status of postcolonial studies as an endeavour, which have taken place over the last two decades. At stake in this 'disciplinary' enquiry, as Wilson et al. describe, are:

The dangers of homogenisation, of a sedimentation of concerns [. . .] of replicating the exclusions and hegemony of the European canon in the guise of metropolitan writers and critics, of foregrounding mobility (geographical and intellectual) and of privileging cosmopolitan models of postcoloniality.

(2010: 9)

The term 'post-colonial' itself, for example, began to be questioned for a perceived insufficiency and imprecision in geographical and historical terms as well as for its teleological implications, which disguise the fact that the historical dismantling of institutions of colonial power (which operated in discrete forms in different parts of the world) has not always been regionally or chronologically synchronous nor resulted in a clean break from colonialism itself.1 Indeed, independence from colonial rule was achieved at different junctures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not just after the Second World War, and in diverse cultures and places located in both the so-called Third and First Worlds. In this regard, Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan suggest that, 'postcolonial criticism founders on [. . .] definitional inconsistencies and on the totalizing, ironically dehistoricized vocabulary it often deploys in order to talk about irreconcilably different cultures' (Holland and Huggan 2000: 48).

In consequence, the category and identity of the 'colonial' have come under scrutiny. On the one hand, this has resulted in the revaluation of assumed 'agents of imperialism', from the Spanish conquistadors to figures such as Alexander von Humboldt or Roger Casement, all of whom travelled to the New World, although not necessarily exclusively in the service of Empire. On the other hand, in a range of different transnational feminist projects, scholars such as Inderpal Grewal (1996), Indira Ghose (1998), Shirley Foster and Sara Mills (the latter also deploying a Foucauldian discourse analysis) have illuminated the ways in which questions of gender complicate the paradigmatic colonial experience and narrative of travel. For Foster and Mills, the journey accounts of colonial women pivot on a paradox which has to do with prevailing discursive constraints on them (the very activity of travelling, for instance, being deemed 'unfeminine', or 'disreputable'), as well as an ambivalence towards discourses of imperialism and femininity, to neither of which many of their subjects appear able to wholeheartedly subscribe. Rather than sustain a specious equivalence between opposition to patriarchy at home and opposition to imperialism abroad, however, Pratt, Grewal, and others underscore the essential complexity of the locations and writings of Western women who participated in, but also might criticize and/or recalibrate, colonial discourses. Critical to Grewal's project, for example, which builds on Pratt's work but reconfigures her terms, is the notion that both 'home' and 'away' ('harem') are articulated at different sites through gendered bodies (of men and women) and that ' "contact zones" exist not just in the so-called peripheries, but in the colonial metropolis itself' (Grewal 1996: 4).

Nevertheless, the tendency of much postcolonial criticism of travel writing to focus on pre-twentieth-century and largely 'metropolitan' works has continued to focus attention largely on production in and at imperial 'centres'. In many ways such endeavours simply bolster hegemonic conceptions of Empire, rather than shed light on corresponding sources in the modern period or in the former colonies themselves. In this respect, the potential anachronism and inexpediency of the term 'post-colonial' has been debated especially in the contemporary context, where it seems to fall short of capturing the singularities of the experience of neoliberal globalization or of recent adjustments in geopolitical organization and/or economic power. Corresponding efforts have been made to rethink or re-describe post-colonial geography, therefore. These have involved taking into account transcontinental and transoceanic routes which steer away from a prevailing Eurocentrism that no longer provides a dominant axis for understanding recent historical processes, but also considering the complexities of the make-up of Europe itself. Notwithstanding the equivalences often drawn between it and the West, Bracewell, for example, points out in her work on Eastern Europe that insofar as 'Europe' itself cannot be neatly divided between East and West, its much cited (and undifferentiated) opposition against 'the rest of the world' seems increasingly untenable (Bracewell 2009: xiv). Meanwhile, thinkers in and about the Global South, such as Walter Mignolo, have advanced ideas such as 'colonial difference' and 'transmodernity' as more appropriate idioms than 'post-colonial' for understanding the modern-world system as a spatial articulation of power, rather than as a linear succession of events. Yet, the valence of the 'postcolonial' (as a term and as an approach) is arguably ensured in a world in which 'people are still influenced by Empire to travel, people still migrate because of Empire and people are still hampered in their travels by Empire' (Edwards and Graulund 2011: 9). If Empire 'is still in place, literally as well as figuratively', its freight is also still associated with the possibility of a 'practical, resistant, "concrete" hoping' in a world from where colonialism has not been eradicated' (Patrick Williams in Wilson et al. 2010: 94). One especially productive outcome of the disciplinary interrogations tracked above, therefore, has been the broadening of the field of study of travel writing in at least two further respects: beyond the limited focus on the colonial period to a consideration of ancient and particularly contemporary travel texts; and, as we shall see presently, to articulations of this category of writing in cultures and languages outside the English-speaking world.

**Postcolonial modes of travel writing**

Notwithstanding the resistance of some writers and critics to the limitations of the label 'postcolonial', there have been efforts to distinguish this as a category of sorts in travel writing. María Lourdes López Ropero, for example, contends that the postcolonial travelogue constitutes a distinct sub-genre of travel writing, the developments in which (in particular, in works by so-called 'countertravellers', including postcolonial, women and gay authors) have breathed new life into the genre. In this instance, the postcolonial does not refer to a particular kind of writing or poetics but rather to the subject position of the authors themselves, for as Elleke Boehmer observes, the difficulties in identifying a postcolonial aesthetic rest on the fact that the term derives from the world rather than the work (in Wilson et al. 2010: 176). In consequence, the characteristics of the 'postcolonial traveller' – a classification which includes both those from formerly colonized regions, in whose lives Empire has directly intervened, and Western descendants of formerly colonized peoples – have a material basis. Certain continuities, however, can be observed in the works of such travellers, although not all their journeys are based on routes to or from the imperial 'centre'. In those travelogues by writers from former British colonies analysed by Barbara Korte, for example, she identifies a tendency to reverse the colonizer's direction of travel (from imperial centre to periphery), the return journey being 'an important variety of the home tour' (Korte 2000: 172). An engagement with colonial heritage and issues of belonging as well as 'new' iterations of de-territorialization or 'extra-territoriality' also characterize the corpus. A cluster of Anglophone writers of works in this vein – including but not limited to V.S. Naipaul ( _The Enigma of Arrival_ , 1987), Caryl Phillips ( _The European Tribe_ , 1987; _The Atlantic Sound_ , 2000), Jamaica Kincaid ( _A Small Place_ , 1988; _Among Flowers: a Walk in the Himalaya_ 2005), and Pico Iyer ( _Video Night in Kathmandu_ , 1988; _The Global Soul_ , 2000) – have come to form a 'canon' of sorts, central to which are the travellers' efforts to underscore historical power relations forged through travel and to contest and protest their endurance.

US-based Kincaid and Phillips, for example, have deployed the travel narrative as a denunciatory critique of the colonial past and, above all, of persistent forms of racism, with their narratives distinguished by the invectives' particular direction _against_ their Euro-American readers, making them become the (uncomfortable) object of the travel writer's gaze. Thus Phillips, returning to Europe, decries the continent's failure to understand 'the high price of her churches, art galleries and architecture' (1999: 128), while Kincaid, back in Antigua after a twenty-year absence, launches a coruscating attack on tourism:

A tourist is an ugly human being. You are not an ugly person all the time [. . .] you make a leap from being that nice blob just sitting like a boob in your amniotic sac of the modern experience to being a person visiting heaps of death and ruin and feeling alive and inspired at the sight of it.

(1988: 14, 16)

In contrast to such trenchant but often also complex reversals of route, narrative and generic conventions, other contemporary travellers articulate a form of cosmopolitanism which celebrates 'out-of-placeness' not as temporary, traumatic or anxious, but rather as a permanent, voluntary and affirmative condition. 'Global soul' Pico Iyer is perhaps the most frequently cited example of this ilk, his works depicting a particular – and, unsurprisingly, rather privileged – post-colonial identity which divides critical opinion: either he '[sits] rather too comfortably next to the frequent flyer' (Smethurst 2004: 181) or the merit of his books rests not on 'writing back or countering' but rather ' "re-focusing" [. . . and] writing _with_ ' (Edwards and Graulund 2011: 67). There are indeed problematic issues at stake in this kind of contemporary cosmopolitanism, not least that such travellers sustain and reinforce long-standing privileges of mobility and representation which stem directly from Empire and which continue to be associated predominantly with the West. In this respect, Holland and Huggan identify a category they call the 'eccentric gentleman traveller', a present-day re-iteration of Pratt's Victorian 'seeing-man', which 'springs from the ironic awareness that Empire has collapsed, but that the traveller is free – or better, can pretend to be free – to act as if it never had' (Holland and Huggan 2000: 46). It is perhaps no surprise that modern cosmopolitans also continue to deploy exoticizing tropes and practices which may take a different guise to those of their colonial counterparts, yet are fundamentally still elitist and exploitative (see Dunn 2004). Moreover, if oppositional voices from the former colonies such as Kincaid's run the risk of commodification in a climate 'within which such strategically "othered" products circulate within the global market [and] in which "otherness" is assimilated, reproduced, and consumed' (Holland and Huggan 2000: 48), much recent travel writing of this cosmopolitan strain is invested in the same processes.

If the market threatens to distort the postcolonial literature of travel in this regard, in others its prevailing monolingualism, like that of its corresponding scholarly activity, poses equivalent risks of homogenization and exclusion. While I began this chapter noting similarities, and the common ground shared by travel writing and postcolonial studies, I conclude it with a necessary emphasis on difference, for as Nirmala Menon suggests in terms that are resonant for both subjects of interest here, one exit strategy from the stagnation in postcolonial critical perspectives is to 'reroute the discipline into a multilingual field' (in Wilson et al. 2010: 218). Indeed, in the wake of Harish Trivedi's assertion that 'the postcolonial has only ears for English' (quoted in Forsdick and Murphy 2003: 7), the limitations of 'postcolonial' and 'travel' paradigms have led some scholars of travel writing to suggest that, until recently, contrary to sight (the sense with which the journey is most typically associated), in fact blindness or deafness are more synonymous with travel and its study (Khair 2006: 4). As Tabish Khair notes, 'the travels of entire peoples (mostly outside Eurocentric spaces) have been erased [. . .] it would appear as if Africans and Asians simply stayed at home discoursing about karma or Allah, shorn of curiosity or enterprise' (ibid.: 6). Reconsiderations of the specificities and implications of the 'post-colonial' experience and its theories in Francophone, Latin American and other countries, have been instructive in testing and reaching beyond these conceptual and linguistic borders. Khair's efforts, showing the world mapped by Asian and African travellers, have been corroborated by scholars of travel and its articulations in non-metropolitan, non-Anglophone cultures, including French- and Spanish-speaking former colonies (see, for example, Forsdick 2005; Lindsay 2010; Bracewell 2009). Writing about journeys by non-Europeans in languages other than English raises fundamental questions about the generic expression and very modalities of travel, practices that take on different meanings in different cultures. Insofar as mobility is often predominantly viewed as the exclusive purview of the European, and in light of its longstanding imperial 'taint', such endeavours require and often insist on the recalibration of existing precepts, while remaining receptive to cross-cultural influences (impossible as it is, for example, to discuss non-European travel writing without its European counterpart).

An insistence on specificity and difference is not necessarily a demand for exceptionalism, however. As Charles Forsdick suggests, 'interculturality [ought to have] a paradigmatic rather than merely thematic status' in the study of travel writing (Forsdick 2005: xix), for to reduce its discussion to one discipline is counterintuitive in respect of such a fluid, transnational category. Mindful, as Said also famously averred, that theories themselves can travel and that cultural frontiers are perhaps more porous than ever in our increasingly globalized world, these recent developments suggest that travel writing and postcolonial studies will continue to be mutually invested in linguistic, thematic and epistemological terms. Moreover, the growing proliferation of diaspora and digital networks in our contemporary world poses questions about location and travel in ways that challenge fixed notions of those ideas, as well as of nationhood, and which ramify, of course, our understanding of what it is to write about (dis)placement. On the other hand, there already exists a growing body of (literary and journey) narratives that articulate varying degrees of postcolonial 'ecocriticism' or environmental engagement, the travelogue offering a seemingly natural vehicle for addressing another pressing current concern. In these respects, travel writing and postcolonial studies today, notwithstanding (or perhaps even precisely because of) the circumstances of their historical alliance, have tremendous potential for social commitment and even for the articulation of what Mignolo calls 'diversality', 'a project that is an alternative to universality and offers the possibilities of a network of planetary confrontations with globalization in the name of justice, equity, human rights, and epistemic diversality' (Mignolo 2008: 257).

**Note**

1 Here, I adhere to the use of the hyphenated form 'post-colonial' to refer to that which comes chronologically after colonialism, and 'postcolonial' to refer to 'a contemporary assessment of the culture and history of empire from the moment of conquest' (see Forsdick and Murphy 2003: 5).

**Select bibliography**

Behdad, A. (1994) _Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution_ , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bracewell, W. (2009) _Orientations: An Anthology of East European Travel Writing ca 1550–2000,_ Budapest and New York: CEU Press.

Campbell, Mary Baine (2002) 'Travel Writing and Its Theory', in P. Hulme and T. Youngs (eds), _The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clark, S. (1999) _Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit_ , London: Zed Books.

Duffy, E. (1996) 'Being Materialist: Beyond Polite Postcolonialism', _Diaspora:_ _A_ _Journal of Transnational Studies_ 5(2): 303–316.

Dunn, K. (2004) 'Fear of a Black Planet: Anarchy Anxieties and Postcolonial Travel to Africa', _Third World Quarterly_ 25(3): 483–499.

Edwards. J.D. and Graulund, R. (2011) _Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Forsdick, C. and Murphy, D. (2003) _Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction_ , London: Arnold.

Forsdick, C. (2005) _Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Foster, S. and Mills, S. (2002) _An Anthology of Women's Travel Writing_ , Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Ghose, I. (1998) _Memsahibs Abroad: Writings by Women Travellers in Nineteenth-Century India_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Grewal, I. (1996) _Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel_ , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Holland, P. and Huggan, G. (2000) _Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing_ , Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Hulme, P. and T. Youngs (2002) _The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing,_ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kennedy, D. (1996) 'Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory', _The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History_ 24(3): 345–363.

Khair, T. (2006) _Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing_ , Oxford: Signal.

Kincaid, J. (1988) _A Small Place_ , New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Korte, B. (2000) _English Travel Writing From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations_ , London: Macmillan.

Lindsay, C. (2010) _Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America_ , New York: Routledge.

López Ropero, M.L. (2003) 'Travel Writing and Postcoloniality: Caryl Phillips's _The Atlantic Sound' Atlantis_ 25(1): 51–62.

Mignolo, W.D. (2008) 'The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference', in M. Moraña, E. Dussel and C.J. Jauregui (eds), _Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate_ , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Phillips, C. (1999) _The European Tribe_ , 1987, London: Faber and Faber.

Pratt, M.L. (2008) _Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation_ , 1992, New York: Routledge.

Said, E. (1995) [1978] _Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient_ , 1978, London: Penguin.

Smethurt, P. (2004) 'Travels in Globality: Pico Iyer and Jan Morris in Hong Kong', _Studies in Travel Writing,_ 8(2): 179–197.

Spurr, D. (1993) _The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration_ , Durham: Duke University Press.

Wilson, J., Şandru, C., and Lawson Welsh, S. (2010) _Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium_ , New York: Routledge.

Travel Writing and Gender

_Dúnlaith Bird_

Travel writing involves the construction of textual identities through motion, encounters and exchanges. The embedded perspective of the traveller is framed through multiple discourses; for example, race, nationality and class. A key frame of reference, however, and one which has generated much critical, historical and theoretical enquiry, is gender. Feminist literary criticism was an important stimulus to the recent burgeoning of interest in travel writing, as researchers sought to identify and analyse women's contributions to what was traditionally viewed as a masculine genre. Pursuing this agenda, the first phase of feminist recovery often offered a rather essentializing account of women's travel writing, which assumed fundamental similarities of style, form and attitude based on the writer's gender. Recent critical theory has taken a more nuanced view, understanding gender as just one factor among many variables and sifting through diverse intercommunicating discourses to better understand the relations they construct. Increasing attention has also been paid to the ways in which male travel writers variously conform to, consolidate or question prevailing norms of masculinity; gender, it is now recognized, is a factor that affects men's as well as women's travel writing.

Travel writing has the potential to dislocate cultural norms of gender, rendering their performance bizarre rather than natural and unchanging when observed out of context. As Amanda Gilroy opines, '[t]he disturbances of travel could destabilize the boundaries of national, racial, gender and class affiliations' (2000: 1). Yet historically, destabilization has not been the only nor even the most common response to gender norms in travel writing. Until well into the twentieth century travel writing was often defined as a masculine domain, a showcase for contemporary norms of masculinity, heroism and virility. In this, travel writing and adventure fiction share a common language: as Ali Behdad notes, both are filled with archetypal figures of masculinity and impregnated with 'the exotics of adventure' (Behdad 2009: 82). Travellers like Richard Burton, with his linguistic mastery, sexual prowess and indefatigable derring-do, exemplified the genre for an avid European audience: 'The world was "all before me," and there was pleasant excitement in plunging single-handed into its chilling depths' (Burton 2007: 10).

However, there is a sense, even with Burton, that the strict gendering of the genre may become restrictive for the male traveller. There is at times an element of weariness or belatedness in their reproduction of well-worn tropes. Gustave Flaubert sleeps with the Egyptian dancer Ruchiouk-Hânem, fulfilling the European fantasy for full possession of the Orient. Yet the traveller is writing by rote, not entirely at ease with the figure of masculinity he presents: 'Pour moi, je n'ai guère fermé l'œil' ['As for myself, I hardly slept a wink'] (Flaubert 2004: 26). Travel writing is a privileged locus of self-fashioning for men on condition that they observe the accepted forms of masculinity: asserting facts rather than indulging feelings, announcing heroism rather than admitting cowardice, accumulating heterosexual conquests and eliding homosexual exploration. Later travellers including Bruce Chatwin and Redmond O'Hanlon openly complain of a genre whose conventions confine travellers to relatively narrow definitions of masculinity. Conversely, women travel writers, even those travelling in more established capacities as missionaries or pioneers, must contend with the apparent unconventionality of their position. They are arguably in a position to explore new textual constructions of femininity precisely because no fixed paradigm exists.

**Feminist imperialists and female solidarity**

The idea of travel writing as a purely male domain, where women were noteworthy exceptions, persists today, as seen in biographies like Pat Barr's _A Curious Life for a Lady: The Story of Isabella Bird_ (1970) and anthologies such as Lapierre and Mouchard's _Elles ont conquis le monde: les grandes aventurières 1850–1950_ ( _They Conquered the World: Great Women Adventurers_ , 2007). Recent criticism has sought to counter this emphasis on exceptionality, focusing instead on the numbers of women travelling and the colonial and religious networks they integrated. Billie Melman's ground-breaking _Women's Orients_ (1995) deliberately adopts a quantitative rather than qualitative approach in order to distance her analysis from what she terms the 'emergency men', the women travellers drafted into a male tradition and judged worthy of critical attention due to their supposedly unusual or eccentric behaviour (Melman 1995: 5).

Another key debate addressed by Melman in her study of women's networks in the Orient is the assumption, particularly in early feminist criticism, that women could not be complicit in colonialism. Despite important contributions including Susan Morgan's _Place Matters_ (1996) and the work of John MacKenzie (1986, 1995), the reluctance to acknowledge women travellers' implication in imperialism continues. Discussing colonial writing, Elleke Boehmer makes a conscious decision to use masculine pronouns, since '[t]he majority of narratives of Empire involved masculine heroes and assumed a predominantly male audience' (Boehmer 1995: 9). While such a stance draws attention to the gender bias within the genre, it also elides the often complex relations of complicity and negotiation many women travellers developed with imperial ideology and administration. More recent criticism tends to recognize that women travellers may be pro-empire while retaining a complex, often ambivalent relationship with colonial administrations that treated them as subordinates on the grounds of gender. Although women travel writers in the imperial age did not have the same access to power as their male contemporaries, many, including Isabella Bird (1880, 1985) and Gertrude Bell (1985), defended their positions as part of the imperial apparatus.

Despite these more nuanced critical readings, there is often still an expectation that women travel writers should display a sense of solidarity with other women they encounter. In _Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary_ (2001), the authors claim that women travellers, already somehow Other or _ex-centric_ in their own culture, therefore occupy a privileged position of ' _otherness_ ' within the host culture and so can identify with the equally marginalized native women beyond cultural and class boundaries (Fortunati and Ascari 2001: 5). Although an attractive proposition, somewhat born out in the grassroots anthropology of nineteenth-century women travellers like Lucie Duff Gordon or Olympe Audouard, this assumes that all women, regardless of socio-economic or cultural background, share a common experience of gender and a common bond of sisterhood. Such a theoretical approach tends to reduce those in the host country to the function of a mirror, set up to reflect the experience of the European traveller. It also disavows the experience of those travellers who do not fit a pre-established cisgender model, including Paula Grieg and Jan Morris.

Tim Youngs (2013: 132) has questioned the assumption of empathy and sisterhood among women of different cultures, seeing it as a form of essentialist appropriation or even belated colonialism which elides questions of race or socio-economic inequalities. In fact a lack of sisterly solidarity was a deliberate strategy for many women travel writers wishing to align themselves with Western imperial power. As a means of appropriating a textual authority traditionally identified as masculine, and of differentiating themselves from local women, many women travel writers depict the indigenous women they encounter as inferior, suppressing any potential similarities. Isabella Bird describes the awakening of the Korean mu-tang, a kind of female shaman: 'On obeying a demon call the woman snaps every tie of custom or relationship, deserts parents, husband, or children, and obeys the "call" alone' (Bird 1985: 409). Arguably this description could also be applied to contemporary perceptions of the solitary woman traveller, an unnatural woman who abandons her home for a powerful inner voice and the lure of the wild. Recognizing such dangerous parallels, Bird distances herself from the mu-tangs, referring to their practices as 'barbarous and degrading' (ibid.: 424). Women travel writers, like their male counterparts, seek out narrative strategies that allow them to negotiate the pitfalls of reader expectations and contemporary gender norms, often at the expense of cultural sensitivity or solidarity.

**Clothes make the man?**

Cross-dressing and cross-cultural dressing are long-standing traditions in both men and women's travel writing, allowing the traveller to transgress the gender norms of their home and host countries. Equally, clothing can be used to signal the traveller's continued allegiance to the home culture, defusing dangerous accusations of 'going native' or 'unnatural behaviour'. In many nineteenth-century travelogues by women, the easily recognizable trappings of femininity, especially the skirt, are preserved even in hostile environments. These objects can be used as a form of sartorial shorthand, for example when Isabella Bird recounts playing dress-up on the outskirts of an American frontier town: 'I got off, put on a long skirt, and rode sidewise, though the settlement scarcely looked like a place where any deference to prejudices was necessary' (Bird 1992: 177). Of course this performance is less for the benefit of the frontier dwellers and more for Bird's British readers, who must be assured that Bird continues to observe cultural norms of femininity even as her travels take her further away from home.

Often cross-dressing is framed by the travel writer as a deference to practical concerns, rather than a desire to transgress gender norms. Just as Bird's long skirt is impractical for riding astride, in _Voyage d'une femme au Spitzberg_ ( _Journey of a Woman to Spitzberg_ , 1854) French traveller Léonie d'Aunet complains that her skirt leaves her stuck in the mud, not just hindering movement but halting it altogether. She later abandons her dresses for men's clothing, arguing ease of movement and practicality. Though it is hard not to see a claim for personal freedom in d'Aunet's sartorial choices, her references to her dresses and skirts, along with the title of her volume, act as strategic reminders to her readers that although she may deviate from the gender norms of her culture in certain respects, she remains a woman. Appropriate clothing offered another line of defence against the common accusation levelled against nineteenth-century women travellers as 'unnatural' women. As in Mary Kingsley's famous account of falling into an animal trap, the timely deployment of a skirt could save the woman traveller's skin in more ways than one.

Male travellers are also confronted with the question of what to wear, and the messages this sends to a home audience. Sartorial choices can be a safe means of escaping constrictive gender norms, as in Pierre Loti's 1895 account of travelling in the Levant, _Le desert_ ( _The Desert_ ). There is a sense of giddy pleasure in Loti's descriptions of flamboyant cross-cultural dressing, as the traveller compares himself and his companions to Aladdin, admires the aesthetic effect of his robes against the desert dust, and deplores above all the lack of an audience (Loti 2006: 53–4). Such sartorial crossings sometimes allowed the traveller to reinforce his sense of cultural superiority by adopting, undetectably, a foreign national dress. T.E. Lawrence, meanwhile, claimed that dressing in Arab robes was a mere performance for the sake of expedience, allowing him to integrate into the tribes more easily: '[they] quitted me of my English self' (Lawrence 1973: 30). Despite, or perhaps because of, the sense of pleasure that accompanies this 'quitting', he insists that he is not really 'going native': 'I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only' (ibid.). Yet it was an affectation to which Lawrence regularly returned, often choosing to use not Arab robes but the ornately embroidered clothing of a Syrian gypsy woman to infiltrate enemy territory. In his subsequent travelogue _The Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ (1926), however, he only mentions briefly his cultural cross-dressing, and elides entirely the adoption of women's costume, which suggests a lingering unease over this contravention of contemporary racial and gender norms. What appear to be simple 'affectations' may get under the traveller's skin, calling into question what is natural about gender and what clothes can make the man into: an Arab sheikh, a Syrian gypsy woman or an archetypal British male traveller.

While Lawrence somewhat desperately reaffirms gender norms, other writers choose to openly play with the gender ambiguities introduced by cross-cultural dressing. Gérard de Nerval tells his readers how he is seduced into femininity at the sight of Arab robes hanging in an Egyptian bazaar: 'choses fort séduisantes qui excitent chez l'homme un sentiment de coquetterie tout féminin' ['highly seductive things which provoke a feeling of coquetry in a man which is entirely feminine'] (Nerval 1998: 204). This textual gender play is intensified in the original French through the alternation of masculine and feminine articles. A similarly playful blurring of binary genders is evident in Isabelle Eberhardt's account, in _Sud oranais_ ( _The Southern Oran Region_ , 1903) of passing a border crossing as her male Muslim alter ego Sidi Mahmood. The bemused guard refuses to believe his eyes as he looks from the traveller's identity papers to her face, unable to reconcile the picture of the European girl and Arab scholar before him (Eberhardt 1988: 134). As these texts show, fixed cultural notions of gender identity can be rendered fluid when set in motion in a foreign country. Many travellers experimented with the degrees of freedom their distance from home allowed, while remaining aware that too-visible transgressions of gender norms could damage their authority back home.

**Strategic authority**

The construction of authority is central to travel writing. Particularly for women travellers, considered to be somewhat anomalous and inconsequential within the genre, this could be a complex process. The most common paradigms available were founded on gendered models of masculine possession and feminine submission, which were difficult for women writers to access. In _Imperial Eyes_ (1992), Mary Louise Pratt picks apart the dynamics of power and gender that underpin the 'Monarch of All I Survey' stance, ubiquitous in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century men's travel writing. In this concupiscent cartography, the unknown land is depicted as virgin territory, spread out below the virile traveller and begging to be claimed. How do the increasing numbers of women travel writers access such clearly gender-coded language? How can a traveller write herself into a position of authority from which she is excluded on the basis of gender, yet given conditional access by virtue of class or nationality?

It is important to consider the strategies women and other travellers excluded from dominant norms of race, sexual orientation or gender developed in order to legitimate their authority as travel writers. Sara Mills contends that colonial spatial relations are constantly redefined depending on whether an encounter takes place between a man and a woman, a native and a non-native, in a colonial bungalow or in a village. Crucially, rather than passively enduring such relations, she argues that individuals are constantly affirming, negotiating and modifying them (Mills 2005: 3).

Some nineteenth-century women travellers, for example, took advantage of their presence in a foreign country to assume positions of authority generally coded as masculine, including that of war journalist or intrepid reporter. Susan Pickford identifies this as the travel writing subgenre of 'genteel woman traveller overtaken by political events/natural disaster constrained to report upon them' (Pickford 2009: 66). In _Korea and her Neighbours_ (1897), Isabella Bird is caught up in the regime change following the Sino-Japanese war, and in intense flooding on the way to Mukden. In both cases she stresses the importance of the traveller as eyewitness, whose embedded perspective gives her account an authority that papers at home in England lack: 'Telegrams later in the English papers announced "Great floods in Manchuria", but of the magnitude of the inundation [. . .] only the experience of sailing over it could give any idea' (Bird 1985: 193). The traveller's gender is not occluded but drowned by force of necessity, her accounts given authority through her physical presence on the ground.

There are other means of occupying the traditionally gendered terrain of travel writing. Elizabeth Bohls's influential _Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818_ analyses the ways in which women travellers used the gender-coded language of aesthetics, formative in the development of the travel writing genre. The access of women travel writers to this discourse was difficult, forcing them to either awkwardly appropriate the language of voluptuous, supine landscapes and virgin cities, or develop alternative aesthetics which draw upon but are not limited to the dominant discourse. Similarly, women travellers have traditionally been excluded from the more scientific paths to legitimation, at least until the twentieth century. The seemingly omniscient tandem of masculine imperial authority and map-making, as exemplified in the work of British traveller Francis Galton, is perhaps why women travellers – including Gertrude Bell – take such pleasure in discovering that they have ridden off the map, and must use their own ingenuity instead: 'Thereupon I had out my map, and after trying to guess what point on the blank white paper we must have reached, I turned my caravan a little to the west' (Bell 1985: 73).

Despite the anthropological and scientific work of travellers such as Gertrude Bell, Isabella Bird or Mary Kingsley, pre-twentieth-century women's travelogues tend to foreground more acceptably 'feminine' feelings and impressions when exploring a new location. In _Letters Written in France_ (1790), Helen Maria Williams deploys sentiment, a traditionally feminine quality, in order to make sense of the shifting terrain in the aftermath of the French Revolution. This strategy also legitimates her position as a witness for the British public: 'I too, though but a sojourner in their land, rejoiced in their happiness, joined in the universal voice, and repeated with all my heart and soul, "Vive la nation!" ' (Williams 1989: 21). Such legitimation is problematic however: in constructing an authority based on gender, the woman traveller risks restriction to purely 'feminine' spheres.

By virtue of gender women travellers often had access to spaces where their male counterparts were forbidden, giving them a unique attraction for the reading public. Particularly popular were accounts of harems, as Inderpal Grewal (1997) has notably discussed. Yet this access to gendered spaces creates its own complications for the travel writer: the authenticity of her account is guaranteed by her gender, and yet this foregrounding of femininity risks reducing the traveller to just another woman amid the masses rather than an omnipotent observer. Despite the fact that her gender might allow her to enter the harem openly, French traveller Jane Dieulafoy rejoices at her cunning in 'stealing' a photograph of two young unveiled Persian women in their home (Dieulafoy 1887: 36). Dieulafoy occupies the traditional position of the male European, desiring the exotic Orient which can only be approached obliquely or through deception. A desire for authority not based solely on gender leads the travel writer to reproduce masculine tropes of Orientalist desire and possession, demonstrating the difficulty of finding new approaches to gender in travel writing.

**Publishing and prevarication**

Questions of gender affect not just the content of the travelogue but how that content is framed and marketed. As Steve Clark notes in his introduction to _Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit_ (1999), travel writing is 'unabashedly commercial' (1999: 1), a notion expanded upon in recent years by Graham Huggan (2001). Travellers follow the trade winds, travel writers negotiate the book trade. The most commercially savvy and successful among them exchange ideas on paratext and marketing with their publishers, embark on public speaking tours and give readings of their travelogues. Yet access to the literary market was particularly complex for the woman travel writer up to, and including, the early twentieth century. For a woman to move outside the domestic sphere and explore terrain considered unsuitable for ladies was one offence, for her to render her transgressions public by publishing a travelogue was to be doubly damned. Yet contrary to popular understanding, a sense of commercial awareness and a willingness to exploit the popularity of the travel writing genre is palpable in the letters and prefaces of many woman travellers from the eighteenth century onwards, though Olympe Audouard is one of the few to openly admit that her aim in writing her Turkish travelogue is to make money: 'je fais cet ouvrage, espérant le vendre' ['I write this work in the hopes of selling it'] (Audouard 1863: 2).

In her Preface to the highly successful _Letters from India_ (1817), British traveller Eliza Fay referenced 'the pains and penalties then generally inflicted on female authorship' which initially made her reluctant to publish her account despite the encouragement of her friends (1908: xvi). Although she had rendered herself unusual among her peer group by virtue of her travels, she is at pains to demonstrate her continued adherence to British standards of femininity, a common stance adopted by travel writers in this period. However in this 'indulgent era', she claims, 'the author presumes to deliver her letters to the world as they have been preserved by [her] dear sister' (ibid.: xvii). Fay admits that she has chosen the epistolary form, 'the most unassuming of all kinds of writing', because it is likely to be received 'with peculiar mercy and forbearance' (ibid.: xvii). This preference for letters and diaries among women travellers is in part strategic: the epistolary genre is strongly linked to the feminine, the domestic and the affective. The choice of this form sends a strong signal to the reading public: though the travel writer may wander into the public sphere, her moral compass is firmly pointed towards home.

Selling one's wares in an increasingly segmented and competitive market involved both publisher and author, and anything that helped to distinguish a traveller from the masses was fair game. John Murray's professional authors Mariana Starke and Isabella Bird helped to develop integrated marketing plans for their travelogues using gender as a unique selling point, influencing everything from title and paratext to choice of content. The use of gendered advertising as part of such marketing strategies is evident in 'Mr. Murray's List', published in _The Times_ Column of New Books and New Editions in October 1880. The second item on the list is a rather demure advertisement for ' _Unbeaten Tracks in Japan_. Travels of a Lady in the Interior, including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrine of Nikko and Isé. By Isabella Bird, Author of "A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains," &c. With Map and Illustrations'. In a short advertisement of only three lines, the word 'lady' is mentioned twice: if for many women travellers gender became a determining factor in how their observations were framed and presented to the public, some writers were canny enough to exploit this advantage.

Often, however, rather than being able to use gender as a marketing tool, travellers find their tales are overwhelmed by the gender-based expectations which rise up around them. In _Tracks_ (1980), Robyn Davidson complains that her original aim was to undermine the idea that only strapping, virile white men could travel through the Australian outback. She set out to show that an ordinary woman traveller could make it from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean, accepting help from Aboriginal Australians she met. Unfortunately the _National Geographic_ and other news outlets decided that the image of the eccentric, glamorous 'Camel Lady' was far more marketable. Davidson finds her 'new adventuress's identity kit ill-fitting and uncomfortable' (Davidson 1998: 252). As Foster and Mills (2002) note, a traveller intending to break away from gender stereotypes cannot control how her work is read by an audience with essentialist notions of gender. Indeed it is arguably in the reception of their travelogues that the differences between men's and women's travel writing are most emphatically imposed.

**Improvising in the contact zone**

Mary Louise Pratt's concept of the 'contact zone', social spaces 'where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subjugation' (Pratt 2001: 4) has been influential in reconceptualising the dynamics of travel writing in terms of human interaction and exchange. As Pratt herself acknowledges, this understanding of the contact zone insists on conflict and asymmetrical power dynamics as central features of travel. In her more recent work, however, Pratt focuses on the importance of improvisation and negotiation within the contact zone. In the essay 'Planetarity' (2004) she uses a series of vignettes, ranging in location from a Bulgarian classroom to a New York delicatessen, to explore how difference may be lived as coexistence, the co-presence of bodies in space. Essential to this new art of the contact zone is the willingness to enter into stuttering dialogues where the participants do not necessarily speak the same language. She argues that such exchanges must be made up on the spot, and in the embodied moment, by the participants: 'Hence, performativity and improvisation. And these two terms imply a third: imperfection' (ibid.: 13). What if these notions of exchange, improvisation and imperfection were used to construct a paradigm for travel writing and gender which did not reinscribe dominant discourses of power and subjugation?

Susan Bassnett remarks that the majority of women travellers chose to write from 'within a tradition that denied them a role' (Bassnett 2002: 231). However, as recent critical theory has suggested, including my own work on _vagabondage_ (2012), many women travellers were engaged in elaborating their own traditions of travel writing which subverted certain gendered clichés of the genre and (mis)appropriated others. _Vagabondage_ can be defined as a search for identity through motion, a physical and textual elaboration with no fixed itinerary. In _Heures de Tunis_ ( _Tunis Hours_ , 1902), Swiss traveller Isabelle Eberhardt gives a manifesto, claiming that: 'le vagabondage, c'est l'affranchissement, et la vie le long des routes, c'est la liberté' ['vagabondage is liberation, and life on the roads is freedom'] (Eberhardt 1988: 27). _Vagabondage_ is the construction of gender in constant motion, the endless destruction of the settled self in a series of encounters and departures.

With its roots in the historically masculine figure of the vagabond, elements of _vagabondage_ , including cross-dressing, gender peripateia and textual experimentation begin to emerge in European women's travel writing from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Olympe Audouard's experimentations with narrative voice, like the extreme structural hybridity of her travelogues, can be seen as a form of _vagabondage_. From seductive temptress to authoritative historian, Audouard remains in constant motion, trying on a variety of authorial personae which defy any notion of a fixed identity. For example, despite the fact that the figure of the crime reporter was largely off-limits to women writers (see Mills 1991: 77), Audouard gives repeated accounts of dismemberment, poisonings and cannibalism. She circumvents the notions of propriety and femininity, which would deny her a voice in this field, instead constructing a hybrid narratorial position which combines the traditionally feminine domains of storytelling and grassroots local connections with a journalistic detachment. Structurally her texts reflect this mobility and potential instability, breaking off from a detailed historical account of the five Pashas of Egypt to recount a violent tale of star-crossed lovers; moving from a gristly account of an execution to recommendations for the smooth running of the Ottoman Empire. The mobile, fractured structure of Audouard's texts is startlingly different to the comparatively conventional epistolary form chosen by her British contemporary, Lucie Duff Gordon in _Letters from Egypt, 1863–65_ (1902), and should be seen as part of a conscious attempt to expand the boundaries of women's travel writing. Confounding stock notions of what Eric Leed terms 'certain realities in the history of travel: the sessility of women; the mobility of men' (1991: 113), Audouard instead inscribes freedom of movement and improvisation as the paradigm for her travelogues.

In an even more extreme fashion Isabelle Eberhardt engages in both sexual and linguistic experimentation in her travel writing, shifting the action from the barracks to the brothel floor while also moving between masculine and feminine pronouns and personae. This insistent experimentation leads to a remarkable passage in _Vers les horizons bleus_ ( _Towards the Blue Horizons_ , 1908) where the traveller is both masculine and feminine, penetrating and impregnated, and clearly poking fun at gendered tropes of possession in the Orientalist travelogue. Eberhardt explains to the reader that she chooses her Arab robes, and her role as a _vagabonde_ , because as an appropriately dressed young European lady she would be allowed to see nothing, given that public life is for men. She then proceeds to undermine this gendered dichotomy, claiming that she enjoys 'me plonger dans le bain de la vie populaire, à sentir les ondes de la foule couler sur moi, à m'imprégner des fluides du peuple' ['plunging into ordinary people's lives, feeling the waves of the crowd flowing over me, impregnating myself with the fluids of the people'] (Eberhardt 1988: 73). The woman traveller takes a phallic plunge, before being caressed by waves of orgasmic pleasure. Finally she reverses the popular Orientalist trope of conquest; the traveller and, not the host culture, is 'impregnated'. In a single sentence Eberhardt destabilises the notion of fixed gender identity, bringing not just women but women's sexual pleasure into the public sphere, and questioning the rigid gender codes that underpin much nineteenth- and twentieth-century travel writing. In this way, _vagabondage_ seeks to push out the physical, geographical and textual boundaries by which gender is defined, providing an alternative paradigm through which to view questions of travel writing, gender and identity construction.

**Conclusion**

Travel writing continues to evolve. Despite its historical links to colonial acquisition and its appropriative nature as a genre, it cannot simply be read as a form of veiled self-exploration in which the self/Other binary is perpetuated. Instead it is the account of unexpected meetings and missed connections, of fantastical personae which calcify into fact for an army of armchair travellers and of identity constructions that misfire. Travel writing sets multiple discourses, including that of gender, into motion, troubling and fracturing them. There is an increasing impetus, particularly among proponents of feminist geography (Rose 1993; McDowell 2013), towards a more mobile understanding of identity and textuality, studying people and groups in transit, whose identities are changing through adaptation, innovation or force of circumstance. Pratt considers that this '[r]apidly accelerating movement of peoples is creating not a world without history, but the proliferating intersection of histories' (Pratt 2004: 17). Some of the most interesting contemporary writers travel with both a gender and an agenda, experimenting with narratorial perspectives, proliferating identities and new directions for gender. For them identity is elsewhere, constructed through unexpected physical, verbal and textual connections with others.

**Select bibliography**

Audouard, O. (1863) _Les mystères du sérail et des harems turcs: lois, mœurs, usages_ , _anecdotes_ , Paris: Dentu.

Audouard, O. (1865) _Les mystères de l'Égypte dévoilés_ , Paris: Dentu.

Bassnett, S. (2002) 'Travel Writing and Gender', in P. Hulme and T. Youngs (eds), _The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Behdad, A. (2009) 'The Politics of Adventure: Theories of Travel, Discourses of Power', in J. Kuehn and P. Smethurst (eds), _Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility_ , New York: Routledge.

Bell, G. (1985) _The Desert and the Sown_ , London: Virago.

Bird, D. (2012) _Travelling in Different Skins: Gender Identity in European Women's Oriental Travelogues, 1850–1950_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bird, I. (1992) [1880] _A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains_ , London: Virago.

Bird, I. (1985) _Korea and her Neighbours_ , London: Kegan Paul International.

Boehmer, E. (1995) _Colonial and Postcolonial Literature_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Burton, R. (2007) _To the Holy Shrines_ , London: Penguin, 2007.

Clark, S. (ed.) (1999) _Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit_ , London: Zed Books.

Davidson, R. (1998) _Tracks_ , London: Picador.

Dieulafoy, J. (1887) _La Perse, la Chaldée et la Susiane_ , Paris: Hachette.

Eberhardt, I. (1988) _Écrits sur le sable: Oeuvres complètes I_ , Paris: Bernard Grasset.

Fay, E. (1908) _The Original Letters from India of Mrs. Eliza Fay_ , Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co.

Flaubert, G. (2004) _Le Nil: Lettres de voyage_ , Paris: Magellan et Cie.

Fortunati, V., Monticelli, R. and Ascari, M. (eds) (2001) _Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary_ , Bologna: Pàtron Editore.

Foster, S. and Mills, S. (2002) _An Anthology of Women's Travel Writing_ , Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Gilroy, A. (ed.) (2000) _Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775–1844_ , Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Grewal, I. (1997) _Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Culture of Travel_. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Huggan, G. (2001) _The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins_ , London: Routledge.

Lawrence, T.E. (1973) _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ , London: Penguin.

Leed, E. J. (1991) _The Mind of the Traveller: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism_ , New York: Basic Books.

Loti, P. (2006) _Le désert_ , Paris: Payot.

McDowell, L. (2013) _Working Lives: Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945–2007_ , Sussex: John Wiley.

MacKenzie, J. (ed.) (1986) 'Introduction', in _Imperialism and Popular Culture,_ Manchester: University of Manchester Press.

MacKenzie, J. (ed.) (1995) _Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts_ , Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Melman, B. (1995) _Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, Sexuality_ , _Religion and Work, 1718–1918_ , London: Macmillan.

Mills, S. (1991) _Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism_ , London: Routledge.

Mills, S. (2005) _Gender and Colonial Space_ , Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Nerval, G. de. (1998) _Voyage en Orient_ , Paris: Gallimard.

Pickford, S. (2009) 'The Page as Private/Public Space in Mariana Starke's Travel Writings on Italy', in J. Kuehn and P. Smethurst (eds), _Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility_ , New York: Routledge.

Pratt, M.L. (1992) _Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation_ , London: Routledge.

Pratt, M.L. (2004) _'_ Planetarity _'_ , in M.L. Pratt, R.G. Manley and S. Bassnett, _Intercultural Dialogue_ , London: British Council.

Rose, G. (1993) _Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge_ , Minneapolis: Minnesota.

_Times Online_ (2006) _The Times_ , 26 October 1880, p. 12, Issue 30022. Online. Available at: http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/tol/archive (accessed 5 August 2015).

Williams, H.M. (1989) _Letters Written in France: 1790_ , Oxford: Woodstock.

Youngs, T. (2013) _The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Travel Writing and Sexuality

Queering the Genre

_Churnjeet Mahn_

Sex and travel are hardly unfamiliar bedfellows; indeed, access to sex, especially when it is tabooed, has often been an impetus to travel in the first place. Yet if a significant body of research has been produced around gender and travel writing, especially on women's writing, sexuality has seldom been an important criterion in the scholarly analysis of travel writing past and present. Apart from a few notable exceptions (Littlewood 2001; Phillips 2002; Jacobs 2012), the analysis of sexuality has usually been subsumed into discussions of gender, whilst 'queer' in travel writing studies is often used simply as a shorthand for gay and lesbian identities rather than as a methodological tool through which to approach the description of transgressive, alternative, or non-normative sexualities. Yet the burgeoning field of queer theory has the potential not only to create new inroads into well-known subjects, but also to contribute to an ongoing discussion of how bodies, identities and subjects are rendered and represented in the act of writing. In this chapter, accordingly, I explore some of the ways in which queer studies might productively intersect with travel writing studies. Rather than offering a comprehensive account or genealogy of queer travel writing, my aim is to highlight some key texts and moments where queer lives become more visible in travel writing.

Although defining queer theory is notoriously difficult, it is possible and important to identity some core concerns that are relevant for scholars of travel writing. Queer theory is interested in the way 'normal' categories, especially in sexuality, are produced and how non-normative sexualities are pushed out of cultural recognition and sanction through legal practices (such as the criminalization of sodomy), discursive structures (such as the vilification of homosexuality) and the privileging of certain lifestyles and social customs (such as heterosexuality). Foucault's seminal study, _The History of Sexuality_ (1976), analysed the way discursive structures such as the 'homosexual' were produced through legal, medical and ideological discourses. There is nothing natural or inevitable about sexuality for queer theorists; rather, the labelling of sexuality is a way to create types of legitimate and illegitimate bodies. David Halperin defines the queer as:

_whatever_ is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. _There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers_. It is an identity without an essence. "Queer" [. . .] describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance.

(Halperin 1997: 62, emphasis in the original)

Halperin, Judith/Jack Halberstam, Judith Butler and Annamarie Jagose are amongst a group of critics who have challenged the operation of gender and sexuality in Western cultures through case studies of subjects and groups whose lives are pushed to the edge of acceptability. Queer theorists are consequently most concerned with lives and subjects at the margins of visibility and viability, often deploying the language of (im)possibility and (il)legibility to reflect the way queer lives are always present but often hidden from view due to the pressures in society to conform to norms. Halperin's 'horizon of possibility' is an imperative to create new forms of being and interaction that actively resist dominant discourses, and to identify a history of sexual dissidence. It is easy to imagine why travel writing can be a perfect vehicle for the queer: travel has a long association with subjects crossing conventional borders and boundaries, and the margin and periphery are travel writing staples.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual and queer (LGBTQ) has become an umbrella term for a collection of identities whose commonality is a challenge to 'normal' sexuality. However, it would be erroneous to assume that there is a single, collective vision within these groups, or that all people who identify as LGBT or Q are sympathetic to recent theoretical and critical interpretations of queerness. 'Queering' travel involves interrogating how the genre helps to produce, and sometimes challenge, knowledge and understanding about sexuality. Rather than referring to a discrete body of knowledge, it involves the disruption and questioning of heteronormative paradigms. Queering the travel writing canon is to some extent a matter of identifying and critiquing moments when the genre works in culture to promote and enforce normative (hetero)sexuality; and it is a project especially concerned to recover and explore moments in which heteronormative structures and relationships are queried or undermined through travel or travel writing. The most obvious focus here is perhaps the recent growth in openly gay and lesbian travel writing, yet I would argue that the genre has always had queer undercurrents.

A comprehensive history of these aspects of the travel writing tradition is beyond the scope of this chapter, but in the first section I offer some glimpses into queer moments in Anglophone travel and travel writing prior to the rise of LGBTQ-identified literature and politics. I roughly date this phase from the late eighteenth century, which witnessed a rise in recreational or touristic travel, and consequently a greater exposure to different models of sexuality around the Mediterranean. Part of my argument is that in this pre-LGBTQ phase of writing it is possible to identify a loose collection of literary threads which challenged sexual norms and categories without necessarily belonging to a cohesive movement. While same-sex attraction features strongly in this, it is not an exclusive feature of the way writers challenged sexuality. I then move on to discuss the comparatively recent appearance of openly LGBTQ travel writers, addressing some of the issues raised by such categorizations and by the identity politics related to them. In particular, I explore the frequent slippage between the terms 'LGBTQ' and 'queer' in popular culture, community groups, policy discussions and even some recent scholarship. Here, however, I want to consider whether gay and lesbian travel writing is always queer travel writing. While being a lesbian might be queer because of the challenge to heteronormative sexual categories, it also comes with an identity politics which queer theory resists. In the final section I explore what can be at stake when LGBTQ writers project Western sexual categories on to other cultures; and here, mindful of recent scholarship that brings queer studies into conversation with postcolonial studies, I look especially at recent gay travellers in Islamic countries and contexts.

**Queer lives, queer journeys**

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, popular Gothic novels such as Matthew Lewis's _The Monk_ (1796), prurient accounts of Lord Byron's travels and the satirical prints of figures like Thomas Rowlandson all helped make the Mediterranean a region strongly associated with taboo sexual practices such as incest, sodomy and pornography. William Beckford was effectively forced into exile for his homosexuality in the 1780s; travel for him was not only a creative activity, but a means of sexual access. Shelley and Byron fashioned themselves as anti-establishment figures, something that extended to their views of sexuality, especially 'Greek love'. Before travelling to the Balkans for the first time, Byron wrote, 'In England the vices in fashion are whoring & drinking, in Turkey sodomy & smoking. We prefer a girl and a bottle, they a pipe and a pathic' (Marchand 1982: 36). Apart from his early youth, the vast majority of Byron's same-sex contact was in the Ottoman regions of the Mediterranean, especially Greece. 'Greek love' was an aesthetic materialized through the bodies of the Greek boys and men he had sexual relations with. Hellenism and Orientalism offered the perfect imaginative and geographical frameworks for Byron's sexuality.

An important influence here was ancient literature, especially that of the Greeks. The 'Classics' offered the historical distance and cultural credentials to play out different visions of sexual, moral and ethical standards. In the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the appreciation and study of these texts often provided evidence of, and served as a catalyst to, non-heteronormative lives. For a highly selective intellectual elite, the Classics offered a cultural acumen that could begin to legitimate an interest in certain culturally tabooed and prohibited practices. This interest in Greece peaked in the late nineteenth century, when a growing number of British and German writers and scholars were actively travelling to Greece to research the diversity of sexuality and sexual practice in ancient and archaic Greek culture. Not all of them were men. Jane Ellen Harrison, the Cambridge Classicist whose work led to charges of 'Sapphic' interest, looked for evidence of pre-patriarchal social structures in Greece's archaic period and had a keen interest in sexuality. Investigating early rituals and forms of religion, Harrison's challenge to patriarchal and heteronormative sexualities came through her anthropological and archaeological work on an era of Greek history that existed before/behind imperial Athens. She deliberately used the distance and opacity of archaic Greece as a metaphor for the impossibility of understanding a social structure so radically different from contemporary patriarchies. Harrison had an important impact on a series of feminists and travellers interested in Greece, especially the young Virginia Woolf. Her own observations of her travels were summarized in _Reminiscences of a Student's Life_ (1925), where she catalogued life at the male-dominated British School at Athens. Harrison's queerness goes beyond speculations around her sexuality: it belongs to a realm of interest and inquiry that brought a series of intellectuals to Greece as a way of revealing alternative social frameworks that accommodated more fluid and flexible models of sex and desire.

The art critic Walter Pater (1839–1894), the human rights activist Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) were all men whose travel informed their personal and intellectual commitment to homosexuality. While Pater and Wilde explored the theme of 'Greek love' in their writing and aesthetics, Carpenter and Hirschfeld were part of an early vanguard of Western European activists that did not see lesbian or gay sexuality as a state of inversion or perversion. As the Nazis rose to power in Germany, Hirschfeld undertook a world lecturing tour to avoid discrimination, a tour that provided the foundations for _Men and Women: The World Journey of a Sexologist_ (1935). As a minor celebrity at the time, Hirschfeld became a magnet for sexual information and discussion during his travels. From seeing fertility customs in Java to observing forms of matriarchy in Bali, he curated a world of sexual variety and difference in his travel writing, albeit with a tendency towards impressionism rather than objective study. However, figures such as Hirschfeld were exceptional in this period. Literary censorship, fear of arrest and social stigma were strong enough to ensure that most personal accounts of sexual difference or deviation remained private and hidden.

As interest in the Classics waned at the beginning of the twentieth century, writers interested in non-heteronormative lives and practices migrated to new forms of artistic practice, creating new lines of queer inquiry. Modernism offered a fertile territory for queer writing and politics in fiction, although its presence in travel writing was less pronounced. Explorations of strangeness and estrangement were bound up in the travel, writing and philosophy of a number of key figures. The poet H.D., Virginia Woolf, Gillian Bouras, Gertrude Stein, E.M. Forster, André Gide and Djuna Barnes were amongst a group of writers for whom literary and sexual experimentation went hand-in-hand. One of the most striking examples of this is Virginia Woolf's novel _Orlando_ (1928), which playfully explores bisexuality through a historical fantasy focused on travel. Yet queer themes are mostly explored in fiction in this period, rather than in non-fictional, ostensibly factual travel writing, since fiction offered at least a partial veil against legal or personal challenges in connection with sexual deviance or difference. While travel writers in the period may have been sexually experimenting abroad to avoid the prying gaze of friends and family, the status of travel writing as an authentic or real account of experience offered potentially dangerous exposure.

This is not to say that there are no canonical examples of travel writing in the early to mid-twentieth century that tackle alternative forms of sex and sexuality. In the 1950s, the Beats brought together a group of intellectuals for whom sexual and literary experimentation was hard-wired into travel and a politics of spontaneity that aimed to bypass stale traditions. Sex and sexuality was more than just a lifestyle for the Beats: it was part of their self-fashioning and their creative manifesto. Jack Kerouac's _On the Road_ (1957) has been hailed as a counter-cultural text partly because of its use of travel as a pseudo-spiritual state of being that reflects a disenchantment with the categories of home and tradition. However, one wonders whether the text would enjoy the same cult status if it more clearly articulated Kerouac's frequent slippage between homosocial and homosexual relations with the men he meets. To put it simply, would it be a cult text if the principal protagonists were openly gay? Unlike Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who were relatively open about their homosexual encounters, both Kerouac and Neal Cassady primarily identified as heterosexual men, yet had occasional sexual contact with men. However, many of the homosexual acts which should appear in _On the Road_ are self-censored by Kerouac in favour of ruminations on his relationship with Cassady, the road and his writing. While spontaneity and impulsivity are important to the Beats in bypassing the mundane orthodoxy of societal expectations, Kerouac fails to blend a convincing version of bisexuality through the omission of his own sexual experimentation. In addition to this, the relative immobility of the women in the text demonstrates the inscription of patriarchal structures within the Beats' aesthetic.

While there may have a been a growth in writing about queer subjects and cultures from the nineteenth century onwards, it would be erroneous to assume that each successive generation or group of writers represents a chronological pin on an easy-to-trace trajectory of growing resistance to hetero-patriarchal structures and values. For example, while the Beats hold an iconic status partially based on their counter-cultural values, their representation of gender and gender norms reproduced its own misogyny and discrimination. These were men using male privilege to legitimize their crossing of selective boundaries. However, the social agitation around civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s facilitated the greater visibility of lesbian and gay cultures, as well as developing a sense of what identifying oneself as 'gay' or 'lesbian' might look like or mean in a positive rather than negative light. The greater legal and social tolerance thus accorded non-normative lives in turn allowed the appearance of travel accounts by openly LGBTQ writers, many of whom were expressly concerned to explore in their travels a range of queer identity labels and sub-cultures.

**Identifying bodies: LGBTQ travel writing**

From the mid-twentieth century, it is possible to identify a growing number of travel writers who can fall under the umbrella term of 'LGBTQ writing'. These are travellers who were either open about their sexuality, or who were consciously aware of LGBTQ politics, even if they themselves had a difficult relationship with the movements. For example, Bruce Chatwin was bisexual and hid his sexuality, but despite this we can read him in a genealogy of writers for whom the awareness of LGBTQ politics and lives had an impact on how they positioned themselves and their work. (In Chatwin's case it was firmly in the closet.) Christopher Isherwood reflected on his travels as a gay man later in his life, at a time when attitudes towards sexuality had softened. However, Edmund White is arguably the first mainstream travel writer to foreground his experiences as a gay man throughout his career. In his pioneering travelogue _States of Desire: Travels in Gay America_ (1980) – written in the aftermath of the Stonewall Riots and subsequent gay and lesbian political agitation in North America – White is sensitive to the ways in which the lesbian and gay communities he travels through inevitably merge the sexual and the political. The volume has now a poignant, elegiac aspect; White's narrative ends just before the AIDS crisis, which devastated most, if not all, of the communities he travelled through.

While White stands as a major figure in gay travel writing, there are relatively few figures who have achieved the same range or scope in their travelogues. Kadushin's volumes _Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing_ (2004) and _Big Trips: More Good Travel Writing_ (2008) have been important for collecting the work of contemporary gay male writers who have produced shorter pieces of travel writing. However, the genre is arguably not keeping pace with the rate of development in gay and lesbian tourism. This is not to say that issues of sexuality are not dealt with in recent travel writing; indeed, in many ways the writers following in White's footsteps have reached wider audiences through embracing a range of genres from comedy to memoir. White's literary descendants have exported their mixture of autobiography, humour and human observation of gay life in America and France to forms such as creative non-fiction; see, for example, David Sedaris's _Me Talk Pretty One Day_ (2001) or David Rakoff's _Don't Get Too Comfortable_ (2005). Yet openly gay travel writing remains a very small strand of this perennially popular genre.

As with many other gay and lesbian literary genres, lesbian travel writing is less visible than its gay male counterpart. Like women's travel writing in general, at least until the recent scholarly recovery of this branch of the genre, lesbian travel writing has been neglected and excluded from the mainstream canon. In overviews of travel writing, 'queer' is often reduced to 'gay and lesbian' which, in turn, is often reduced to just 'gay'. While magazines, zines and blogs have circulated accounts of lesbian and gay travel, there is a curious deficiency of published travel accounts by women. This is symptomatic of a more general lacuna or absence. Martha Vicinus (2004), Annamarie Jagose (1994) and Terry Castle (1993) are amongst a group of critics who have theorized the ways in which lesbian desire has been rendered invisible in cultural histories, to become, as Jagose puts it, 'utopic' (1994: 2) – in the sense of 'being of no place' – or 'apparitional', in Castle's more controversial phrasing (1993: 30). Drawing on the work of French feminists such as Luce Irigaray, Vicinus, Jagose and Castle have led a movement towards thinking about the lesbian as a figure who stands outside dominant patriarchal control, thereby circumnavigating phallocentric order. These studies have been used to sketch out a theoretical history of lesbian lives in Western culture which strategically uses lesbian 'invisibility' to work outside traditional histories or genealogies.

A selection of lesbian writers are brought together in Gillian Kendall's edited volume _Something to Declare: Good Lesbian Travel Writing_ (2009), an important output of the University of Wisconsin's active collation of new lesbian and gay travel writing. The themes of visibility and invisibility are explored by one of the most famous contributors to the volume, Lucy Bledsoe. The author of a number of novels and travel accounts, Bledsoe offers in 'Fruits at the Border' an account of a journey with her partner through Chile and Argentina. Border crossings are used as a metaphor for the ways in which people can 'pass' unchecked, and for what triggers 'detection' and possible detention. 'In most cultures', she writes, 'women are perceived as less threatening than men or as being inconsequential altogether, which allows us to slip across different kinds of borders, not just international ones' (Kendall 2009: 192). Approaching a border Bledsoe observes: 'Granted, as middle-aged women, we were quite invisible in that culture, but wanted to remain that way for the most part [. . .]. [O]ur being lesbians did add an additional layer of risk we didn't need to play with' (ibid.: 196). Despite this, Bledsoe lists a range of women who detect something different about her relationship with her travelling companion, and who offer additional help. The 'fruits' at the border refer to her anxieties about detection. Apples are not allowed to cross the border, but Bledsoe and her partner have little access to fresh fruit, so decide to smuggle some into Chile. While her partner condones their concealment, Bledsoe succumbs under her own paranoia and fear of discovery, declaring her contraband to border control.

While the piece is humorous and light-hearted, Bledsoe points to the complex ways in which travellers can live in fear and paranoia about their own sexual disclosures and the consequences of being labelled as a lesbian, especially in cultures with unsympathetic legislation. Bledsoe offers a nuanced layering of identity: she is attuned to the complex ways in which ethnicity, nationality, gender and sexuality impact the way bodies move through space. She can trade on the privilege of her ethnicity and nationality, be aware of the vulnerabilities posed by her gender and selectively disguise her sexuality. Immigration controls become an emblem for the way states regulate a body's access to recognition or legality. Yet the real level of surveillance and detection in Bledsoe's piece is not at the border, but at the level of self-censorship through the internalization of homophobic discourses. However, one issue Bledsoe does not address is to what extent there is a shared understanding of what a 'lesbian' is across different cultures; this is a topic I shall come back to in my final section.

The growing confidence of lesbian and gay writers has facilitated alliances with other bodies which failed to conform. A section of queer theory has focused on what happens to bodies when the basic operation and realization of gender fails, not as an aesthetic experiment but as a basic social and biological reality (see Butler 1993). The growing visibility of transgendered subjects in literature coincided with surgical and cultural explorations of the body, and a growing appreciation of the complex discontinuities that can be in play between biological and lived gender. 'Cisgender' is a term recently adopted to describe a person where there is no social conflict between biological sex and lived gender (for example, a person identifying as a woman who was also biologically born as a woman). The agitation around this term partially reflects a desire to develop a more sophisticated vocabulary to describe the ways in which bodies and identities operate within 'normal' or 'not normal' categories.

These issues are relevant to the career of one of Britain's most famous travel writers, Jan Morris, who was born as James Morris in 1926. An account of her life, travels and transition from male to female was published as _Conundrum_ (1974). The memoir uses travel to trace her movement between places and between genders. For Morris sexuality is an external experience rather than an embodied state:

I have never doubted, though, that much of the emotional force, what the Welsh call hwyl, that men spend in sex, I sublimated in travel – perhaps even in movement itself, for I have always loved speed, wind and great places.

(Morris 2002: 88)

Yet despite being a comparatively rare account of the transexual journey, _Conundrum_ is a problematic text for many critics. At issue is Morris's attitude to Africa, where s/he went to have her gender realignment performed. A self-confessed 'child of imperial times' (Morris 2002: 109), Morris frequently applies to the continent an imagery of blackness and darkness, something Marjorie Garber (2011) has described as Orientalist and Carol Riddell has called 'embarrassing' (2006: 152). Moreover, Morris seldom reflects critically on the way being British facilitates her privileged travels, and the way it provides her with access to select clinics for surgery. As a result, _Conundrum_ is for queer theorist Judith Halberstam 'less [. . .] a representative narrative [of transgender experience] and more [. . .] a caution against detaching the metaphors of travel and migration from the actual experience of immigration in a world full of borders' (1998: 169–70).

As this suggests, LGBTQ identities are not necessarily deviant, radical or progressive in the positive senses of these terms. They can reproduce sexism and racism in mundane forms through reproducing and internalizing other forms of cultural stereotypes and orthodoxies. Equally, while gay and lesbian writing may be categorized as 'queer' through its fundamental challenge to heterosexuality as the only legitimate model for sexual relationships, it is constantly in danger of developing its own orthodoxies and exclusive categories (for example, can a bisexual woman be a lesbian?). The identity politics behind LGBTQ movements has been important for securing rights and fostering a community within which LGBTQ identification is a primary issue and desire. Yet these identities may also be more rigid and more limiting than the earlier, more complex and contradictory identity formations which went under the umbrella term 'queer'. The latter is an identity label that categorically refuses straight privilege, passing or ambiguity; its queerness is more definite and defiant.

**States of conflict: transnational sexualities**

In the past ten years, scholars have been paying increasing attention to the intersection of queer theory and postcolonial studies, bringing these two fields into dialogue to critique the way contemporary discussions of sexuality, especially queer sexualities, are dominated by Eurocentric and Anglo-American definitions and categories which efface alternative discourses of desire and difference. Rather than assuming that the West is more sexually liberal and progressive than the rest of the world, attention has been increasingly paid to other, non-Western histories of sexuality. There has also been significant debate about whether the terms 'lesbian' and 'gay' have a transnational significance and meaning, or whether their use always returns back to essentialized Western categories for identity (Vanita 2002; Gopinath 2005; Bauer and Mahn 2014). 'Queer' has been used by critics as a more open way to understand non-heteronormative experiences and communities, thereby avoiding the narrow labelling of 'lesbian' or 'gay' practices which are not easily translatable across the globe. In this spirit, Jasbir K. Puar (2002) has offered a useful analysis and overview of modern tourism's relationship to issues of transnational sexuality. In her discussion, she also insists on the inadequacy of an older scholarly model of 'intersectionality', prevalent since the 1980s, which assumed that identities (queer and otherwise) could be construed in terms of the inter-relationship of supposedly discrete, fixed categories such as race, class and gender. As Puar writes:

There is no entity, no identity, no queer subject or subject to queer, rather queerness coming forth at us from all directions, screaming its defiance, suggesting a move from intersectionality to assemblage, an affective conglomeration that recognizes other contingencies of belonging.

(2007: 211)

The notion of 'assemblage' here derives from French theorists Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and is intended to convey the far more complex ways in which subjects actually negotiate a multitude of experiences that cannot be disaggregated or reduced to identity politics.

Notwithstanding the theoretical enquiries outlined above, there is still relatively little work on queer travel writing alongside the issues of race and faith. However, an important collection that brings together these themes is Michael Luongo's _Gay Travels in the Muslim World_ (2007). Crossing national, racial and ethnic boundaries, this landmark volume has assembled a range of largely gay-identified men to discuss their same-sex experience in the context of Islam. Histories of non-heteronormative practices and lives in Islamic contexts have highlighted the inadequacy of identity-based categories such as 'gay' and 'lesbian', both of which carry their own associations and histories (Ioannides 2014; El-Rouayheb 2005). To what extent, therefore, can the terms 'gay' and 'lesbian' carry a trans-faith significance? Travelling to Mauritania with the US Peace Corps, Jay Davidson meets men who are sexually interested in him, but for whom the future involves marriage with a woman and children. Same-sex relations in this context are not necessarily a secret or a contradiction; they are an extension of sexuality and operate in concert with more conservative national prescriptions about the composition of a family. Confused by the sexual attention two men are paying to him and a female Peace Corps volunteer, Davidson observes:

it did make we wonder about how they saw their own sexuality. It was my first indication that people elsewhere in the world are living and dealing with a more fluid definition of sexuality than the one we experience in the United States.

(Luongo 2007: 4)

Reflecting on his fellow travellers he comments, 'I have heard people say, "We don't have homosexuals in Mauritania." Most Americans laugh at what they perceive to be such a naïve and absurd statement' (ibid.: 8). These assumptions demonstrate the way sexual 'progress' is often measured by Western standards: the allegation of naiveté simply becomes a way of suggesting that Islamic cultures are in the infancy of understanding the complexity of sexuality.

In this way, several of the pieces in Luongo's anthology project Western sexual categories on to the very different cultures of the Middle East. Elsewhere, many of these travel accounts exhibit long-standing Western prejudices about Islam and deploy familiar tropes of Orientalism, especially around the issue of sexual excess/access in the region. Richard Ammon identifies generations of (in)famous travellers and ordinary tourists for whom North Africa represented sex, mystery and access to young men for the right price (ibid.: 92). The growing visibility of lesbian and gay travel has had a detectible influence; Martin Foreman comments on the way gay porn has created new transnational markets for consuming homosexuality (ibid.: 20). Yet despite the prevalence of stereotypical East–West, Islamic–Non-Islamic binaries in the collection, there are a number of accounts describing other kinds of border crossings. As discussed earlier, travel can lead to the possibility of living more open lives. Ethan Pullman uses the literal meaning of the word 'intifada' – 'to wake up from sleep' (ibid.: 61) – to describe his move from being a closeted Palestinian Muslim to being an openly gay man in North America. The film-maker Parvez Sharma uses his transnational journeys as a way of thinking about how travel and sexuality can be framed as a form of activism. He ends with an imperative: 'Let's together – travel gay – through the richness of Islam. Let's get our hands dirty and let's please manufacture dissent' (ibid.: 109).

Sexuality, dissent and travel are natural companions in writing, illuminating the varied and messy ways in which bodies and discourses come into intimate contact. Queering travel writing, we acknowledge and promote the genre's potential to destabilize cultural and social norms, and we nuance our discussion of that destabilizing tendency. The challenge for future studies of queer travel writing is twofold: identifying more examples of queerness in mainstream texts to generate new readings, and avoiding the temptation to conflate 'queerness' with minority LGBTQ identities.

**Select bibliography**

Bauer, H. and Mahn, C. (2014) 'Introduction to Special Issue on Transnational Lesbians', _Journal of Lesbian Studies_ 18(3): 203–8.

Butler, J. (1993) _Bodies That Matter_ , London: Routledge.

Castle, T. (1993) _The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture_ , New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) _A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ , Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.

El-Rouayheb, K. (2005) _Before Homosexuality in the Arab–Islamic World, 1500–1800_ , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Garber, M. (2011) _Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety_ , New York: Routledge.

Gopinath, G. (2005) _Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures_ , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Halberstam, J. (1998) _Female Masculinity_ , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Halperin, D. (1997) _Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ioannides, G. (2014) 'Queer Travels: Intersections for the Study of Islam, Sexuality, and Queer Theory', in Y. Taylor and R. Snowdon (eds), _Queering Religion, Religious Queers_. New York: Routledge.

Jacobs, J. (2012) _Sex, Tourism and the Postcolonial Encounter_ , Aldershot: Ashgate.

Jagose, A. (1994) _Lesbian Utopics_ , New York: Routledge.

Kadushin, R. (ed.) (2008) _Big Trips: More Good Gay Travel Writing_ , Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Kadushin, R. (ed.) (2004) _Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing_ , Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Kendall, G. (ed.) (2009) _Something to Declare: Good Lesbian Travel Writing_ , Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Lewis, R. (1996) _Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation_ , New York: Routledge.

Littlewood, I. (2001) _Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex_ , London: John Murray.

Luongo, M. (ed.) (2007) _Gay Travels in the Muslim World_ , New York: Harrington Park Press.

Marchand, L.A. (ed.) (1982) _Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals_ , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Morris, J. (2002) _Conundrum_ , London: Faber and Faber.

Phillips, R.(2002) 'Travelling Sexualities: Richard Burton's Sotadic Zone', in J. Duncan and D. Gregory (eds), _Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing_ , London: Routledge.

Puar, J.K. (2002) 'Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism, Travel and Globalization', _GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies_ 8(1–2): 101–37.

Puar, J.K. (2007) _Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times_ , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Riddell, C. (2006) 'Divided Sisterhood: A Critical Review of Janice Raymond's _The Transsexual Empire_ ', in S. Styker and S. Whittle (eds), _The Transgender Studies Reader_ , New York: Routledge.

Roberts, M. (2008) _Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Literature_ , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Schiffer, R. (1999) _Oriental Panorama: British Travellers in Nineteenth-Century Turkey_ , Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Vanita, R. (2002) _Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society_ , New York: Routledge.

Vicinus, M. (2004) _Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women: 1778–1928_ , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

White, E. (1980) _States of Desire: Travels in Gay America_ , London: Picador.

Travel Writing and Ethics

_Corinne Fowler_

From its inception, the field of travel writing studies has had a pronounced ethical dimension. This is partly because the rise of scholarly interest in the genre was linked to, and grew out of, broader currents in humanities scholarship over the past three decades, such as an increasing interest in subaltern voices and the emergence of postcolonial scholarship (Forsdick et al. 2013: 1). In the wake of Edward Said's _Orientalism_ (1978) _,_ critics of travel writing initially focused on the genre's kinship with colonial discourse, arguing that the genre persistently makes sharp distinctions between travellers and 'travellees', those who are visited and are the object of the traveller's gaze. Syed M. Islam's influential volume _The Ethics of Travel_ (1996) similarly emphasized travel writing's tendency to both promote and portray asymmetrical encounters in this regard. This has led many critics to see travel writing's colonial legacy as inescapable, and the genre as therefore always ethically compromised and problematic. Debbie Lisle, for example, makes a convincing case that much contemporary travel writing inherits colonialism's 'conservative political outlook', an outlook that she feels 'extends to its view of global politics' (Lisle 2006: xi).

However, a growing number of studies have in recent years explored the extent to which travel writing, past and present, has been able to overcome the genre's unethical orientations. Tim Youngs, Andrew Hammond and other scholars have for example noted the capacity of modernist travellers such as W.H. Auden to burst the genre's colonialist straitjacket (Youngs 2004; Hammond 2010). More recently, travel writing scholars have been influenced by the rise of ecocriticism, associated most closely with Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin (2009). Expanding the field's ethical field of vision to include animals and environmental concerns, critics have identified numerous ways in which contemporary travel narratives have responded positively to conservationists' calls for 'critique[s] of ecocide' or condemnations of environmental destruction (Nyman 2013: 109; Carrigan 2013). Other commentators, meanwhile, have focused on the ethical implications of fiction within the genre (Lisle 2006; Lindsay 2010; Fowler 2013). As this suggests, debates about travel writing and ethics have ranged widely. This chapter therefore focuses on three key areas of recent discussion: the genre's merging of 'fact' and 'fiction', travel writing as social and political critique, and the travelogues produced by war correspondents.

**Tall tales: the ethics of fabulation**

From the early modern period to the present, travel narratives have usually purported to describe real people and actual places. That is to say, travel writing is generically meant to be a non-fictional rather than fictional form. This assumption is complicated, of course, by the fact that travel writers necessarily select and edit the experiences they relate to their readers, and then often deploy many of the devices of fiction as they craft their reports. In this way, travel writing and fiction have long been felt to have what Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs describe as a 'close and troubling' relationship (2002: 6). Hulme later expands on this 'fraught' relationship: 'it is travel writing's association with the novel', he suggests, 'which brings it into that difficult area where truth and fiction meet' (Hulme 2002: 2). As is customary among scholars of travel writing, Hulme's words strongly imply that fiction is truth's binary opposite. And for many commentators over the years, any fictionalization on the part of the traveller is to be regarded as always already unethical. Readers, reviewers and critics have traditionally responded with suspicion and disapproval when they feel a travel writer is inventing rather than reporting events; there are lies, there are damn lies, and there is fiction.

More recently, however, some critics have questioned this seemingly stark ethical distinction between ostensibly factual reportage and fictional invention. In this context, Hulme has cited E.L. Doctorow's 1977 proclamation that 'there is no fiction or nonfiction as we understand it. There is only narrative' (quoted in Hulme 2002: 12). Graham Mort similarly argues that everyday realities are unavoidably steeped in fiction and that the truth–fiction dichotomy potentially produces analytical distortion (Mort 2013: 33). This more nuanced view stems in part from developments in anthropology, and especially from James Clifford and George Marcus's seminal essay collection _Writing Culture_ (1986), which sought to emphasize the pervasiveness of literary devices and rhetorical techniques even in supposedly 'objective', scientific modes of ethnography. Some contributors to the volume lamented the apparent loss of authority brought about by recognition of the literary and fictive aspects of ethnographic discourse, yet Clifford in his Introduction argued powerfully against the traditional equation of fiction with falsehood; he urged instead that 'the best ethnographic texts' constitute 'serious, true fictions' (ibid.: 7).

Taking their lead from anthropologists, specialists in the emerging academic field of creative writing are increasingly interested in the ethics of fabulation, with current discussions centring on the cultural work performed by fiction, its power to make an original contribution to knowledge and the ethics of consciously introducing fiction techniques into academic writing (Fowler 2013; Schad 2012; Schneck and Schweighauser 2012). A recent collaboration between the journals _Cultural Anthropology_ and _American Short Fiction_ produced a special issue entitled 'Literature, Writing and Anthropology'. If some contributors to Clifford and Marcus's _Writing Culture_ deplored the persistence of literary devices in ethnographic writing, the editors of 'Literature, Writing and Anthropology' make a virtue of aligning ethnography and fiction:

There is no way to easily demarcate where fiction ends and anthropology begins. Conventionally, we have relied on 'truth' as the fundamental distinguishing factor between fiction and other genres; fiction was thought to be invented, while the social sciences, journalism, and memoir presented accounts of 'real' people, places, and events [. . .] Clearly this simple binary is eroding.

(Iverson and Byler 2012)

As noted, this 'truth'–fiction' binary was always problematic. Hulme points out that although travel writing is routinely categorized as non-fiction, it 'uses the rhetorical resources of writing and narration to make its text through techniques of condensation, plotting, selection and paraphrase' (2002: 12). Shannon Dugan Iverson and Darren Byler's introductory essay in the 'Literature, Writing and Anthropology' volume provides the following rationale for embracing the role of storytelling:

Anthropology has turned to literary conventions [. . .] to expose vulnerability; to reveal silences in standard discourses; and to reveal the seams in both anthropological and ethnographic practice. Likewise, fiction writers increasingly borrow from non-fiction writing genres [. . .] which in turn results in a destabilization and reworking of the 'truths' contained within those genres.

(Iverson and Byler 2012)

Echoing a key message of Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon's 1996 essay collection, _Women Writing Culture_ , Iverson and Byler go on to observe that recent discussions among Canadian ethnographers have stressed 'the utility of literary modes for accomplishing what forms of conventional ethnography does [ _sic_ ] not: injecting a personal, multi-vocal, creative, and emotional element into anthropological writing' (Iverson and Byler 2012). The argument remains unfinished, but it has implications in the field of travel writing studies, where the ethics of fictionalization are also being re-evaluated, first with regard to travellers' persistent lack of affective identification with travellees (Lindsay 2010; Fowler 2013) and, second, as a means of criticizing globalization's exploitative aspects (Levin 2012).

Fiction, it is argued, can play a role in combating one of travel writing's most ethically troubling characteristics: its persistent failure to promote an egalitarian sense of solidarity with travellees. Claire Lindsay's study _Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America_ (2010), for example, argues that critics in the field have been too hasty to dismiss fiction's role in travel writing as unethical. To illustrate this point, Lindsay examines two Mexico–US border narratives by creative writing practitioners: Ruben Martinez's _Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail_ (2001) and Luis Alberto Urrea's _The Devil's Highway_ (2004). Without overlooking the unequal power relations between these middle-class authors and the people they write about, Lindsay argues that the use of fiction in their narratives disrupts travel writing conventions and 'unsettle[s] orthodox epistemologies' (Lindsay 2010: 97). The presence of fiction, she suggests, is a key mechanism for achieving this, citing Bill Ashcroft's argument (2009) that travel writing – particularly Latin American _testimonio_ ('testimony') – can offer 'intimacy of identification' with travellees (Lindsay 2010: 98). She writes that the fictive elements of Martinez's and Urrea's books actively promote an ethically engaged mode of affective identification, a mode advocated by Ashcroft's work and also by Maureen Moynagh in _Political Tourism and Its Texts_ (2008). I have already touched on a critical tendency to view fiction's general presence in travel writing as a sign of ethical _dis_ engagement. Yet, like the Canadian anthropologists mentioned above, Lindsay sees as potentially ethical a form of travel writing she describes as 'ethico-fictive ethnography' (2010: 105). Urrea's book juxtaposes third-person narratives, thereby allowing space for competing versions of past events. Urrea also deploys a 'doubly fictive' mode, whereby a dying Mexican narrates his attempt to cross the Mexican–US border illegally: 'you piss into your hands, or in whatever container you might have. You try not to dribble a single drop [. . .] Proteins are peeling off your dying muscles' (quoted in Lindsay 2010: 111). The man later dies. Since the dead do not speak, the account is implausible, yet the fact that it 'strains credibility' is in many senses an ethical gesture (Lindsay 2010: 111). It relinquishes any claim to straightforward truth-telling. As Lindsay further suggests, its second-person narration also plays a key ethical role. Usually the preserve of fiction, second-person narratives encourage the addressee to imagine themselves in the place of the speaker. In this sense, second-person narrative is uniquely equipped to promote emotional engagement with travellees in this and similar plights.

In a move watched closely by travel writing specialists, some academics have harnessed the power of fiction to advocate an experimental form of writing known as fictocriticism, sometimes known as critical-creative writing (Schad 2012: x). A technique or mode pioneered in Australia by texts such as Stephen Muecke's _No Road (Bitumen All the Way)_ (1997) and the essays collected in Heather Kerr and Amanda Nettlebeck's anthology _The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism_ (1998), its practitioners purposely amalgamate supposedly distinct forms of writing, such as literary criticism, poetry, theory and prose fiction. As Tim Youngs observes, the form's association with Australia caused it to be overlooked at first by the European and US academy (Youngs 2009: 155). Yet fictocriticism deserves serious attention for a number of reasons. At its best, it challenges assumptions about the nature of fiction as a predominantly affective, rather than analytical, form. It has also been celebrated for providing meta-commentaries on the limits of form, particularly academic writing and travel writing. Katrina Schlunke and Anne Brewster believe that fictocriticism 'changes and challenges' scholarly work by 're-theatriciz[ing]' the 'textual performance[s]', choices and omissions of conventional academic writing (Schlunke and Brewster 2005: 393). Fictocriticism, they argue, promotes a better sense of the academic writer as an unreliable narrator, someone who should 'acknowledge a position – white, mortgagee, academic, artist' (Schlunke and Brewster 2005: 394). Youngs is also cautiously optimistic about fictocriticism, which potentially 'opens up and expands the often maligned genre of the travel text' by means of formal experimentation (Youngs 2009: 162). He praises Krim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe's fictocritical narrative of travel, _Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology_ (1996), for its implicit challenge to travel writing's habit of contrasting travellees' supposed immobility with traveller's perpetual movement (Youngs 2009: 148). Youngs has some reservations, however. Despite its egalitarian ideal, he suggests, fictocriticism's reliance on postmodern French philosophy leaves it open to the criticism that it readmits travellees' previously silenced voices 'on the master's terms' (ibid.: 155).

These criticisms aside, fictocriticism's concern with challenging collective understandings of fiction is pertinent to debates about the ethics of fabulation in travel writing. For some readers, elements of outright fiction may always seem inappropriate and morally problematic in an ostensibly non-fictional form such as travel writing. However, advocates of fictionalization would suggest that creative-critical forms of travel writing are better able to emphasize writers' positionality, to relinquish the genre's customary degree of narrative authority, and encourage more sympathy for the peoples and places being described. Tall tales aside, fictionalization in travel writing can have a uniquely powerful affective and politicized charge (Fowler 2013: 70).

**Travel writing as anti-colonial critique**

As noted at the start of this chapter, the recent boom in travel writing studies has frequently seen the genre indicted for its apparent complicity with colonialism and neo-colonialism. Yet some critics have also sought to counter or at least nuance this assumption about the form, by considering travel writing's capacity, in both the past and the present, for anti-colonial critique. Even at its height, European colonialism had its internal detractors. As Carl Thompson notes, there is an established history of defiance, which runs from Las Casas's sixteenth-century _Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies_ to Roger Casement's influential 1904 _Casement Report_ , which condemned Belgium brutality towards Congolese rubber collectors (Thompson 2011: 149). Modernist travellers, too, express a marked sense of unease with Western superiority, suggesting that travel writing is less culturally arrogant than many ethical critiques of the genre have supposed (Hammond 2003: 184). As Moynagh suggests, writers such as W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood produced travel writing that offered a left-leaning critique, in this case by drawing parallels between war heroism and heterocentric masculinities (Moynagh 2008: 131).

Since the late 1960s, postcolonial travellers have also posed a challenge to the colonial entanglements of the genre, contesting the idea that travel writing is always already imperialist. This has been achieved in numerous ways. Jamaica Kincaid's _A Small Place_ (1988) casts a contemptuous gaze on the tourist, for example, while Amitav Ghosh's _In an Antique Land_ (1992) scrutinizes historical documents to reveal Egypt as a site of advanced twelfth-century cosmopolitanism. In so doing, of course, Ghosh's vision of Egypt contrasts markedly with European colonial attitudes, which generally assumed that this and many other regions of the world were backward and primitive until Europeans brought Enlightenment and modernity. Other contemporary travel writing, meanwhile, is not so straightforwardly postcolonial, yet nonetheless presents alternative versions of cultural and historical truth. Thompson cites as examples Hugh Brody's _Maps and Dreams_ (1981), Barry Lopez's _Arctic Dreams_ (1986) and Daniel Everett's _Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes_ (2008) (Thompson 2011: 166).

Ultimately, it really matters _who_ produces travel writing and _how_ they represent their journeys. In his essay 'Pushing against the Black/White Limits of Maps: African American Writings of Travel', Youngs argues that travel writing's 'generic indeterminacy' has, historically speaking, made it 'a powerful vehicle for the African American protagonist whose mobility constitutes a refusal to be fixed' (Youngs 2010: 71). Drawing parallels between the fluid identities of African Americans and the 'polyphonous' genre of travel writing genre itself, he argues that African Americans have had to invent new literary forms and conventions. This imperative to invent, he argues, makes travel writing's multi-generic orientations especially conducive to creating an enabling 'space in which identity can be affirmed, discovered and renegotiated' (ibid.: 71, 81). Taking the fugitive slave William Wells Brown as an example, Youngs argues that Brown's mid-nineteenth-century travel narrative _Three Years in Europe, Or Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met_ (1852) shows how liberating it was for Brown and his contemporaries to travel abroad as tourists.

By way of further illustration, he focuses on James Weldon Johnson's _Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man_ (1912), in which Johnson compares the drinking habits of the English and the French in ways that are not entirely edifying for the former. Passing 'public judgements' in this way is customary in travel writing. Such judgements, however, were denied Johnson and other African Americans in the United States. Travel allows the traveller to comment on topics usually reserved for his white contemporaries. At home, he is required to write and speak as an African American. Abroad, Youngs argues, he can write 'as an American' too (2010: 72). Travel writing thus allows Johnson temporary respite from his public role as a commentator on only African American affairs. The genre can in this way have an empowering aspect for writers from otherwise marginalized communities (an aspect often overlooked, Youngs suggests, because of the academic tendency to concentrate on narratives of suffering and forced travel by African Americans and others, rather than on the accounts of comfortably off, middle-class representatives of these communities). Of course, this empowerment may still come at the expense of those written about, the travellees who may be presumptively judged, labelled and stereotyped even in the travel writing of avowedly 'postcolonial' writers. Yet the work of Youngs and other scholars reminds us of the need for the nuanced assessment of travel writing, and recognition of the genre's complex and multi-directional ethical orientations.

**Travel writing by war correspondents**

Evidence of the genre's capacity for providing sustained anti-imperialist critique or for relinquishing excessive narrative authority is harder to find in recent travel writing by war correspondents, who are currently the chief authors of travel writing from war-torn countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Again, the question of _who_ writes travel narratives, and to which pressures they are subject, is crucial. As I argue elsewhere:

[T]he shifting imperatives associated with different modes and purposes of travel have a strong bearing on travel narratives about [countries . . . ] inaccessible to regular travellers [. . . P]rofessional imperatives have tended to [. . .] accrue, rather than to problematize, narrative authority, militat[ing] against any self-reflexive turn in travel writing.

(Fowler 2007: 216)

The rise of current conflicts in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East has meant that travel writing about these regions is increasingly dominated by journalists. An example is travel writing about Afghanistan: decades of warfare banished contemporary anthropologists from the country, leaving the field open only to diplomats like Rory Stewart, whose travelogue _The Places in Between_ appeared in 2005, and to journalists, from whose ranks have come Christina Lamb's _The Sewing Circles of Herat_ (2002), war correspondent Christopher Kremmer's _The Carpet Wars_ (2002), Asne Sierstad's _The Bookseller of Kabul_ (2004) and the Irish journalist Stephen Starr's _Revolt in Syria: Eye-Witness to the Uprising_ (2012).

Journalists overwhelmingly depict contemporary Afghanistan as medieval, a tendency they inherit from twentieth-century travel writing by Robert Byron and Eric Newby, among others. When _Daily Mail_ reporter Ross Benson visited Afghanistan in 2002 after an interval of twenty years, he conformed to his predecessors' confusion of material poverty with cultural backwardness. For Benson, 'the intervening decades [since his last visit] have witnessed the rise of the computer, the invention of the internet and the refinement of [. . .] satellite communications' yet in Afghanistan 'time has gone backwards. According to the Islamic calendar the year is 1379 [. . .] and to journey [. . .] along the ancient donkey tracks which serve as highways is to step into the Middle Ages' (Benson 2002). This passage supports the status quo by on the one hand celebrating the rise of the information society and equating it with progress and civilization, while on the other hand banishing Afghanistan to a different century altogether. The consequence is to deny the coevalness of modern Afghans and modern Britons, in ways that conceal the disquieting fact that the destruction of Afghanistan's infrastructure is largely the result of modern military technology.

Facing a professional imperative to be authoritative, it is difficult for journalists to experiment in their media reports with modes of travel writing that might overcome the genre's imperialist leanings. War correspondents' reportage is inevitably implicated in the production of knowledge about countries, such as Colombia or Iraq, designated by the major powers as legitimate targets in wars on drugs or terror. Moreover, journalists are tied by tacit agreements to be relatively uncontroversial about military conflicts in which their own government has a political stake. As Mark Pedelty argues in _War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents_ (2013), to defy your own country's official sources, such as military or political leaders, is to risk continued access to these same sources on future occasions. This has obvious consequences for journalists embedded with their own nation's troops. For all these reasons, correspondents are conscious of the dangers posed by embedded journalism and also by 'parachute journalism', whereby news media organizations dispatch people to report on countries about which they have little or no background knowledge. The figure of the traveller/travel writer can seem attractive, even compelling, in comparison: the traveller's slower pace through the world is easily contrasted with the reporter's mode of fast travel. In _The Places in Between_ , Rory Stewart depicts himself as a contemplative figure whose powers of observation exceed that of an _LA Times_ journalist who screeches to a halt in his jeep so that he can interview Stewart. Stewart asks the journalist if he can see 'the stillness of that man Qasim. The Prussian blue sky' (Stewart 2005: 30). Yet the journalist is unable to listen. Like his colleagues, he is continually subject to pressing deadlines.

Travel narratives accordingly promise something extra, giving journalists the space to explore phenomena they have no time to discuss in their reports. It is partly for this reason that many journalists have embraced travel writing as a genre, extending their stays in conflict zones in the hope of providing deeper insights into those places, just as anthropologists once supplemented their official ethnographies with unofficial travelogues (Pratt 1986). The travel writing they produce usually deploys many self-authorizing devices. Journalists who produce travel narratives tend to be reliant on first-hand observation and eyewitness account, often accompanied by photographs for the purpose of verifying details and establishing journalists' credentials as a reliable narrators. Journalists' travel writing is often purged of the genre's disreputable elements, such as eroticism and hyperbole, in order to accrue status as a legitimate form of knowledge-making (Fowler 2007: 89). However, journalists' travel writing tends to be markedly unrestrained in its use of colonial sources and it remains relatively untouched by the late-twentieth-century crisis in ethnographic authority. The work of earlier, colonial-era historians and anthropologists is often quoted uncritically, and evidently serves to shape journalists' understanding of what they have seen. Travel writing by journalists rarely registers Clifford's warning that there is 'no politically innocent method for intercultural interpretation' (Clifford 1997: 19) and often appears innocent of the way anthropologists have so often, in David Richards' words, 'mis-recognized colonized people as primitives' (Richards 1994: 237).

Clifford and Marcus's _Writing Culture_ shone an interrogator's beam on one of anthropologists' favourite devices: synecdoche. Their critique, however, has not been reflected in news media coverage of foreign cultures. Synecdoche is fundamentally a literary technique which gained anthropological currency in the 1930s, when ethnography branched off from the subjectivity of travel writing in favour of formalized, systematic observation (see Rubies 2002). Synecdoche is variously defined as the 'evocation of a social whole through representation of its parts' or, less charitably, as a 'trope for representing otherness by describing a single cultural aspect, which appears immensely significant as a key to the whole culture' (Richards 1994: 221). However, since the 1980s synecdoche has been widely discredited as an anthropological technique. Yet it remains prevalent in travel writing by journalists. In the case of travel writing about Afghanistan, this may partly reflect the fact that journalists rely heavily on ethnographical texts about the country which pre-date the crisis in ethnographic authority, since war in the region has for a long time made it largely off-limits to anthropologists. Lamb's _The Sewing Circles of Herat_ , for example, is heavily influenced by Louis Dupree's pre-crisis ethnography _Afghanistan_ (1973). In his study, Dupree suggests that 'play and recreational activities reflect' Afghanistan's 'values and ethos' (1973: 209), which are measured against a 'functional' European norm. In particular, Dupree presents Afghan games as culturally 'dysfunctional' (1973: xxi). His research questions express an in-built hierarchy of skills: '[a]re they games of skill or brute strength, mental exertion or violent contact, physical or mental coordination?' (ibid.: 210). Published three decades later, Lamb's discussion of Afghan games is clearly informed by Dupree's research questions. After making explicit mention of Dupree's intertext, Lamb recounts a conversation in which an Afghan man declares 'Fighting is our problem [. . .] Afghans are world champions in fighting' (2002: 107). Lamb then reflects:

It was hard to disagree [. . .] Even activities that seemed peaceful, like boiling eggs, in Afghanistan involved some form of warfare. [. . .] Kite-flying was another unexpectedly martial sport [. . .] It was explained to me that the point of kites was not to watch them soar and dive in the sky but to use them to fight other children's kites. Warrior kites.

(Ibid.: 107)

As with Dupree's _Afghanistan_ , synecdoche is the device that allows Lamb to test and confirm her predecessor's thesis that Afghan games reveal a dysfunctional predisposition to warfare. The recent wars on Afghan soil thereby appear to spring from a prevalent cultural attitude: while peace-loving British children watch kites 'soar and dive', Afghan children want to 'slash' each other's kite strings (ibid. 2002: 187).

In _The Carpet Wars_ (2002), Kremmer similarly suggests that kite-fighting reveals Afghans' apparent inability to embrace peace. Yet kite-fighting is an inappropriate metaphor to argue that Afghans have a particularly warlike nature: the game is played throughout the Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat and has its origins in Hindu mythology (Fowler 2007: 108). The ethical problem of synecdoche here lies in the logical extension of Kremmer and Lamb's discussion of kite-fighting: the claim that it is pure addiction to warfare that accounts for Afghanistan's war-torn environment (ibid.: 108). This pathologizing gaze clearly deflects attention from the geo-political contexts of the recent wars fought on Afghan soil.

Synecdoche is also equally apparent, and equally problematic, in Asne Sierstad's international best-seller _The Bookseller of Kabul_ (2004). Sierstad's 'Preface' suggests that, like Lamb and Kremmer, she is unfamiliar with recent anthropological debates about the ethics of representation. Her book is an account of spending several months in the house of an Afghan bookseller, Mohammed Shah Rais, a figure whom Sierstad presents metonymically as 'a living piece of Afghan cultural history: a history book on two feet' (2004: 2). However, Rais read the book and called it 'a defamation of me, my family and my nation' (Judah 2003); he subsequently travelled to Europe seeking damages from Sierstad. Although his case failed in the courts, Rais was the first Afghan man to draw international media attention to a perceived injustice about unfair representation in a travel book. As Tim Judah argued in the _Guardian_ , the case raises 'serious questions about the ethics of journalists [. . .] from rich countries writing about people from poor countries' (ibid.: 1).

**Conclusion**

Travel writing continues to be a source of complex ethical debates. The field of travel writing studies has always been concerned with better understanding the nature and ethical implications of the genre's literary aspects. While travellers retain a reputation for tall tales, some critics have emphasized the centrality of fiction to all narratives, whether or not these are categorized as non-fiction. Nearly three decades after the publication of Clifford and Marcus's _Writing Culture_ , more optimistic understandings of fiction's ethical potential have been developed. Ficto-critical and critical-creative works challenge the assumption that fiction is only an affective form, rather than an analytical one. Finally, in a genre much-criticized for its imperialist tone, travel writers have used the techniques of fiction to better promote egalitarian forms of solidarity with travellees and their plights. The ethics of fiction has proved an important emerging line of enquiry, not least because similar debates are taking place in anthropological circles.

Meanwhile, questions of positionality remain important in the field. Stephen Levin et al. (2009) have variously argued that formal experimentation – to which the genre is so amenable – allows significant disruption to, and negotiation of, travel writing conventions in ways that have sometimes amounted to serious cultural critique. Equally, critics are alert to the social status of the writer as well as to their book's likely reception and impact. There is a world of difference between a lettered traveller and an undocumented Mexican migrant, or a Taliban fighter and the journalist who writes about him in a travel book. Even when relatively marginalized figures write travel books, then, the question of _who writes_ remains complicated by class, gender, sexuality, place and history.

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Travel and the Body

Corporeality, Speed and Technology

_Charles Forsdick_

Travel writing is the most physical of all literary genres, primarily as a result of its very subject matter, which involves the passage of the body through varying configurations of time and space. Travel itself has also customarily been understood, historically at least, as a profoundly corporeal experience, and the presence of the body in travel and travel writing – and the effects of different modes of travel on consciousness as well as on bodily and sensory perception – has been explored by a range of recent scholarship. This is made particularly clear by current debates surrounding how different modes of travel adjust the perceptions and experiences of the traveller, and then leave their trace in the travel text. A figure that places a particular emphasis on the central place of the body in the travel narrative is the early twentieth-century writer Victor Segalen, for whom such centrality is part of a wider reflection on what he called the 'Aesthetics of Diversity' (with 'aesthetics' understood here in its etymological sense, associated directly with the senses). In works such as _Equipée_ ( _Escapade_ , 1929), Segalen challenges the discursive normativity of the visual in journey narratives through the evocation of soundscapes and smellscapes, as well as through an emphasis on the role of the tactile in the experience of travel. Interested in the interplay in the field between the 'imaginary' and the 'real', Segalen outlines a phenomenology of travel in which the body serves as the interface between interior and exterior worlds. The result is an acknowledgement that the body is not only the vehicle via which travel traditionally occurs and is variously experienced and freighted, but can also, at moments of exhaustion and dysfunction, serve as an impediment to the progress of the journey. Any celebration of physicality is accordingly tempered with an awareness of the potential fallibility (or at least unpredictability) of the travelling body. It is not surprising, therefore, that Segalen's emphasis on the bodily is picked up by later twentieth-century travellers, not least Nicolas Bouvier and Jacques Lacarrière, Swiss and French respectively, both of whom were instrumental in the late twentieth-century resurgence of interest in travel writing in France.

The act of travel entails the body passing through places and spaces of varying degrees of familiarity, with the various forms of friction created between the travelling body and these places and spaces generating the raw material of what will eventually become the travel narrative. As Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing suggests (2004), 'friction' may indeed be the metaphor most suited to cross-cultural encounter, challenging claims of inevitable 'clash' and 'conflict', but at the same time attenuating the neutral overtones of 'contact'. Corporeality is central to such an approach, implying that travel involves the erosion and transformation not just of sites visited, but also (physically and mentally) of travellers themselves. This is made clear in the polysemic term 'usage' (meaning both 'use' and 'wearing away') deployed in the title of Bouvier's _L'Usage du monde_ (1963), although this implication is not captured in its English translation, _The Way of World_. But as Bouvier writes: 'You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you' (2007: 13), a reflection that is mirrored in the emphasis throughout his travel writing on the challenges inherent in the traveller's physical investment in his or her journey.

The visibility of the functional or dysfunctional travelling body in authors such as Segalen and Bouvier reflects an assertion of physicality in the contemporary travel narrative that may be read in part as a countercyclical response to the increasing absence of embodiment in the actual practices of contemporary travel. Mobility is now, for many, increasingly mechanized, compartmentalized and even rendered virtual. This disjuncture underlines several key aspects of the travel narrative that must be borne in mind in its analysis. First, the relative presence (or absence) of the travelling body in the journey narrative is a feature not only of the practice of the journey, but also of its textualization – in the shift from experience in the field to often retrospective narration of travel, the author may foreground or reduce the role of the body for a variety of reasons, ranging from the performative to the ideological. Second, the travelling body and its representation always benefit from cautious historicization, not least because the mechanization of transport has increasingly disembodied the experience of travel. Journeys dependent on arduous, physical encounters with the terrain are now often a choice not a necessity (Jack 2001); it is striking that many of the earliest journey accounts, of for instance pilgrimages, may now be read as downplaying the place of the body in travel, in part because physical hardship was normalized in the practices and motivations of the journey. Finally, travelling bodies are socially determined, gendered, sexualized and otherwise defined in terms of class and ethnicity. Susan George has suggested, by coining the term 'fast castes' (1999: 179), that the velocity at which the body travels, the vulnerability to which it is subject, and the relative degree of actual motility of the individual traveller (Kaufmann et al. 2004) must all be understood in terms of access to the means of locomotion. In short, the presence and representation of the body in the travel narrative are a clear indicator of the selectivity and performativity of the genre, and can usefully be read, contrapuntally, in relation to wider cultures and histories of travel as well as to the ephemeral, often unrecorded 'travel stories' (Clifford 1997: 38) of those deprived of access to the means of formal narration.

The sections that follow seek initially to historicize the travelling body, reflecting on the impact of the mechanization of transport on both the traveller and his or her narrative; this leads to a focused consideration of the place of walking as a strategy of deceleration and active re-embodiment of the traveller; and the chapter then concludes by attenuating discussion of the body-centred travel narrative by foregrounding questions of disability and illness, phenomena that often oblige the reader to rethink normative assumptions about what constitutes travel and its textualization.

**Technology, mechanization and acceleration**

The evolving history of travel – in particular of its mechanization – means that the relative place of the body in both the practice and textual representation of mobility has shifted radically, especially over the past two centuries. Moving from the self-reliance inherent in walking or the self-propulsion permitted by cycling, transport has been subject to increased automatization with the development of trains, motor vehicles and aircraft. Alternative means of movement had long existed and been central to the narration of travel; journeys by boat, horse or other animal had permitted access to locations otherwise inaccessible at speeds otherwise unachievable (and, at times, unimaginable). None of these pre-industrial means of locomotion could, however, entirely eliminate the association of physicality, exertion and vulnerability in the pre-modern travelogue, meaning that 'travel' was closely linked to questions of embodiment and risk: this is reflected in English in etymology of the word 'travel', which is often linked – like 'travail' – to the'tripalium', an instrument of torture made up of three stakes to which a victim would be tied and burnt with fire (Fussell 1980: 39).

It is arguable that such an emphasis on corporeality and even physical ordeal differentiates travel from other more neutral keywords relating to mobility such as 'movement' or 'displacement', and the practices described by Graham Huggan as 'extreme travel' (2009) may be read as a contemporary effort to recover earlier modes of journeying and to reassert the place of the body in the act of travel. The mechanization of travel impacted on the journey in two key ways: not only did it increase the velocity at which the body travelled through space and place, but also it tended – with notable exceptions, such as the motorcycle journey (Youngs 2013) – to abstract travellers from the surroundings through which they were conveyed. This led to what Michel de Certeau, in the chapter of _The Practice of Everyday Life_ (1980) entitled 'Railway Navigation and Incarceration', dubbed a 'travelling incarceration' in which the traveller is 'pigeonholed, numbered and regulated' (1984: 111). De Certeau's point is that mechanization of travel – announced in railway travel, further developed in the automobile, and perfected in aviation – leads not so much to a disembodiment of the traveller as to a dislocation of the spheres of travel whereby external mobility is separated from an immobility internal to and inherent in the means of transportation. The anthropologist David Le Breton develops this analysis in his description of the car-bound traveller as a 'hypertrophied eye' (2000: 82), a designation that suggests not only physical restriction but also sensory reconfiguration (and most notably the further privileging of the gaze over those other senses, especially smell and touch, engaged in more embedded and embodied forms of travel).

In _The Railway Journey_ (1977), Wolfgang Schivelbusch outlines the ways in which the advent of rail travel had a particularly disruptive impact on the history of perception, effectively annihilating the distinction between space and time, and creating a 'new spatiality' dependent on the individual relationship not to natural space, but to mechanical power (1986: 10; see also Pichois 1973). The aesthetic implications of such shifts were evident in the emergence of the panoramic view, a consequence of the shift away from the focused perception of detailed settings towards a scopic regime that produced, in colonial contexts, what Mary Louise Pratt calls the 'monarch-of-all-I-survey' narrative (1992: 205–6). Critics of this new transport technology predicted physical degeneration in conditions such as 'railway spine', and degenerationists such as Max Nordau described future atrophication of the underemployed body. By the early twentieth century, authors including Segalen and the poet Saint-Pol-Roux saw evidence, in the ever increasing acceleration of transport, of a decline of cultural diversity and hence a threat to the future of travel. In a series of aphorisms entitled _Vitesse_ ( _Speed_ , published posthumously in 1973), Saint-Pol-Roux encapsulated this anxiety: 'Car seat: cinema seat'; 'Mechanized speed is no more than motorized motionlessness'; and 'Human speed reduces the dimensions of the Earth. Speed: blindness' (1973: 25, 30, 53). The acceleration of travel is thus presented as a form of kinetic, sensory and perceptual impoverishment. At the same time, however, other artists and authors embraced speed, particularly in the context of modernism and futurism, developing what Enda Duffy has dubbed an 'adrenaline aesthetics' (2009: 9) that sought to capture in new ways perceptions of the world experienced at high speeds. It is also important to stress that technological innovation in transport as well as communications permitted an interwar flourishing of travel writing (Fussell 1980), with women playing an uncharacteristically prominent role in the development of the genre: texts such as Peter Fleming's _News from Tartary_ (1936) and Ella Maillart's _Forbidden Journey_ (1937), rare instances of stereoscopic accounts of a shared journey from differently gendered perspectives, show the ways in which a physically arduous journey across Xinjiang could be facilitated and chronicled via new technologies. However, creative tensions around the mechanization of transport persist, and often surface in the adoption of an enforced slowness that characterizes many contemporary travelogues. At the same time, acceleration still lends itself to formal and practical innovation: in an experimental travelogue entitled _Paysage fer_ ( _Ferroscape_ , 2000), François Bon describes a regularly repeated series of high-speed train journeys during which his representation of the landscape crossed is slowly assembled from fragments fleetingly perceived.

The impact of speed and motorized transport on travel writing has thus been considerable. The chosen mode of transport continues to have implications not only for the experience of the journey but also for the poetics of the travel narrative. The proliferation of means of transport may, for instance, permit a variegation of the travelogue, as the narrator's perception of and engagement with the field of travel alters according to his or her relative velocity or sense of removal from or proximity to the surroundings. Most notably, mechanized or motorized transport reduces the opportunities for direct contact with 'travelees' (Pratt 1992: 7), creating a sense of abstraction from the places crossed by the journey, epitomized by texts such as Henri Michaux's _Ecuador_ (1929), in which the narrator's reluctance to engage with South American people and culture is encapsulated in frenetic car journeys during which perception of the host culture is reduced to a blur more akin to hallucination than the modes of perception customarily associated with the travel narrative. It is important to note, however, that mechanization does not inevitably lead to a sense of abstraction and even disembodiment in travel. On the one hand, what de Certeau considered to be a form of incarceration within a means of transport is exploited by certain travel writers to create journey narratives whose focus is on the vehicle as a 'contact zone' in its own right (Pettinger 2002). Thus Jenny Diski's _Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America with Interruptions_ (2002) explores the USA through encounters on Amtrak, and Dan Kieran in _Three Men in a Float_ (2009) embraces the slowness of a milk float to produce a playful journey account that harnesses deceleration to focus on the relationship between co-travellers. On the other hand, a cluster of recent travel narratives have subverted the speed of mechanized transport in accounts that deliberately disrupt the anticipated progress of the journey. In _Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Voyage from Paris to Marseilles_ (1983), Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop describe a ludic trip in a VW campervan along the motorway between Paris and Marseilles punctuated by overnight stops in service areas that extend to several weeks – an itinerary that would normally have taken no more than twelve hours. Adopting a similar methodology, François Maspero's _Roissy Express: A Journey through the Paris Suburbs_ (1990) recounts a journey along the RER-B line, broken up by overnight stays in the vicinity of each suburban station, leading to an atomization of the space through which commuters and travellers to and from Roissy-CDG airport are conventionally whisked. The logical conclusion of these accounts of radical deceleration is found in narratives of 'vertical travel' (Cronin 2000: 19), exemplified by two very different texts, Alain de Botton's account of his experience as writer-in- residence at Heathrow Terminal 5 in _A Week at the Airport_ (2009), and Roger Green's microscopic, fragmented, voyeuristic observation of life at the South Mimms services on the M25 in _Destination Nowhere_ (2004).

**Walking and deceleration**

The recognition of public transport and of sites of mass travel customarily dismissed in terms of 'non-places' (Augé 1995) as a form of contact zone in their own right reasserts the idea of travel-as-friction with which this chapter began, a conceptualization that has a lengthy pedigree and can be traced back to early modern authors such as Montaigne. _Contra_ these new technologies of speed, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed the valorization of more obviously arduous, corporeal forms of travel (most notably pedestrianism) as a mark of 'authenticity' or as a means of recovering a mode of travel that permits a heightened engagement – often in psycho-geographic form (Coverley 2006) – with the complexities of place. Whereas Cortazar and Maspero subverted motorized transport to rediscover major transport arteries such as the RER-B line or the so-called 'Autoroute du Soleil' (the 'Motorway of the Sun', the French A6), Iain Sinclair's _London Orbital_ (2002) recounts an exploration of the palimpsestic hinterland of the London orbital M25 undertaken stubbornly and almost exclusively on foot. Sinclair is one of a number of contemporary authors for whom walking has become the privileged means of travelling through space and of (re)discovering its status as place. The tradition of the pedestrian travelogue to which he belongs is a long and distinguished one, achieving its distinctiveness as a subgenre when the emergence of alternative means of transport meant that travel by foot – and the reliance on one's own bodily capabilities this implied – became a positive choice. Travel narratives recounting walking journeys were a staple of Romantic literature (Jarvis 1997; Thompson 2003), with pedestrianism permitting an immersion of the body into nature; with the decline of such a tradition, a new practice of urban walking was encapsulated in post-Romantic _flânerie_ , famously described by Walter Benjamin as 'botanizing on the asphalt' (1983: 36). The rapid mechanization of travel, especially in the period following the First World War, did nothing to eradicate the travelogue based on walking journeys, and although the possibilities afforded by new means of transport may have made such narratives appear doubly pedestrian, some of the finest works in this subgenre – by authors such as Patrick Leigh Fermor and Laurie Lee – are based on long-distance walking itineraries.

To some extent, walking remains a constant in travel literature, although its prominence fluctuates and its meanings shift according to the prevailing context. A moment of resurgence has been the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, when a wider public interest in walking (e.g. Solnit 2000; Gros 2014) has been complemented by the publication of a cluster of pedestrian travel narratives launched in the 1970s by texts such as Lacarrière's _Chemin faisant_ ( _Along the Way_ , 1977). As Maureen Stone has noted (2002), however, there is a major difference between walking by choice and walking out of obligation, and the current trend for texts based on walking journeys is to be read in part as evidence of a form of self-differentiation in an era of mass travel and a nostalgia for earlier modes of journeying: Robert Macfarlane entitled his recent collection of accounts of walking journeys _The Old Ways_ (2012), and uses travel by foot to access locations, observe phenomena, meet individuals and discern traces of the past otherwise out of reach. Kathleen Jamie has criticized Macfarlane's travel writing as the work of a 'lone enraptured male' (2008), focusing in her reading on the issues of class and gender his writings raise, and also highlighting the construction of wildness on which it depends. It is arguable that such elements may be associated more generally with a certain tradition of travel writing, often linked to a 'guild' identity (Sugnet 1991), according to which access to the genre has been closely policed. Whilst undoubtedly part of this continuity, Macfarlane's work also reflects wider efforts among contemporary travel writers to reanimate the form in which they work. A return to walking has been central to this endeavour. Some authors – such as Robyn Davidson, Bernard Ollivier and Caroline Riegel – have returned to the tradition of undertaking ambitiously transcontinental journeys on foot; others have followed established routes, from the increasingly popular _camino de Santiago_ (journeys along which have been described by an eclectic and expanding group of authors, including Jean-Claude Bourlès, Tim Moore, Cees Nooteboom and Jean-Christophe Ruffin) to the resolutely British Pennine Way (the subject of Simon Armitage's _Walking Home_ , 2012). Walking has also been adopted as a means of rediscovering the urban – as in William B. Helmreich's exhaustive 6,000-mile tour of New York City ( _The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in New York City_ , 2013) – or of exploring the interstitial zones between the rural and urban that Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley have dubbed 'edgelands' (2011).

Just as it is difficult to talk of travel writing as a homogenized genre, so these new walking journeys (of which the works referenced above are only a small representative sample) resist reduction to a single set of characteristics. What unifies them, however, is their location of the self-reliant, un-mechanized travelling body at the centre of the journey and its account. In an age that theorists such as Paul Virilio have seen as characterized by 'dromology' (meaning that culture and society are to be understood in terms of speed, and as a progress toward absolute acceleration in which any distinction between time and space will be annihilated; see James 2007: 29–43), these contemporary walkers propose a counter-cultural alternative in which _de_ celeration permits multi-sensory engagement with the environment, an often fractal attention to detail and a sense of belonging in contexts of social fragmentation and even alienation. Walking does not necessarily imply a return to Romantic solipsism, and many pedestrian journeys rely on an openness and vulnerability that encourages forms of regular, interpersonal encounter that are rare in mechanized travel (see Mee 2014). At the same time, walking allows multidimensional engagements with the spaces of travel in terms of their substance, their content and the ways in which travellers perceive and process them. In her 2013 account of eleven walks with different experts around her block in New York, for example, Alexandra Horowitz proposes and performs what might be seen as a form of 'attentive' walking, for she notes in everyday pedestrian journeys that 'we miss the world making itself available to be observed. And we miss the possibility of being surprised by what is hidden in plain sight right in front of us' (2013: 2).

**Travel, disability and illness**

Horowitz's accounts of modest walking journeys encapsulate the capacity of pedestrian travel to defamiliarize the familiar and to re-enchant the everyday (on travel and re-enchantment, see Evans and Robson 2013). Despite the potential of walking to engage the full range of the body's senses, her very title – _On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes_ – nevertheless epitomizes the ocular-centrism present in many pedestrian narratives. It is important to acknowledge that the passage of the body through space does not only depend on engagement with (or disengagement from) external means of transport, which for all travellers may be seen as prosthetics by which the bodily is (relatively) modified, extended or enhanced; it also relates to the capacities and capabilities of the individual body, aspects that alter according to age or health, but which are additionally to be associated with issues of disability and impairment (and with their progressive social construction). When considering the place of the body in the travel narrative, these are questions which are attracting increasing attention as it becomes apparent that travel writing provides evidence of a generic normativity based around certain assumptions relating to able-bodied-ness. Although there are many pre-modern examples of travellers with visual impairments, not least in the context of pilgrimage and the quest for cure, Eitan Bar-Yosef – in what still remains one of the few scholarly treatments of the subject (2009) – links the nineteenth-century emergence of the subgenre, in the works of authors such as the 'Blind Traveller' James Holman, to the growth of tourism and the emergence of 'disability' as something socially and culturally constructed. Subsequently, a considerable corpus of travel narratives has been published by authors considered disabled, who have written about their subjective experiences of losing and renegotiating literal mobility, in terms that demand comparison, it might be argued, with the many travel writers concerned about losing and renegotiating the possibility of travel. Predominant in these texts are travelogues by authors who are blind or visually impaired, but there are also a number of narratives by travellers who are deaf as well as those by writers with limited mobility. The identification of such a corpus challenges the contemporary enthusiasm for corporeally active travel literature – either pedestrian or 'extreme' – with its nostalgia for accounts based on physical exploits of strong, performing bodies. The risk is that privileging corporeal authenticity over technological mobility may be seen to contribute to perceptions of disability as a form of deficiency. Insistence on walking as the epitome of natural, ethical, quintessentially human mobility has, for instance, potentially dehumanizing implications for those who are confined to a wheelchair. Accounts by disabled travellers highlight, however, the ways in which differing configurations of sensory engagement lead to differing constructions of space and place in the journey narrative; they also often reveal the full sensory dimensions of the travel experience, and provide reflections on alternative modes of engagement with other places and their inhabitants that are absent from narratives that privilege the visual.

Whereas disability in such accounts constitutes – implicitly or explicitly – a constant element of the journey, there are other narratives in which the traveller's corporeality is challenged more temporarily by bouts of illness (see Wrigley and Revill 2000). In certain accounts – such as William Fiennes's _Snow Geese_ (2002) or W.G. Sebald's _Rings of Saturn_ (1995) – illness precedes the journey or is otherwise inflected in it; in others, bodily breakdown occurs in the field of travel, punctuating the journey and either arresting or at least radically disrupting its progress. There is a long tradition – epitomized by Montaigne's kidney stones, described in detail in his posthumously published Italian travel journal (1983) – of the traveller's illness accompanying the traveller and serving as a metaphor for the experience of the journey more generally. Eric Newby, in _A Short Walk in the Hindi Kush_ (1958), contributes to this tradition as he stoically presents the serious gastrointestinal disorder that strikes him the final stages of the journey as merely one of a series of hardships: 'there was no more sugar to put in the tea, no more jam, no more cigarettes and I was reading _The Hound of the Baskervilles_ for the third time; all of us suffered from a persistent dysentery' (2010: 266). Bernard Ollivier allows illness to enter the narrative more dramatically as, at the end of the first volume of the _Longue marche_ ( _Long Walk_ ) trilogy, he collapses on the Turkish–Iranian border, noting minimalistically: 'I can no longer walk' (2000: 300). But of modern travel writers, it is perhaps Nicolas Bouvier for whom illness and the fallibility of the body are key elements of the journey narrative. His 1990 account of a journey to the Aran Islands – a location he visits in February at a time when little is visible through the mist – is marked by a fever, the symptoms of whose emergence he recounts in detail; when he does venture out, the narrator suffers a fall and returns to his accommodation bleeding and bruised. Lying awake following this accident, he describes a form of out-of-body experience as he views his own hands on the bedcovers and provides a detached account of the role they have played in his journeys. The effect is one of estrangement, as the weight of the body at once anchors the traveller in the place he visits but also provides a hallucinatory lens through which the experience of the journey is perceived. An extreme account of such a process is included in _Le Poisson-Scorpion_ ( _The Scorpion-Fish_ , 1981), in which Bouvier describes his exhausted feverish stay in Sri Lanka, during which altered perception permits microscopic attention to the insect life on the island as well as observation of long-dead figures such as the priest Father Alvaro. Fact and fiction begin to merge, and the narrator asks a question not uncommon to travelogues: 'Fever [. . .] and the dancing fireflies above my head made me giddy: one of those moments that robs a traveller of his purpose. I was rather nonplussed, wondering what I was really doing here' (2014: 17). In this process, the traveller is slowly erased and begins to dissolve into his surroundings in what one critic has dubbed Bouvier's 'aesthetics of disappearance' (Ridon 2002), but the narrative ends with release as the traveller re-emerges from this hallucinatory experience of place: 'I began to revive: I had touched bottom, I was coming up like a bubble' (Bouvier 2014: 139).

**Conclusion**

To differing degrees, by foregrounding the role of corporeality in the journey, accounts of both disability and illness highlight and challenge the diverse and often unpredictable forms that travel may continue to adopt in an age of mechanization and apparently ever-increasing acceleration. They disrupt perceptions of the standardization and sanitization of the travel experience, reveal the ways in which the body in motion may engage in very different ways with its surroundings, and invite reflection on the borderline between mobility and immobility. Perhaps most significantly, cases in which the body fails to operate according the ways in which society or the individual expects permit the reintegration of contingency into the journey and its textualization. Jacques Meunier has described how some of the most successful travel writing depends on the unexpected but creative intervention of various forms of 'breakdown', physical, psychological or mechanical: 'a marvellous opening to the unexpected and the unthinkable' (1993: 91). Such access to the mystique of misadventure and mishap, aspects of the journey that mechanization seeks in various ways to minimize or even eliminate, finds its extreme form in the sometimes liberating, sometimes terrifying, experience of getting lost – described eloquently by Rebecca Solnit, in her field guide to this particular art of travel, as a time when 'the world has become larger than your knowledge of it' (2005: 22).

Getting lost – either literally, as is the case with many pedestrian travellers, or more figuratively, as is the case with travellers such as Bouvier who appear to experience the journey as a process of radical defamiliarization – is very different from the disembodiment or even evaporation experienced in mechanized acceleration or in the 'virtual travel' (Cheong 1995) that offers a hyper-contemporary form of armchair journeying. It is, rather, an extreme form of re-embodiment, the reassertion of the place of the corporeal – with its radical unpredictability – in the experience of travel. In 'Travelling cultures' (1997), James Clifford described a balance between 'travelling' and 'dwelling', refusing any neat division between static and mobile cultures or individuals, and positing instead complementary states of 'dwelling-in-travelling' and 'travelling-in-dwelling'. For readers of travel writing, such a distinction invites a renewed reflection on the body – in motion, or in stasis; self-propelled, or carried along; stimulated by its surroundings, or acutely vulnerable to the threat of the unfamiliar – as it dwells in the journey, serving either as the means of movement or as an impediment to progress. And such reflections in turn locate the traveller firmly in the world.

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Thompson, C.W. (2003) _Walking and the French Romantics: Rousseau to Sand and Hugo_ , Oxford; New York: Lang.

Wrigley, R., and Revill, G. (eds) (2000) _Pathologies of Travel_ , Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Youngs, T. (ed.) (2013) 'Travel Writing and the Motorcycle', Special Issue of _Studies in Travel Writing_ 17(4).

Travel Writing and Visual Culture

_Margaret Topping_

_Banality is never in the world. It is always in the gaze_

Jean-Didier Urbain1

In his 1998 book _Secrets de voyage_ ( _Travel Secrets_ ), French sociologist and travel theorist Jean-Didier Urbain echoes the common call of critics and scholars of visual culture to set aside preconceived interpretations in favour of 'look[ing] for ourselves' (Howells 2003: 438–9). Yet, as the title of John Berger's seminal work on this subject reminds us, there are many _Ways of Seeing_ (2008). Seeing is contingent, in other words, on personal, institutional and cultural 'dispositions' which may be explored with reference to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's fluid concepts of 'field' and 'habitus' (1993). In the dialogue established here between Bourdieu and Urbain, two key ideas emerge which have particular potency for the study of travel writing. The first is that narratives of encounter with the world tend to privilege what is _seen_ : for Urbain, it is a freshness of _vision_ that defamiliarizes the familiar and challenges our 'worldview'. The second is that this worldview is not neutral. Rather, it is influenced both by the attitudes or 'system of dispositions' we unconsciously internalize as individuals ('habitus'), and by the institutional, codified structures within which we as individuals operate ('field'). Multiple interpretations of the world emerge in the 'space of possibilities' (Howells 2003: 92) created when 'habitus' comes into contact with 'field'. But that is not to celebrate an unanchored cornucopia of ways of seeing, for vision is always partial (i.e. limited, selective) and never impartial (i.e. never disinterested, or devoid of value judgements and intellectual influences). In short, we never simply see the world in a direct, unmediated sense-perception; rather, what we see and how we see are always conditioned by the observer's specific conjunction of 'field' and 'habitus', and so informed by political, economic and class affiliations.

The insights of Bourdieu and others have inspired much recent scholarship on visual culture and its diverse forms and implications (for a summary, see Howells 2003). One strand of this scholarship has explored how vision and visual images have historically been used in the contexts of travel and travel writing – these both being activities in which, as noted above, Western culture has long valorized the eyewitness or auto-optic account, in which the writer has supposedly seen for themselves the events, places or phenomena they describe. In the present chapter, I discuss some of the key themes explored in this recent work on the inter-relationship of travel, travel writing and visual culture, paying particular attention to the way the aesthetics of the visual and of visualization are inescapably bound up with ethical questions of political, economic and social power. To explore this issue, I consider three main areas. First, I address the extent to which a prioritizing of _seeing_ in the experience of travel overlaps with particular value judgements and cultural preconceptions – that is to say, I explore whether 'ocularcentrism' may in certain contexts be equated to eurocentrism. Second, I consider the importance of rethinking the secondary status commonly ascribed to pictures of one's travels as mere 'aides-mémoires' in favour of an interrogation of images as more dynamic, and potentially contestatory, participants in the narrative. Then finally, I offer a brief speculation on a potential future for travel narratives in which the visual is extended into a more multi-sensory, 3D or 4D experience. The purpose of the present chapter is thus not to provide detailed analyses of individual travel narratives, although examples will be introduced to illustrate ideas; rather I offer here theoretical insights into the ethical implications of seeing in relation to writing and, indeed, briefly in the final section, in relation to hearing, smelling, tasting or touching – in essence, in relation to the physical realities of travel.

**Ocularcentrism as Eurocentrism?**

Travel is an embodied experience, for even the armchair traveller is seeking a synaesthetic taste of local colour in his or her reading; and yet, as suggested above, accounts of travel tend to isolate vision from the other senses, both the non-proximate (hearing) and the proximate (touch, taste, smell). This privileging of sight may risk replicating the Western 'ocularcentrism' critiqued by Martin Jay in _Downcast Eyes_ (1994) and countered by a range of twentieth-century philosophers, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2013), who sought to oppose the reduction of the world to a spectacle to be observed. That is to say, this cutting-off of vision from other parts of sensory and perceptive experience may reduce _vision_ to _observation_ in an almost mechanical separation from thought, which turns the subject into an unquestioning object. Alternatively, it may grant vision absolute supremacy, in which case the subject becomes all-powerful, and perception is turned into a form of authority or judgment that is based on the assumption that transcendent knowledge of the world exists prior to full sensory experience. The reduction of the world to visual experience may also imply a reduction of the travellee and his/her culture to a spectacle produced by and for the traveller/writer.

Turning from travel to travel writing, the genre is of course 'a notoriously raffish open house', encompassing such diverse texts as travel journalism, guidebooks, coffee-table photobooks and travel literature (Raban 1988: 253–4). None the less, recurrent tropes appear when artistic production coincides with particular unequal power relations. European travel narratives written in the context of imperial expansion, for example, often reproduce the Saidian binary, which opposes dominant Western agency and a stable sense of selfhood to the presumed passivity and fundamental alterity of the non-Western 'subaltern' (Said 1978). With regard to issues of visuality and the ethics of viewing, a common feature of travel narratives produced during these periods are ekphrastic portraits of place; that is to say, portraits which incorporate 'the verbal representation of visual representation' (Heffernan 1993: 7), so that the travellee and his/her culture are metaphorically linked to visual artefacts such as stage-sets, works of art or decorative objects. To give one example, French writer and naval officer Pierre Loti (1850–1923) opens his 1887 text _Madame Chrysanthème_ with the protagonist's arrival in Japan as part of a naval fleet tasked with securing trade relations with the West. He describes the bay of Nagasaki as being framed by mountains 'like the supports for a theatrical backdrop [. . .] but not naturalistic enough'. The trees he sees are 'arranged with the same precious grace as one sees on lacquered trays', and his first encounter with the culture on disembarking is described as a collectible 'tourist trinket' (1993: 48–51). This semantic field, drawn from the visual arts, not only replicates the idea common to colonialist discourse that the cultural other depends for its existence on the gaze of the traveller/colonizer – a gaze which is never presumed to be reciprocal – but also that the culture visited has the status of a commodity. Works of art, after all, imply the presence of a market and a privileged consumer; it is not coincidental that Loti's travelogue was produced at the height of the fashion for _Japonisme_ in France. The sanctification of the work of art this market produces, and which feeds the ocularcentrism noted by Jay, implies a desire to frame, fix, capture, and possess a foreign culture, in ways that paradoxically 'domesticate' it.

The concept of 'domestication' here is drawn from translation theory and specifically the work of Lawrence Venuti. Venuti identifies domestication and foreignization as ethical strategies used by the translator to make the actual process – indeed, the very _fact_ – of translation either 'invisible' or 'visible' (2008: 1–34). A domesticating strategy when translating obscures the act of translation; conversely, a 'foreignizing' style foregrounds the translation process, effectively reminding us that the translated text is constructed, and, by extension, that representation is not neutral but the product of the translator's 'field' and 'habitus'. Similar processes occur in travel writing, which is itself a form of cultural translation. Here, domestication implies conforming to a preconceived vision of the foreign that retains all the appeal of the exotic without becoming impenetrably or uncomfortably alien. This is the exotic shorthand of palm trees and camels that the remarkably prescient Victor Segalen – a writer whose theoretical importance only began to be recognized several decades after his death in 1919 – condemned in Pierre Loti. More generally, if cultures such as Japan, China or India are perceived by the Western traveller/writer as representing, variously, the cradle of civilization, the geographical centre of spiritual enlightenment, and/or a timeless site of ritual and tradition, their aestheticization by the traveller facilitates a process of salvage exoticism in which the messy business of human poverty or progress, technological development or material ambition, or the much-lamented loss of Diversity brought about by the march of globalization, may be conveniently evacuated from the picture. What remains is the sought-after (because stereotype-confirming) vision of 'a monumental and uninhabited world', to quote Roland Barthes' debunking analysis of the iconic French travel guide, _Le Guide bleu_ (1972: 123). In particular conjunctions of field and habitus, therefore, ocularcentrism and eurocentrism are mutually reinforcing.

**From aide-mémoire to iconotext**

The previous section explored the links between travel and the visual with reference to the frequent presence in travel writing of quasi-ekphrastic descriptions of the culture visited, which associate it with a pre-defined aesthetic commodity. However, the visual may also be present as a _material_ artefact on which the travel writer relies, either as an 'aide-mémoire' or as physical illustration published alongside, and as a supplement to, the textual narrative. The present section turns to the different ways in which image and text interact on this material and – as I will argue, ethical – level, my goal being to propose a re-evaluation of the role of images as secondary to text, as their common categorization as either 'aide-mémoire' or 'illustration' implies. My particular focus will be photography, a medium often celebrated as an unmediated, 'objective' mode of representation.

As Berger notes, 'seeing comes before words' (2008: 7), and while the context for his assertion is that 'the child looks and recognises before it can speak', one might argue that seeing also comes before words in the experience of the many travel writers who also sketched, painted and, increasingly since the development of photography in the 1830s, took photographs on their travels. Yet the camera has undergone its own journey since the 1830s, from its early prized status as a tool of political privilege and colonialist cataloguing, to a questionable marker of cultural capital. The question mark depends on one's position as either traveller or tourist, itself an over-determined distinction that is unambiguous only for the traveller who seeks to define him/herself in direct opposition to the tourist.

At the start of the camera's journey, the astronomer François Arago vaunted the opportunities offered by this new technology in his 1839 address to the French Assembly, saying:

While these pictures are exhibited to you, [you] will imagine the extraordinary advantages which could have been derived from so exact and rapid a means of reproduction during [Napoleon's] expedition to Egypt: everybody will realise that had we had photography in 1798 we would possess today faithful pictorial records of that which the learned world is forever deprived by the greed of the Arabs and the vandalism of certain travellers.

(Quoted in Schwartz and Ryan 2003: 24–5)

Indeed, photography was, throughout the nineteenth century, 'understood to be the agent _par excellence_ for listing, knowing, possessing, as it were, the things of the world' (Solomon-Godeau 1994: 155). However, in the intervening century, not only has the rhetoric of scientific objectivity been called into question, but the photographic image has also acquired an ideological edge, as famously explored by Susan Sontag in _On Photography_ (1977). For Sontag, the camera is 'predatory' and 'to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed' (1977: 14). As such, in the context of travel and tourism, photography has moved beyond 'aide-mémoire' to become an instrument of objectification, as well as a sanitized shorthand or safe synecdoche, which may well provide the guarantee for the traveller/tourist of having 'been there', but in which privileged and mediated vision ousts the challenges of multi-sensory engagement. For French travel writer Christine Jordis:

The tourist doesn't have the time to listen, scarcely even to see; he takes photographs. He doesn't force his brain to do any work: he manipulates his camera; he's been led to believe that it's more certain/sure [plus sûr]. The mechanical organ has replaced the visual one, a photo instead of a memory, the solidity of paper as opposed to the fleeting image.

(Jordis 2005: 92)

The tourist, she seems to suggest, prefers intercultural contact to occur via the distance of an instrument of mechanical or, more recently, digital reproduction. It is this prosthesis that renders the encounter with alterity 'plus sûr'. How are we to read this term? Is it that the camera facilitates an encounter that is more manageable or more contained by virtue of being literally and metaphorically framed? In an echo of the picturesque images of travel produced before photographic technology, the photographee is rendered non-threatening by the boundaries that are policed and preserved by the camera lens, while the image frame allows for the convenient exclusion of all that does not 'fit' with expectations. As noted previously in relation to textual (ekphrastic) images, this is touristic photography as stereotype confirmation, to be celebrated at some future moment in the familiar space of home and shared with extensions of one's self (that is, friends and family), not the cultural other who is the object of the photograph.

Alternatively, does the cultural encounter become 'plus sûr' because the photograph seems to offer the promise of 'authenticity'? As Roland Barthes reflects in _Camera Lucida_ : 'By its very nature, photography is tautological. [. . .] One might say that photography always carries its referent with it' (1993: 80). As a medium of representation, it is quite distinct from text, painting or film on account of what Barthes terms its evidential qualities, the absence of 'fictional' mediation it may seem to imply. In this, it also, of course, seems to function as a guarantor of memory:

the photo is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, waves radiate outwards to touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission scarcely matters; the photo of the one who has disappeared comes and touches me like the refracted rays of a star. A kind of umbilical cord links the body of the thing that has been photographed to my gaze.

(Barthes 1993: 80–1)

Barthes' observation envelops within it such binaries as past and present, here and there, spectre and spectacle, material and immaterial, self and other – binaries that are intrinsic to a mode of representation whose promise of empiricism is belied by its inevitable partiality and incompleteness. The photograph shuttles between these opposing poles in a seeming promise of reconciliation. It conjures up the other – the other as time, space, or identity – offering an image of capture, but one that is also, always, evasion. For if the photograph creates the impression of being capable of fixing a fragile memory on the tangible surface of photographic paper as an 'aide-mémoire' for the traveller's narrative, that impression is undercut by its inescapably mediated status and compromised by the underside of this concretizing power: memory's multi-dimensional vectors become solidified, in a photograph, into an unchanging monument. The photograph does not therefore just _depict_ 'a monumental and uninhabited world'; it cements a partial vision of the culture visited as fixed and unchanging. One might note, in passing, that the more recent photographic technologies offered by mobile phones and other devices generate new paradoxes based on an oscillation between the studied and the casual, the permanently preserved and the readily discarded. Albeit in different ways, everything that does not 'fit' is deemed expendable.

However, the diachronic relationship between image and text implied when the former acts as 'aide-mémoire' for the latter evolves into a democratic relationship of co-presence when travel writers produce intermedial texts – or 'iconotexts', to use the term favoured by critics such as Peter Wagner (1995) – in which the relationship between image and text is not one of mutual illumination, but instead involves the conscious creation of 'in-between' spaces. These are spaces where ambivalent relationships between text and image, sometimes of complementarity but more often of tension, ludic interplay, or ideological disjuncture, are played out. In short, iconotexts have the potential to create contestatory spaces where image and text do not always tell the same story. As such, they create a mosaic in which travel writers may reflect productively on the possibilities and limitations of textuality, visuality and iconotextuality, or on what they perceive to be photo opportunities and what they do not. What a writer chooses to represent textually rather than photographically, for instance, can reveal an ethical impulse as much as an aesthetic one, not least because the use of visual images – particularly those reproduced by mechanical and increasingly digital technology – also opens up, as we have seen, questions of commodification and capture, of mediated or sanitized experience, and an emphasis on the traveller at the expense of the travellee (Topping 2013).

Critic Jean-Marc Moura identifies a dominant strategy in the contemporary touristic imaginary which favours a 'musealization [muséalization] of the world' where all human artefacts are to be 'labelled, preserved and secured'. He identifies this trend as being symptomatic of a 'heritage syndrome', which demands that the world be exhibited ['une mise en spectacle du monde'] in ways that maintain the ocularcentric distance between viewer and viewed.2 Iconotexts have the ideological potential to resist this ocularcentrism, and this 'museum' perspective, by offering a more unstable, fragmented worldview in which unexpected harmonies nonetheless emerge. Francophone Swiss travel writer Nicolas Bouvier (1929–1998) implies just such a 'mosaicization [mosaïcization] of the world' when he writes of his travelling philosophy as follows: 'I bring together little fragments of knowledge, as one would gather the scattered pieces of a shattered mosaic, wherever I can, with no attempt to impose a system' (2004: 128). A writer of supreme literary merit and an accomplished photographer, as well as an ideologically engaged 'post-Orientalist' voice, Bouvier's work is becoming increasingly known to an Anglophone readership in translation. Although a prolific writer of prose as well as poetry, the core of his work is often identified as comprising three texts, _L'Usage du monde_ ( _The Way of the World_ , 1963), _Chronique japonaise_ ( _Japanese Chronicle_ , 1975); and _Le Poisson-Scorpion_ ( _The Scorpion Fish_ , 1981) – with the first of these books often described as a bible for a new generation of French travel writers (2004).

Bouvier's work at times takes the form of a phototextual narrative created by Bouvier himself, at others (as in _L'Usage du monde_ ) that of a dual narrative combining Bouvier's text with the ink drawings of his travelling companion, the artist Thierry Vernet. This democratic interplay of image and text is crucial to challenging the authority of monolithic, homogenizing discourses of otherness: one recalls Said's description of the edifice of Orientalism, for instance, as a ' _textual_ attitude' (1978: 93; my emphasis). To the inherent intergenericity of travel writing is thus added a further instability in which the juxtaposition of image and text is based not on complementarity, but on the recognition of multiple perspectives on the culture visited, indeed multiple 'ways of seeing'. These alternative narratives, in which interpretative slippages in accounts of the same event may be present or which may not map onto one another in any obvious way – physically, the image on one page may seem to bear no relation to the text on the facing page – also highlight the partiality of any individual's perspective on the culture visited, and prompt a critical reflection on the very art of representation. In this, Bouvier's work is illustrative of the ways in which the visual images that commonly accompany (or sometimes precede) the written accounts of travel writers have been overlooked and their ethical importance un-noted.

It is not only the iconotextual status of these narratives which is significant, but also the focal point of the photographic eye, for in this too may be detected a resistance to the defining narratives of place. For Michel de Certeau, 'place' is delineated and dominated by powerful elites. Only in being 'lived through' – i.e. personalized and inscribed with meaning by individuals – is it transformed into 'space'; and for de Certeau, it is crucially _everyday_ practices which provide individuals with the 'tactics' by which they can challenge, elude or resist structures of commercial, political or cultural dominance (1984). If we transpose this model of tactical resistance through everyday activity onto the dominant discourses that typify particular cultures as they are (stereotypically) represented in travel writing, a range of iconotextual narratives acquires a new potency. While Bouvier's textual account of Japan, for example, provides a rich, authoritative account of the country's myths, rituals and history (alongside, of course, his own encounters with individuals), the focus of his photographic narrative on the everyday constitutes a tactic by which to resist commercialized, commoditized or politicized visions of the culture (Gorrara and Topping 2008). Immediately striking, for instance, is the relative absence of static, 'touristic' images of a timeless and traditional Japan or, to use Barthes' terms, of a 'monumental and uninhabited world' of temples and monuments (1972: 123). Instead, Bouvier's camera lens rests on ordinary people, in ways that erase social and aesthetic hierarchies. Many of these are full-face portraits, where the picture space is filled and compressed to such a degree that cultural context is effaced and intercultural distance between viewer and subject is bridged. Indeed, Bouvier's subjects often resist 'containment' by exceeding the boundaries of the photographic frame. Elsewhere, images of physical mobility, such as that of a student running (Bouvier 2002: 82), blur the photographic image both to imply the elusiveness of any authentic knowledge of the cultural other and to counter the stereotype of Japan as a ritual, unchanging world. The East here is not 'objectifiable' – either as passive and impassive commodity or as feared 'yellow peril' – nor is it irretrievably other, as underlined by the cultural non-specificity of many of Bouvier's photographs of people. Although culturally specific art forms and performative rituals – such as Noh theatre, Sumo, or a geisha dance recital – are presented, such photographs are almost without exception accompanied by parallel images in which the 'performative mask' is literally or metaphorically erased: subjects are variously shown with make-up and costume not yet complete or engaged in an everyday activity, as with Bouvier's photograph of a Sumo wrestler playing mah-jong (2002: 105). This juxtaposition of images serves to highlight the gap between spectacle and reality and to provide a tangible marker of the multi-layered complexity of the cultural other. Inter-subjective contact thus becomes, for Bouvier, the necessary means to intercultural contact, and his photographs grant a space to the individuals concealed behind politically charged stereotypes or cultural emblems. These stereotypes can be all too easily replicated by the very tool he himself uses, as Bouvier satirizes textually, for example in his description of the Western tourists who are seeking to consume in one mouthful 'the soul of Japan' ('l'âme du Japon'):

Three mature American women, robustly equipped with hats, corsets and cameras – of the kind who can digest in a single day a dozen temples and a couple of imperial residences without ever feeling full – settle in before the famous 'Garden of Stones', resolved to have no more than a single mouthful.

(Bouvier 2008: 176)

In contrast, Bouvier's highly self-conscious reflection on photographic portraiture in 'Notes en vrac sur le visage' ('Random notes on the human face') elaborates a vision of photographic encounter in which the fleetingness of the precise moment of encounter is prefaced by a gradually cultivated relationship of trust between himself and an individual who may eventually become the photographee, but who is not viewed as a photo opportunity from the outset. The photographer, Bouvier argues, must 'seek through patience and humility to allow the inner contours of a face to emerge (2004: 702), explaining also in _Routes et déroutes_ ( _Routes and Detours_ ) how it may be weeks before a photograph is taken, representing as it does a 'gift of the face' on the part of the photographee born of 'our friendly contact' (2004: 1309). What is clear from the intermediality of Bouvier's narrative is that encounter is dependent on the exotic gaze being returned and, indeed, de-exoticized. Intercultural contact is thus based not on the privileged position of the _voyeur_ , but on an equality and mutuality that finds its material reflection in the democratic interplay in his works of image and text.

**From visual to virtual**

This final section offers a few speculative thoughts on the possibilities for resisting ocularcentrism offered by the new technologies that are enabling us to travel in 3D or 4D. In a humorous evocation of this brave new world of travel that transcends the primarily visual phenomenological experience of reading, Gemma Bowes opens a 2007 article in the 'Travel' section of the _Observer_ with the following description:

I'm ambling along the beach, palm trees looming through the dusky haze of sunset. I can just make out some lights through the trees and, as I draw closer, I realize it is a beach club, with dozens of gorgeous people in outlandish clothes dancing on the sand.

After joining them for a while, I follow a sign for a treehouse campsite and find a stylish open-air lodge, with verandas built up into the trees and bean bags and designer chairs round open fires. I recline for a while before Mario, my tour operator, says he wants to buy me some designer clothes before taking me skiing. Then he'll take me to see some historical sites and meet some celebrities.

It seems I've stumbled upon my dream holiday. What's more, it's free, totally eco-friendly and we don't have any long coach transfers between the sites. We can simply teleport, or indeed fly.

Mario Gerosa's tours are a little different to your average package holiday. He's the world's first 'virtual tour operator', offering holidays in cyberspace through his company, Synthtravels, to online 3D, interactive worlds, which together have around 20 million users worldwide.

(Bowes 2007)

If this year's hottest destination is cyberspace, with all of its promises of a multi-sensorial 'sense of place' that moves the experience of travel beyond the ocularcentric model of the world as spectacle, what is the future of travel writing? Lively debate as to the preservation of print culture more generally has lost none of its vigour, but might we identify an imperative of a very particular kind to preserve travel writing notwithstanding – or perhaps precisely because of – its possibilities in the global age of virtual communications? The authors of a 2007 article on 'The Mixed Reality Book: A New Multimedia Reading Experience' describe their quest to develop a product that combines something of the physical book and the virtual experience:

A new type of digitally enhanced book which symbiotically merges different types of media in a seamless approach. By keeping the traditional book (and its affordance) and enhancing it visually and aurally, we provide a highly efficient combination of the physical and digital world. Our solution utilizes recent developments in computer vision tracking, advanced GPU technology and spatial sound rendering. The system's collaboration capabilities also allow other users to be part of the story.

(Grasset et al. 2007: 1953)

Would this have been an ideal technology for Bouvier, were he able to capture the sounds, sights, scents, feel, taste of his travels and embody them digitally in his narrative? Would he have embraced 3D or 4D technology? Recent developments in neuroscience have rejected the long-held belief that the information gathered by each of the senses is processed in separate areas of the brain. Research is now revealing that there is a complex interaction between the senses in the brain, an interaction that enables us to understand the world in a unified way: in the most radical examples, we experience the world synaesthetically. The 'mixed-media book', with its claims for symbiosis and seamlessness, seeks to replicate that cohesion of the senses and thus move travel writing beyond the visual.

However, to return to the image of the mosaic, the counter-argument to the powerful appeal of the virtual is that, for travel writing, neither seamlessness nor symbiosis is the goal, notwithstanding its conventional association with an attempted recreation of the physical and metaphorical experience of 'being there'. What is important is the preservation of uncertainty, the shock of the unfamiliar in the midst of the familiar, or indeed the shock of the familiar in the midst of the unfamiliar. What is important, in other words, is the sense of disruption, not an imposition of blemish-free harmony. Such disruptions may emerge in the juxtaposition of text and image and the different intellectual and affective demands of each; the immediate, spontaneous affect of a visual image, for example, which Lessing (1838) famously contrasted with the intellectual, slow simmer required by reading a text. The intermedial may facilitate an understanding of the world in a unified way, but there must also be a gap between direct experience and mediated experience; between, for example, a journey around Japan as it is experienced by individual travellers in the 'space of possibilities' that emerges from the conjunction of their own 'field' and 'habitus', and Bouvier's account of _his_ journey around Japan.

**Conclusion**

Travel as an activity is fraught with ethical challenges. I have focused here on the temptation of privileging vision above a multi-sensory, unmediated encounter with the culture visited, and the risks this implies of experiencing travel as a form of consumption and the travellee as commodity or spectacle. Travel writing struggles also with this legacy, as may be evident in, variously, a narrative positioning that implies a sanitised distance, an abundance of metaphors of viewing, and/or the presumption that a static image captured while travelling can provide the 'authentic' aide-mémoire for – or, indeed, stand in for – the experience. Increasingly, however, writers whom we might identify as postcolonialist, post-Orientalist, and, I would suggest, post-ocularcentric are showing an awareness of this complexity, often by experimenting with intermedial forms. Paradoxically, too, such writers are using visual means of representation to destabilize binary conceptions of what text and image _do_ , precisely as a means of destabilizing binary conceptions of what self and other _are_. And while the intriguing possibilities of virtual travel might seem the obvious progression in the artistic quest for an approximation of the full embodied experience of travel, the ease or comfort which would doubtless be expected of such a product risks flattening out the shock of Diversity, which Segalen insists we must experience if the experience and account of travel is not to be reduced to domesticated assimilation. As he proposes, exoticism is not 'that kaleidoscopic state associated with the tourist or the mediocre viewer, but the acute, curious reaction to the _clash_ [choc] of a strong individuality against an objectivity whose difference from itself it perceives and savours' (Segalen 1999: 43). If seeing is only one of the senses engaged in the phenomenological shock of travel, the challenge for travel writing is to test its boundaries in search of an unsettling (enough) balance between the feeling of sensory immersion and the _construction_ of a feeling of sensory immersion.

**Notes**

1 Unless bibliographical details are provided for published translations, all translations from French are my own. Where published translations are quoted, the first publication date of the original French is also provided.

2 These ideas were developed in a plenary lecture entitled 'Littérature et imaginaire touristique du temps: portraits du Caraïbe en paradis atemporel', delivered by Jean-Marc Moura at the 2008 'Borders and Crossings/Seuils et traverses' conference in Melbourne, Australia.

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Travel Writing

Reception and Readership

_Robin Jarvis_

Why do people read travel books? _How_ do they read them? Have people read travel books for different reasons, and in different ways, at different times in the evolution of this durable genre?

These are not questions that travel writing studies has so far considered worthy of serious investigation. Following the lead of Edward Said's _Orientalism_ (1978) and Mary Louise Pratt's _Imperial Eyes_ (1992), many critics have construed the genre as a form of textual domination or exploitation of marginalized and vulnerable peoples and cultures, with the explorer or traveller either paving the way for, or reinforcing ideological complicity in, more material forms of power. In this light, it is unsurprising that early travel writing has become, in Steve Clark's combative analysis, 'interesting for us again' only as 'a kind of love that dare not speak its name' (Clark 1999: 3). As for contemporary travel writers plying their trade in a largely decolonized world, this diverse community has been characterized by Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan as 'retailers of mostly white, male, middle-class, heterosexual myths and prejudices', whose books are 'a refuge for complacent, even nostalgically retrograde, middle-class values' and 'an alibi for the perpetuation or reinstallment of ethnocentrically superior attitudes to "other" cultures, peoples, and places' (Holland and Huggan 1998: viii). As these remarks illustrate, sweeping generalizations, often proffered without a shred of evidence, have long been par for the course in criticism of travel writing.

As Holland and Huggan's study also confirms, the reader has all too often become collateral damage in the war on travel writing. Travel readers, we hear, comprise a 'nostalgic middle-class audience', voyeuristic 'consumers of exotic – culturally "othered" – goods' who wish above all to 'identify themselves as bone fide travellers, not vulgar tourists', and are grateful to writers who 'pander skilfully' to their 'whims' (Holland and Huggan 1998: 45, viii, 203–4). It would seem that, as purveyors of negative stereotypes, critics of travel writing have little to learn from travel writers themselves. To be fair, Holland and Huggan do acknowledge that 'a detailed study of travel writing's by no means uniform readership needs to be written' (Holland and Huggan 1998: ix) and one can only endorse this recommendation. As I discuss in more detail in the next section, although the rapid growth of book history has seen an explosion of research into the reception of major poets and novelists, this trend has not been reflected in travel writing studies. Serious inquiries into the readership and reception of this genre remain thin on the ground, with the result that travel readers get generalized about to death. If one is fascinated by early travel writing, then one is seemingly guilty by association with the worst examples of racism, sexism, and imperialist arrogance to be found in that body of literature. There could be no better example of what Jonathan Rose calls the 'receptive fallacy' (Rose 1995: 209) – the lazy assumption that the attitudes and beliefs of readers are identical with the worldview embodied by a text. Alternatively, if one enjoys contemporary travel writing, then one is hopelessly nostalgic for a time when the world was reassuringly divided into civilized Westerners and funny foreigners, and desirous of still enjoying representational power over other peoples and cultures to compensate for the unpleasant realities of imperial dispossession and economic decline. It must be possible to do better than this, and to give a less prejudiced and prejudicial account of the reader's role in the communications circuit – to borrow Robert Darnton's well-known concept (Darnton 1990b) – that links travel writers, publishers, booksellers, and the diverse men and women who consume these texts and respond to them in varied and unpredictable ways. Our understanding of travel writing can only benefit from seeking – if not finding – answers to the difficult 'how' and 'why' questions that Darnton, in another of his seminal essays (Darnton 1990a), rightly portrays as the holy grail of the history of reading.

**Researching the reader**

How might we recover the meanings and significance of travel books for 'real', historical readers? What kinds of evidence can one draw on?

Reader-response criticism of the kind pioneered by Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish posits a hypothetical reader whose operations are dictated by the text, while reception theory as exemplified by Hans Robert Jauss is concerned with broad frameworks of readerly expectations and accords limited value to empirical testimony. Neither school offers much leverage in answering the questions I pose above. More promising are the quantitative measures favoured by book historians in their quest to reconstruct the material life of texts: information on print runs, prices, formats, sales, and the like, which can help form a general picture of a genre's position in the marketplace at a particular time and, by extension, of a particular community of readers. William St Clair presents some fascinating data of this kind in one of the statistical appendices to his major economic analysis of the 'reading nation' in the Romantic period. His research into 'voyages and travels' leads him to conclude that the 'reading elites' of the age – but _only_ the elites – 'took all geography and all history into their consciousness' and that there was 'nothing the world which the British did not feel was partly their own' (St Clair 2004: 555–60, 233–4). For earlier periods such as this, information on libraries and other shared reading institutions can also be helpful in refining our ideas of the popularity of the genre and the ease or otherwise of readers' access to the latest travel books. Paul Kaufman's pioneering work on eighteenth-century libraries (1969) found ample evidence of the popularity of travel narratives with library users.

While it is important to improve our knowledge of the production and consumption of travel books, consumers and readers are not the same thing, as Claire Squires notes in a survey of the contemporary global book market (Squires 2007: 406). Readers can read a book without buying it and consumers can buy a book without reading it; many people may buy (and read) a book but all may be disappointed by it; and so on. How can we derive a better insight into what readers actually felt and thought about travel books at any given point in their life-cycle?

Book reviews might appear to many to be the obvious resource, but have often been discounted as reliable evidence of reading experiences, at least with respect to earlier periods. In studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, it is common to denigrate reviews for their class and gender bias, or their alleged passive compliance with the ideological affiliations of particular journals, or their craven subservience to the commercial interests of publishers. I have argued elsewhere (Jarvis 2012) that these objections have been overplayed and that it makes no sense to exclude from consideration what is often a rich vein of testimony to what educated readers found interesting, original, or important in books when they first appeared. Nevertheless, there has been scant critical attention to reviews of travel books (compared with reviews of poems or novels), so it is indifference rather than discreditation that is the fundamental problem.

The excellent and ever-growing Open University-hosted _Reading Experience Database_ ( _RED_ ), which gathers and catalogues all kinds of 'recorded engagements' with all types of written texts (including travel books), tellingly excludes formal reviews from its evidence base. The sources it prefers to mine for the responses of 'ordinary' men and women include autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, letters, commonplace books, and marginalia. Such documents can indeed bring us close to what we might imagine to be the true grain of historical reading (although all need to be treated carefully); evidence of this kind is, however, notoriously hard to locate, even with all the digital resources at the disposal of today's scholars. If one's interests are more in the modern era (the _RED_ has 1945 as its cut-off point), then customer reviews, fan forums, and the blogosphere offer new ways of accessing readers' thoughts and opinions, while the more laborious but customizable option of empirical research via questionnaires or focus groups is there for the serious enquirer. Once again, despite the multiplication of available forms of evidence the amount of attention given to the reception (actual rather than ideal or theoretical) of travel writing remains vanishingly small.

The goal should be to uncover shared features of readers' engagement with travel books, in different geographical and historical settings and (wherever possible) within different sectors of the reading public, without sacrificing the irreducible singularity of each reading experience. On the few occasions when scholars have focused on the reception of travel books or on a single reader with interests in travel writing, the results have been fascinating. Stephen Colclough's study of the reading habits of Sheffield cutler, Joseph Hunter, shows the latter keenly exploiting his local subscription library's stock of travel literature and consuming books in different ways. Sometimes he read part of a work aloud then transcribed a chunk into his diary; sometimes he focused on landscape descriptions in order to enhance his reading of comparable novels; sometimes he just made copies of the illustrations. The one thing he never did was consider the text 'as an organic whole' (Colclough 2007: 114). David Allan's comprehensive survey of Georgian commonplace books discovers strong evidence of readers' excitement at being mentally transported to unfamiliar places and confronting unusual cultural practices; he also finds commonplace books being used to record readers' own travel experiences, so that reading and writing merge on a single 'stage' on which the self can be re-fashioned (Allan 2010: 252). H.J. Jackson's pioneering investigation of marginalia (2005) found examples of 'idle' and 'recreational' reading of travel books in the Romantic era along with readers who relentlessly quarried such books for extractable quotes, while the keynote of my own 2012 study of the British reception of North American travels in the same period was that the popularity of these works was entirely curiosity-driven (with curiosity sometimes taking less savoury forms).

In relation to more prestigious genres, book historians have employed a greater variety of approaches to reception study, including experimental research with actual readers. David Miall, for example, focusing on poems and short stories (2006), has argued that it is possible to form a hypothesis about historical reading and test it on readers in the present, and has presented case studies that differentiate between readers with a measure of literary training and those with none. To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet attempted any such study of the behaviour of travel readers. If we are to move away from crude negative stereotyping of the men and women who have enjoyed, and still enjoy, reading travel narratives, there is an urgent need for empirical studies of this nature. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall briefly consider what can be learned from examining the responses of individual and historical readers to two notable travel books.

**Reading Samuel Hearne's** _**Jour**_ _ **ney to the North**_ _ **ern Ocean**_ **(1795)**

Samuel Hearne (1745–92), an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), led two abortive overland expeditions to investigate reports of substantial copper deposits near the mouth of the Coppermine River and otherwise expand the HBC's territory and trade in what is now Canada. In 1772 – with the crucial assistance of First Nations people and a new survival strategy based on living off the land – he was successful at his third attempt, thereby becoming the first European to reach the northern coast of North America by land. Eventually retiring to London in 1787, Hearne, who had continued to compile material after his exploring days were over, was able to devote more time to preparing his journal for publication. However, this did not finally appear until 1795, just over two years after his death in November 1792. It was republished in octavo format in Dublin a year after the luxurious London quarto and was subsequently translated into German, Dutch, Swedish, French, and Danish as well as appearing in abridged form in the United States.

By the admittedly modest standards of the Romantic period, these bare bibliographical facts probably make _A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort, in Hudson's Bay, to the Northern Ocean_ a commercial success, if not a bestseller. It was commonly observed at the time that travel books were second only to novels in terms of popularity with readers; indeed, a review of Hearne's book went even further in asserting that 'The present taste for books of travels and voyages is stronger than for any other species of composition or compilation' (Anon. 1796a: 1). However, this did not mean that such books were produced in large numbers and marketed in such a way as to maximize sales. The longstanding publishing industry norm, for travel books as for most other genres, was for small print runs (500–1,500 copies) of books produced to high standards, with the quarto format often preferred for the first edition; reprinting in octavo would only happen if demand was strong enough. Sales figures alone are therefore not a reliable indication of readership, since many copies were sold to subscription libraries and book clubs, where a single copy could pass through many hands. In addition, public interest in the contents of new travel books was whetted, and perhaps in many cases sated, by their frequent inclusion among reviews in the periodical press, which often followed the established format of foregrounding long extracts from the work in question rather than embarking on critical commentary. The circulation and readership of periodicals dwarfed the tiny book-buying elite, and for many readers reviews of travel books almost certainly presented an acceptable substitute for the books themselves; Shef Rogers suggests that travel books may well have been 'the type of publication about which readers wished to be informed rather than to read themselves' (Rogers 2009: 785).

Harder evidence of the specific popularity of Hearne's _Journey_ can be found in the borrowing records of the Bristol Library Society (a subscription library whose subscribers in this period included Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey). The Society seems to have been quite slow in acquiring a copy of Hearne (the catalogue confirms that it was the London quarto edition), since it was first issued on 13 May 1796. For the remainder of that year and the first two months of 1797 it was rarely on the shelves, being borrowed fourteen times in total; there was then an inexplicable four-month hiatus before borrowing resumed in June, and Hearne went out six times in the second half of the year. Thereafter issues declined: the _Journey_ was borrowed six times in 1798, three times in 1799, just once in 1800, and three times in 1801. My perusal of the Bristol Library Society registers indicates that this was not an unusual pattern for a travel book in this period: strong interest for the first couple of years, slowing to a trickle of interested readers in succeeding years. (There were exceptions, with works such as Thomas Pennant's _Tours_ , James Cook's _Voyages_ , and James Bruce's _Travels_ still attracting significant numbers of borrowers a decade or more after publication.) The Bristol Library is known to have had a bias towards travel literature and it is impossible to know just how representative these results are of the reading public at large, but one interpretation of these findings is that most travel books were perceived as having little enduring literary merit and were valued chiefly for what was 'newsworthy' or contributed to the accumulating stock of knowledge about places and peoples in a rapidly expanding world.

This assumption of a hunger for new geographical and ethnographical knowledge is validated by a survey of responses to Hearne by professional reviewers. Above all, it was Hearne's detailed account of the 'Indians' – the Chipewyan people who guided his expedition and who effectively kept him alive – that commanded interest and attention. Reviewers were drawn to two elements of this account in particular. One, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Hearne's lurid description of how his own party attacked and slaughtered twenty-two Inuit, whom they found encamped on the Coppermine River. The other was Hearne's insistent focus on the physical and mental characteristics of Native women and the oppressed circumstances of their way of life.

The Bloody Falls massacre, which was the subject of lengthy extracts in, for example, the _British Critic_ , the _London Chronicle_ , and the _Monthly Review_ , was taken by most reviewers as irrefutable evidence of Indian savagery, which had been a favourite theme of discourse on North America since the Seven Years' War. In highlighting this passage, and in reproducing Hearne's graphic account of how individuals were tortured and killed (including the notorious detail of how one young girl wrapped herself round Hearne's legs while being repeatedly speared by two Chipewyan men), they seem to show a clear sense of what will be of most interest to their readers. Whether this served to gratify a 'liberal curiosity' about foreign manners and customs, as the _Monthly Review_ would have it (Anon. 1796b: 250), or to quench an appetite for something approaching soft-porn violence, is debatable. I.S. MacLaren (1991) has shed light on this issue by pointing to the major discrepancies between Hearne's original field notes and his published _Journey_ , with all the most gruesome and emotive elements of the description of the massacre being later additions to what was initially a spare, factual account. As MacLaren argues, different versions of the massacre appear to play to different audiences: the field notes are geared to the expectations of Hearne's employer, whereas the heavily redacted narrative is aimed at a reading public (assumed to be) hooked on Gothic violence and Sentimental journeys.

It seems likely, therefore, that Hearne's description of the Bloody Falls massacre shrewdly battened onto contemporary tastes in popular fiction. On the other hand, his detailed commentary on the situation of Native women would appear to have satisfied a purer intellectual curiosity about the manners of a 'primitive' people, while still offering rich nourishment for readers eager to polish their credentials as men and women of superior sensibility. Reviewers, almost without exception, were fascinated by evidence of how differently women were regarded and treated compared to their British counterparts: the dominant criteria of female beauty, the desiderata involved in choosing a wife, and the sexual morality that governed women's behaviour were all intriguingly alien. So too were the many examples Hearne offered of male indifference or cruelty towards women in Chipewyan society, such as the exhausted mother forced to begin a long march immediately after childbirth or the sick woman abandoned by her people in the course of a journey. These and other examples of the Indians' 'conduct to their women' prompted the _Critical Review_ to remind its readers how 'happily removed' they were from 'the barbarity of savage manners' (Anon. 1797: 128, 135), while the _English Review_ took 'the miserable state of women' as proof of 'how much we owe to civil government' (Anon. 1796a: 116). Hearne's fondness for representing Native women as domestic slaves or helpless victims could scarcely go unnoticed by professional readers and was generally found to justify a measure of cultural self-complacency.

Sifting the sparse records of more private reading experiences reveals significant convergence with the biases of periodical reviewers. There is no doubt that 'ordinary' readers, in common with reviewers, were encouraged by travel books like Hearne's to share in feelings of national superiority and pride in the colonial enterprise. But this critical cliché does scant justice to the depth and variety of individual readers' responses. Anna Larpent (1758–1832), an ambassador's daughter and a committed and industrious diarist, thought that Hearne's account of the Indian nations offered a 'disgusting picture of uncivilized human nature' but that it was 'curious to read of such varieties' (Larpent 1995: entry for 11 January 1797). Less predictably, she also reflected on the vast outlay of money and human energy involved in the North American fur trade and on the 'Ambition' and 'Avarice' propelling this mammoth industry – an industry that had brought about an incidental accumulation of geographical and anthropological knowledge that Larpent plainly valued, but which nevertheless had as its primary objective the satisfaction of totally 'fictitious' wants. As she digested Hearne's narrative Larpent 'marked passages for extracts' in her commonplace book, showing how seriously readers in this period took the informational and educational claims of travel writing.

A heavily annotated copy of Hearne in the National Library of Scotland offers a still fuller picture of an individual reader's engagement with this text. The anonymous reader's marginalia have things in common with the reviews summarized above, with over 80 per cent focusing on the 'Indians' and homing in on many of the same passages. But the marginalia convey a much more granular impression of the reading experience, with annotations that take the form of subject headings, cross-references to other parts of the text, allusions to literary works, and lengthy meditations on topics raised by Hearne. As one example, when Hearne remarks that Native women are subjected to domestic drudgery but are generally found to be 'affectionate wives, and fond and indulgent mothers', this reader muses:

Something to hope from their future gratitude? Or does the misery of the women make them compassionate the misery of the children? 'Haud ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco.' Their affections, repelled by the tyranny of the husband, will fix more tenaciously on the children.

Here we sense a reader intellectually stimulated by the text and entering into a dialogue with the author, showing greater philosophical open-mindedness, while displaying his or her learning and personality in the form of a quotation from Virgil's _Aeneid_ ('Not unacquainted with misfortune, I have learned to succour the distresses of others.') Like Larpent, this reader is intrigued to find out about the 'manners and customs' of strange peoples, but engages with the book in an active and interrogative way. Hungry for new knowledge and mental stimulation, both are at the furthest possible remove from the stereotypically passive travel readers, interested chiefly in having their ethnocentric attitudes confirmed or reinforced, with whom the genre has always been, and remains, encumbered in the eyes of many modern critics.

**Reading Edward Marriott's** _**The Lost Tribe**_ **(1996)**

The Barren Lands traversed by Hearne on his expedition to the Arctic coast seemed remote, yet the reach of the fur trade was such that all the indigenous peoples Hearne met had had contact with Europeans. It is therefore remarkable that more than 200 years later, there are still regular reports of the 'discovery' of small, marginal communities apparently living in complete isolation from the rest of the world. One such event took place in 1993, when the _Daily Telegraph_ reported that a single member of an unknown tribe in western Papua New Guinea had emerged from the jungle and staggered into a government station; Christian missionaries were said to be racing into the mountains in a bid to save the souls of the remaining seventy-eight tribespeople. This story inspired a young British writer, Edward Marriott, to fly to Papua New Guinea to find out the truth about the Liawep and 'what would happen to them now they had been found' (Marriott 1996: xi). His exploits on the other side of the world were published as _The Lost Tribe_ , subsequently shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

Hoping at first to join an official expedition to Liawep territory, Marriott is frustrated by local government non-cooperation and decides to assemble his own ramshackle (and illegal) jungle patrol. After a gruelling six-day trek from the nearest available airstrip, he arrives at his destination, to be greeted largely by indifference. To begin with, the only resident who will speak to him is a Lutheran missionary, whose Christian message is faring badly in competition with the locals' animistic mountain-worship. Eventually Marriott succeeds in opening some basic communication in pidgin English with a few of the villagers and learns a little about their way of life, but his stay comes to an abrupt and dramatic conclusion when his main confidant, a young man called Fioluana, leaves on a hunting trip and entrusts his wife and children to Marriott's care. During an apocalyptic storm, Fioluana's family is killed by lightning; Marriott, convinced that he will be held responsible and made to pay with his life, cuts and runs, with Liawep men in hot pursuit.

In the British press, the reception of _The Lost Tribe_ was overwhelmingly positive. In _The Times_ , Brian Jackman praised Marriott's courage and endurance and acclaimed a prose style comparable with Eric Newby and Norman Lewis. In _The Observer_ , Alexander Frater called it 'a stunning piece of work, the most memorable travel-writing debut for years'. In _The Sunday Times_ , William Dalrymple was equally exuberant: fascinated by its 'desolate picture of a self-contained primeval world [. . .] in the process of being destroyed by the twentieth century', he pronounced _The Lost Tribe_ 'one of the most memorable travel narratives to have been published this decade' and 'a reminder of the continuing power of the genre'.

As the names of Jackman, Frater, and Dalrymple confirm, in today's literary scene travel writers tend to be reviewed by fellow travel writers. Any serious effort to assess the reception of a modern travel book must surely involve spreading the net more widely than this culturally narrow and inherently well-disposed pool of readers. Literary criticism offers few resources in this instance: despite the boom in travel writing studies, _The Lost Tribe_ has attracted surprisingly little attention from scholars. One interesting possibility is to consult the archive of customer reviews on Amazon, the world's largest online bookseller. As Paul Gutjahr observes, there are numerous caveats regarding this evidence base, not least that it is impossible to know 'how accurate a representation this clientele is of the nation's reading public' or how representative such reviews are of the readers of any particular book, but its size and democratic character nevertheless makes it 'a wonderfully rich resource for reader response explorations' (Gutjahr 2002: 219).

Customer reviews of _The Lost Tribe_ offer a more variegated expression of opinion than their professional counterparts. Marriott's book does elicit favourable comment: one reader finds it 'an entertaining and educating work', while another calls it 'a great book [. . .] too fantastic to be true, but the amazing thing about it is, that it is true'. Some readers are ambivalent: one thinks Marriott is 'naïve, foolish, and often obtuse' but tells a 'riveting' story nonetheless. There are also some very negative responses, one or two of them seemingly restrained only by Amazon's blanket ban on offensive language. One reader states that Marriott's story 'is everything I hate about travel books', claiming that he has 'no genuine interest in the tribespeople as fellow human beings' and shows 'no real sense of his own role as exploiter'. Another lambasts Marriott's 'comic-book fantasies of being an explorer' and provides a disparaging summary of the book, concluding with the judgement that 'If anyone is lost in this awful book, it is the author'. One reader contents her/himself with the observation that, 'the author's confusing sense of guilt is ridiculous and tiring'.

While some customer reviews on Amazon seemingly emanate from 'general' readers or enthusiasts for the genre, the facility also attracts readers who claim some particular insight into the subject matter. One reviewer of _The Lost Tribe_ who has worked in Papua New Guinea in a medical capacity thinks that Marriott 'paints an excellent picture of the people, culture and terrain', whereas a linguist who has spent eight years in the country considers his 'interpretations of cultural mores [. . .] naïve at best, intolerably patronising at worst'. Denis Dutton, a professor of philosophy with anthropological interests, finds the book 'moving and disturbing' and predicts that it will become 'a classic of New Guinea exploration'. However, the hard-core anthropological response and the longest and most damning of the Amazon reviews comes from Lorenzo Brutti, a researcher at the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l'Océanie in Marseilles. Anthropologists generally are scathing about the very notion of 'lost tribes'. Stuart Kirsch, for example, argues that such marginal peoples could usually be more accurately described as 'mislaid' or 'neglected', and dissects their popular appeal as an 'antidote' to modernity and a possible source of 'forgotten but fundamental truths'; in the specific context of Melanesia, he argues that so-called lost tribes invariably 'contribute to their own creation so that they can be found, and [. . .] benefit from their discovery' (Kirsch 1997: 58, 64). Brutti, however, is much more personal and direct in his review of Marriott. He claims to have studied the Liawep for four years and says that they were 'disgusted' with Marriott's book when he translated it to them on his most recent visit. He explodes the myth of this people's 'lostness' and insists that the Liawep have been misrepresented by someone without the expertise to comment. Furthermore, Marriott overrode sensible legal restrictions (designed to prevent the spread of Western diseases) on visiting Liawep territory and disrespected 'indigenous customs and laws' by not paying the compensation he promised to Liawep men when they caught up with him on the way out. Fundamentally, Brutti argues, _The Lost Tribe_ is unethical and exploitative and an appalling example of 'ideological neo-colonialism'. His indictment typifies one end of a spectrum of response that appears far wider than the formal reviews and critical comment published to date would lead one to believe. Online forums such as Amazon's clearly offer unprecedented and timely access to a welter of opinion that is especially valuable in researching neglected genres such as travel writing.

In the case of Marriott, as with that of Hearne, I have tried to show that the responses of real readers are far more interesting and diverse than the carefully choreographed activity of the 'implied reader', or 'ideal reader', or other simulacra dreamt up by reader-response theory and criticism. Moreover, it is only by researching and analysing such reading experiences that we will arrive at a fuller understanding of the sphere of reception that is such an important part of the life-cycle of a book or genre. As far as travel writing is concerned, this work has barely begun. It is true that travel books are declining in commercial terms: in the UK, sales of travel writing fell from £15.49 million to £8.81 million between 2005 and 2012, and in the USA from $28.3 million to $14.1 million between 2006 and 2012.1 Nevertheless, there is still a substantial international readership for this literary genre. If we are serious about the academic study of travel writing, we need to put more effort into investigating that readership in all its human variety and complexity, which will hopefully entail methodological advances that improve on the messily empirical approach adopted in this chapter. The only alternative, it seems, is to fall back on the derogatory generalizations that have so far passed for critical analysis of travel readers. And as William Blake said, 'To Generalize is to be an Idiot.'

**Note**

1 I am grateful to Stephen Mesquita of Nielsen Bookscan for the bibliographical data.

**Select bibliography**

Allan, D. (2010) _Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Anon. (1796a) Review of _A Journey [. . .] to the Northern Ocean_ , by S. Hearne, _English Review_ 28: 1–8, 114–24.

Anon. (1796b) Review of _A Journey [. . .] to the Northern Ocean_ , by S. Hearne, _Monthly Review_ 20: 246–51.

Anon. (1797) Review of _A Journey [. . .] to the Northern Ocean_ , by S. Hearne, _Critical Review_ 20: 127–39.

Clark, S. (1999) 'Introduction', in S. Clark (ed.), _Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit_ , London: Zed Books.

Colclough, S. (2007) _Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–1870_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dalrymple, W. (1996) 'Uncivilising Influences', review of _The Lost Tribe_ , by E. Marriott, _Sunday Times_ , 16 June.

Darnton, R. (1990a) 'First Steps Towards a History of Reading', in _The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History_ , New York: Norton.

Darnton, R. (1990b) 'What Is the History of Books', in _The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History_ , New York: Norton.

Frater, A. (1996) Review of _The Lost Tribe_ , by E. Marriott, _The Observer_ , 18 May.

Gutjahr, P.C. (2002) 'No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.com, Reader Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America', _Book History_ 5: 209–36.

Hearne, S. (1958) _A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean_ , ed. R. Glover, Toronto: Macmillan.

Holland, P. and Huggan, G. (1998) _Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing_ , Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Jackman, B. (1996) 'Lunch with the Cannibals', review of _The Lost Tribe_ , by E. Marriott, _The Times_ , 27 April.

Jackson, H.J. (2005) _Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia_ , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Jarvis, R. (2012) _Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel: Expeditions and Tours in North America, 1760–1840_ , Farnham: Ashgate.

Kaufman, P. (1969) _Libraries and Their Users: Collected Papers in Library History_ , London: Library Association.

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Part II

HISTORICAL OVERVIEWS

Travel Writing in the Ancient Mediterranean

_William Hutton_

In antiquity the Mediterranean Sea was a pathway for contact between several thriving cultures, so it is no surprise that in many of these cultures travel narrative became an important mode of expression. The oral traditions of peoples all over the world feature travelling gods and heroes, but in the ancient Mediterranean, more than in most places, the travel-tales of figures such as Isis, Gilgamesh and Herakles served as forerunners for sophisticated and multifaceted traditions of travel writing. Nevertheless, no ancient Mediterranean culture recognized 'travel literature' as a distinct genre, and this is one reason why modern scholarship has yet to produce a comprehensive study of ancient travel writing _qua_ literature. There are, however, several comprehensive surveys of 'travel in the ancient world' that rely in part on travel literature as a source of information (Casson 1994; André and Baslez 1977; Chevallier 1988), and there are literary studies of individual works and genres, a selection of which will be cited in what follows. It should be noted at the outset that in dealing with ancient literature in general, and with travel literature in particular, it is not always practical or worthwhile to seek a firm distinction between 'fictional' and 'non-fictional' accounts. While some ancient accounts unquestionably deal with actual travels by actual people, even the most reality-based narratives are often rich in literary allusion and authorial role-playing, and some texts that modern readers would place squarely in the realm of the imaginary, like the _Odyssey_ , were generally thought by ancient audiences to reflect (at least in outline) real events and real individuals.

Egypt produced some very early written travel narratives. One of the earliest is the _Story of Sinuhe_ (Simpson 2003: 54–66) _,_ a first-person account dating from the early second millennium BCE that bears striking similarities to the _Odyssey_ and other later travel tales. Sinuhe, a high royal official, learns of the death of his pharaoh and embarks upon an exile that eventually lands him in the Levant. He is taken in by a ruler of the region, who endows his visitor with lands, riches and his daughter's hand in marriage. Despite this comfortable existence Sinuhe never forgets his homeland, and in old age eagerly accepts the invitation of the new pharaoh to return. The _Story of Sinuhe_ , and other Egyptian travel texts, including the _Story of Wenamun_ and the _Shipwrecked Sailor_ , display a level of complexity generally associated with the literate sophistication of later periods, including framed narratives, mixtures of prose and poetry, embedded texts such as decrees and epistles, and play with established generic forms. These stories also represent early examples of the potential of travel narrative to foster and problematize societal values, such as the devotion to homeland that motivates Sinuhe's return. The problem of distinguishing fact and fiction in ancient travel texts is also evident among these accounts. Modern scholars debate whether the stories of Wenamun and Sinuhe were based on the actual travels of real men; both partake of literary and folkloric tropes, but both also mimic 'factual' sorts of Egyptian accounts, such as autobiographical tomb-texts in the case of Sinuhe.

Such morsels of Egyptian writing are intriguing, but the vast majority of surviving travel texts from the ancient Mediterranean come from the Greek and Roman traditions. These are accordingly the traditions addressed in this brief overview of an immense topic.

**Early Greece**

The earliest extended travel narrative to survive in Greek is also one of the earliest examples of Greek literature of any sort. The _Odyssey,_ an epic poem ascribed to the semi-legendary poet Homer, tells the story of Odysseus as he tries to make his way back from the Trojan War to his home on the humble island of Ithaca. After ten years adrift with little to rely on apart from his wits, he finally arrives home in Ithaca, where he must dispatch a large number of suitors who have thronged his palace in hopes of winning the hand of his presumed widow Penelope.

The _Odyssey_ is usually dated to the eighth or seventh century BCE, a time when the Greek city-states were engaging in an energetic wave of colonization and commerce. While the story of the _Odyssey_ probably circulated orally before being written down, the text as we have it is a work of great sophistication and complexity, belying the notion (as does the _Story of Sinuhe_ ) that earlier means simpler in the realm of travel literature. The narrative ranges backwards and forwards in time and from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, incorporating a number of embedded tales and a plethora of narrators, including Odysseus himself, who narrates the bulk of his own adventures. Odysseus' storytelling skill befits his characterization as intelligent and eloquent, but it also raises the issue of narratorial reliability. Odysseus recounts many outlandish encounters, including his visit to the land of the dead and his struggles with the one-eyed cyclops. Is he telling the truth or embellishing things to impress his audience? Centuries later, Lucian's _True Stories,_ a spoof of bizarre travel tales, named Odysseus as one of the chief ancestors of tall-tale-tellers everywhere (1.3); other later works of literature (including Sophocles' _Ajax_ and Virgil's _Aeneid)_ cast him as a scurrilous villain. But in the world of the _Odyssey_ , an ability to prevaricate and dissemble can be a positive virtue. The first line of the epic introduces Odysseus as a man who is _polutropos_ ('many-turning'), an adjective seemingly referring to both the twists and turns of his journey and the craftiness of his intellect. Another aspect of Odysseus' characterization is also important. While Odysseus' travels involved him in many unpleasant situations, he also often encountered circumstances agreeable enough to make leaving difficult. Much as Sinuhe was offered a royal bride and a share of his host's kingdom, the Phaiakian king Alkinoos promises Odysseus the hand of his daughter Nausikaa and a prominent position in that fabulously fortunate realm. This is one of many enticements Odysseus must resist to achieve his _nostos,_ or homecoming, a primary theme of the epic (Hartog 2001: 15–39). Real-life adventurers who set off from Greece to the rich lands of Egypt, Sicily and Italy must have faced analogous temptations. The _Odyssey_ seems designed to say to them 'do not forget where you came from'.

Preservation of the social structure against the uncertainties brought about by travel is a major preoccupation in the _Odyssey_. While Odysseus' travels are certainly an important part of the epic, well over half of the work focuses not on Odysseus himself, but on his absence. In Ithaca, Penelope and her adolescent son Telemachos must keep the household together against the threat of the suitors. Penelope succeeds by remaining sexually and emotionally faithful to her long-lost husband and by frequently deploying a craftiness that makes her a good match for Odysseus. By maintaining stability in her society in this way, Penelope displays an agency that is remarkable in the context of ancient Greek literature, which is usually so adamantly androcentric that women are portrayed as either passive and harmless or active and destructive. Telemachos, for his part, was an infant when Odysseus left home. To become a reliable ally to his father, he must grow up and assert himself as an adult. His maturation begins on a journey he makes in search of his father – a travel narrative within a travel narrative – that occupies much of the first four books of the _Odyssey_ , which are therefore often called the _Telemachia_. This is one of the better examples of travel narrative as _Bildungsroman_ in ancient literature (Petropoulos 2011).

At the very beginning of Greek literature the _Odyssey_ stands as an excellent example of the capacity of travel literature to explore issues of social values, gender and individual maturation, and to reflect upon the culture of the time and place in which it was composed. In the opposition between idyllic urban societies like the Phaiakians' and anti-civilizational, anti-societies like that of the cyclopes we see an articulation of common Greek ideology about the ultimate limits of foreignness (Romm 1992), which may also reflect upon the contemporary Greeks' interactions with new foreign contacts (Dougherty 2001).

**Odyssean afterlives**

The characters, plot and themes of the _Odyssey_ provided useful paradigms for subsequent Greek and Roman travel literature (Stanford 1963; Hartog 2001; Jouanno 2013). As well as providing an almost unavoidable intertext for travel-centred epics such as the _Voyage of the Argo_ by Apollonios of Rhodes, the poem is frequently alluded to in other sorts of literature that touch on travel, absence and exile. Banished to the Black Sea under the Emperor Augustus, for example, the Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE–18 CE) frequently compares his lot to that of Odysseus in his exile poetry (McGowan 2009: 178–190).

The most noteworthy Odyssean reflection in antiquity comes in the _Aeneid_ , by Virgil (70–19 BCE). Aeneas is a Trojan prince who, after the sack of Troy by the Greeks, departs to found a new homeland in Italy. To tell this story Virgil draws upon elements of the _Odyssey_. Like Odysseus, Aeneas and his companions are blown off course, to be shipwrecked on foreign shores. To reach his fated destination, like Odysseus and Sinuhe, Aeneas must resist the three-headed temptation of wealth status, and the agreeable companionship of a woman, the Carthaginian Queen Dido. Virgil's transactions with the _Odyssey_ are not simply imitation or literary showmanship, but the transformation of a well-known Greek classic into a work addressing what it meant to be Roman at a crucial time in the city's history. By bringing Aeneas and his Roman audience into contact with the Mediterranean cultures against which Rome defined itself – Greece in the east, Carthage in the west – Virgil exemplifies and problematizes many Roman values, including the all-encompassing dutifulness ( _pietas_ ) that is an emphatic element of Aeneas' character. The _Aeneid_ is thus a travel narrative responding to a contemporary political context as well as serving the construction of an identity for a hero and his audience.

A bookend to Virgil's exploration of Roman character and potential comes from the very end of the western Roman Empire in Rutilius Namatianus' autobiographical poem _On His Return_ ( _c_. 417 CE). With Virgilian and Homeric echoes, Rutilius traces his journey from Rome to his homeland in Gaul, confronting landscapes ravaged by war and neglect, but pairing those stark scenes with praise of Rome's greatness and hope for her return to glory (Soler 2007). In Rutilius' movement away from Rome, even as he sings her praises, one can almost feel the Middle Ages taking root.

**The tragedy and comedy of travel**

In addition to being the start of the tradition of Greco-Roman travel writing, the _Odyssey_ is also in many respects the summit of that tradition. With the exception of the occasional gleam of brilliance like the _Aeneid_ , the number of subsequent travel-focused texts (as distinct from mere references to travel) is surprisingly limited after the _Odyssey_. The reasons for this are not easy to pinpoint, but they probably reflect a persistent attitude that classified travel as one of the baser necessities of life, fit perhaps for merchants but not for gentlemen and intellectuals. An early manifestation of that attitude comes from the poet Hesiod ( _c_. 700 BCE), whose didactic poem _Works and Days_ presents sea travel as something that only the foolish and the greedy engage in with relish. The most extensive description of travel in the surviving corpus of Greek tragedy occurs in the Aeschylean _Prometheus Bound_ ( _c_. 460 BCE) _,_ which catalogues the frenzied wanderings of the unfortunate princess Io from one corner of the world to the next (561–886). The description of her endless wanderings serves as an indictment of the reckless autocracy of Zeus, whose illicit passion for Io was the ultimate cause of her exile. A similar attitude toward travel is reflected in a generic type of poetry called the _propemptikon_ ('sending-off poem'), which typically represents the dramatic occasion of one friend bidding farewell to another as he or she is departing on a voyage. A common feature of such poems (for instance Horace _Odes_ 1.3.9–20) is the ominous rumination on the folly of entrusting one's life to the fickle elements of the sea.

One strategy for confronting something you are anxious about is to turn it into comedy. A vivid depiction of land travel in classical Greece occurs in the _Frogs,_ by the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes, which begins with the god Dionysos making a journey on foot to the underworld. Much of the comedy of the _Frogs_ hinges on a god behaving in all-too-human ways; travelling like an average mortal is part of that debasement. In a similar spirit Horace offers a witty take on travel in one of his verse _Satires_ (1.5), in which he narrates his own overland journey from Rome to Brundisium (Brindisi). Written in around 37 BCE, Horace's poem is set in a particular political context: he is travelling to join his patron Maecenas, who is arranging a sensitive meeting between Octavian (the future Augustus) and his rival Marcus Antonius. Despite the tense situation, Horace is preoccupied not by politics but by the mundane indignities of travel: bad roads, flea-ridden inns, wet dreams and noisy frogs. The poem has been taken variously as a light-hearted tribute to the comity of Maecenas and his circle, as a favorable portrait of Italy under Octavian, where the worst one has to fear is bad food and noisy neighbours, and as a witty philosophical sermon on keeping politics at arm's length (Welch 2008).

The comedic potential of travel narrative also provides fodder for Latin authors in subsequent centuries. Petronius' _Satyricon_ ( _c_. 65 CE), a fragmentary farrago of ribald episodes, follows the wanderings of a group of dissolute young men through a carnivalesque Italian underbelly of the Neronian period (Vout 2009). Apuleius' _Metamorphoses_ ( _c_. 175 CE) likewise partakes of comic themes, being a first-person account of a traveller who is turned into an ass by a sorceress. Greek authors also continued to produce humorous travel texts long after Aristophanes. Apuleius' work was based substantially on a Greek original, possibly by Lucian, of which we only have an epitome _._ Lucian is also credited with writing two other humorous travel works that survive: _True Stories_ and _On the Syrian Goddess_ ; these are discussed below.

**Historiography and geography**

Some types of Greco-Roman literature invoke travel for more serious and positive purposes. Although not a continuous travel narrative, the _Histories_ of Herodotus ( _c_. 440 BCE) frequently showcases the wisdom that the author has gained on his travels. Large tracts of this work, ostensibly about the Persian Wars of the early 400s BCE, are a species of ethnography (Munson 2001). Herodotus famously describes the Egyptians, for example, as having 'habits and customs that are generally the opposite of other humans', citing as examples of this inversion: 'Men carry burdens on their heads but women carry them on their shoulders. Women urinate standing up, men sitting down' (2.35). As this suggests, Herodotus' treatment of the Other is somewhat schematized (Hartog 1988), exhibiting orientalizing tendencies akin to those of early-modern European writing about the East. Even in antiquity his reports smacked to some of tall-tale-telling. Despite his limitations, however, Herodotus projects an earnest desire to produce a valid depiction of the outside world for the Greeks, who at the time were pondering their own standing vis-à-vis that world as a result of their epoch-making victory against the Persians.

From Herodotus on, travel and _autopsia_ ('seeing-for-one's-self') were considered as valuable practices for the historian. Neither Herodotus nor his successors, however, generally present their _autopsia_ as sequential travel accounts. One important exception is the _Anabasis_ of Xenophon ( _c_. 390 BCE), which tells of a stranded army of Greek mercenaries (led by Xenophon himself) making their way home from Mesopotamia. Partly impersonal history and geography and partly personal memoir (couched in the third person), the _Anabasis_ offers a tale of homecoming replete with echoes of the _Odyssey_ (Ma 2010). It culminates with the culturally diagnostic moment when the troops catch their first glimpse of the Black Sea and excitedly call out _thallatta! thalatta!_ ('the sea! the sea!'), though the sea they have reached is still far from home. Travel narrative arising from actual military campaigns is also one product of the career of Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE), whose conquests took him to the eastern limits of the known world. Many in Alexander's retinue produced eyewitness accounts of his campaigns. None of these survive, unfortunately, apart from excerpts in the later writings of Arrian, Plutarch ( _c_. 100 CE) and others, which also provided the factual substrate for the novelistic _Alexander Romance_ , a fanciful travel narrative that circulated in many versions from the Hellenistic period through to the Middle Ages (Stoneman 1994).

Travel and _autopsia_ were also recognized as valuable practices in Greek and Roman geography (Clarke 2001: 85–87), a genre that played an important role not only in imparting information about the world but also in staking out various spatial and cultural ideologies (Jacob 1991; Nicolet 1991). Some of these texts (though a distinct minority) framed their geographical information in a sequential eyewitness narrative. Arrian's _Indika_ , for instance, an account of a journey down the Indus river ( _c_. 140 CE), is openly derivative, but based on the first-hand accounts of Nearchos and Megasthenes ( _c_. 320 BCE). Similarly, Pytheas of Massalia ( _c_. 325 BCE) is cited by later authorities as the author of first-hand accounts of journeys to Britain, Thule (Iceland?) and other mysterious lands (Roller 2005: 57–91). Many later authorities were sceptical of Pytheas' account, a reaction motivated in part by the existence of a number of texts that might be described as geographical fictions. The historian Diodoros (first century BCE) quotes credulously from the account of a certain Iamboulos about his visit to a utopian island of curiosities in the Indian Ocean (2.55–60). This Iamboulos is among the targets for Lucian's rambunctious parody, _True Stories_ ( _c_. 170 CE), which offers a deadpan-earnest account of the narrator's voyage to the moon and other fanciful places (Georgiadou and Larmour 1998). Also worth mentioning in this context is another work ascribed to Lucian, _On the Syrian Goddess_ , in which the author playfully adopts the persona of an impressionable visitor to an important cult-centre in Syria, and delivers a Herodotean pastiche describing the cult's architecture, history and rites (Lightfoot 2003). This has been interpreted as a witty exploration of the complexities of being a Greek-language author of Syrian extraction in the context of the Roman Empire (Elsner 2001).

**Periplous, periegesis and Pausanias**

There are a number of texts titled _Periploi_ ('Sailings-around') and _Periegeseis_ ('Leadings-around'). These terms, along with the Latin _Itinerarium_ ('Itinerary'), are the closest the ancients come to using separate labels for genres of 'travel writing', but they are affixed to a wide variety of texts. A _periplous_ is generally a sequential listing of sites along a particular coastline. Some surviving _periploi_ may have been intended for use by actual wayfarers; others seem to be more literary than utilitarian (Shipley 2011: 20–21). An example of the latter is Arrian's _Periplous of the Black Sea_ ( _c_. 130 CE), in which Arrian, speaking in his own voice as an imperial legate, delivers an epistolary report to the Emperor Hadrian about the coast of the Black Sea (Liddle 2003). Arrian's _periplous_ goes well beyond simple reportage, incorporating numerous references to the _Anabasis_ of Xenophon and allowing Arrian to showcase his relationship with the emperor. Another noteworthy _periplous_ is ostensibly a Greek translation of a Punic original by Hanno of Carthage ( _c_. 500 BCE, though some scholars doubt its authenticity). This tantalizing, fragmentary text presents a first-person account of a voyage down the western coast of Africa (Roller 2005: 29–43).

_Periegesis_ is applied to a wide variety of descriptions of places. The only two _periegeseis_ that survive in more than fragments are as different as night and day: the poetic and thoroughly derivative _Periegesis of the Inhabited World_ (second century CE) by Dionysius of Alexandria (Lightfoot 2014), and Pausanias' _Periegesis of Greece_ ( _c_. 175 CE), which is by far the longest work in Greek based on the author's own travels. The latter takes the reader on a series of itineraries between sites in mainland Greece, describing their artworks and monuments and interweaving extensive information about local history, mythology and religious practices (Pretzler 2007). Pausanias often lets the reader know that he is speaking from _autopsia_ , and modern archaeological research has confirmed that his description of Greece is that of a contemporary eyewitness (Habicht 1998: 28–64).

Pausanias has been labelled the 'Ancient Baedeker' (Casson 1994: 292–299), which assumes that the work was intended as a utilitarian guidebook for travellers in Greece. Recent scholarship, however, ascribes more ambitious motives to Pausanias' efforts, noting, for instance, the meaningful structuring of his text, and his frequent subtle homages to Herodotus, his predecessor in the realm of _autopsia_ (Hutton 2005). Pausanias' deliberate selectivity – he omits mention of most contemporary structures, as well as most that are primarily secular in function – suggests a desire to impart an ideological notion of Greece rather than an objective representation of what tourists will see. Many scholars have argued that Pausanias' text is an important witness to the problem of Hellenic identity within the Roman Empire (Elsner 1992), a knotty issue that Pausanias addresses on the level of the physical and tangible, conjuring up a Greece in which Roman-era monuments are largely invisible, but the distance between the subjugated present of Greece and its glorious past is not (Akujärvi 2005: 265–306). The _Periegesis_ may also be read as a sort of pilgrim's progress (Veyne 1988: 95–102; Hartog 2001: 133–150). Late in the work (8.8.3) Pausanias tells us that he began by thinking that many of the mythological tales of the Greeks were nothing but foolishness, but now he looks on them as allegorical expressions of Greek wisdom. His Greek travels have thus given Pausanias a deeper appreciation for Hellenic heritage in the contemporary Roman context, and it is that sort of experience that the text seems to encourage in the reader

Though not entitled _Periegesis,_ one text often compared to Pausanias is _On the Cities in Greece_ by Herakleides Kritikos (third century BCE), a unique account consisting largely of comments on what travellers can expect when visiting Athens and other cities in central Greece. Like Pausanias Herakleides gives information about monuments, roads and landforms; unlike Pausanias, he peppers his account with witty and occasionally sardonic comments about the places and people he encounters. The work survives only in three fragments, so any conclusions must be tentative, but it arguably reflects contemporary changes in landscape and attitude in Greece as a result of Macedonian domination (McInerney 2012). At the very least it reminds us that the body of Greek travel-related literature may have been far more diverse than the small sample that survives today.

**The wandering sage**

The wisdom Pausanias claims to receive from his travelling connects him with a long tradition of travelling sages in Greco-Roman letters. Many of the early philosophers of Greece, including those known as _sophists_ , were said to have spent at least part of their careers as rootless wanderers. Their absences from home allowed them both to learn from foreigners and to address their own societies from a detached vantage point (Montiglio 2005). In the first centuries CE, this tradition produced a lucrative industry of travelling intellectuals. Modern scholarship refers to this phenomenon as the Second Sophistic, following the lead of Philostratos (third century CE), who wrote a _Lives of the Sophists_ about the most prominent celebrities of this ilk. There are a number of travel-oriented texts among the literature of the Second Sophistic: one example is Philostratos' _Life of Apollonios of Tyana_ , a biography of a first-century CE philsopher/mystic (Elsner 1997; Van Dijk 2009). Philostratos' Apollonios seeks enlightenment all over the known world, confronting fabled wise men such as the Brahmans of India and the gymnosophists ('naked philosophers') of Ethiopia. Other examples come from the surviving orations of Dion of Prusa, also known as Dio Chrysostom ( _c_. 100 CE), in which the orator adopts the persona of an exile who has wandered the far corners of the empire (Desideri 2007). In his _Euboian Oration,_ for example, Dion describes being shipwrecked on the remote reaches of the island of Euboia (Montiglio 2005: 193–203). He is taken in with Odyssean hospitality by a poor but happy huntsman who lives with his family in the hinterland of a small city-state. The simple, uncorrupted lifestyle of the huntsman serves Dion as an illustration of the sorts of occupations that ought to be encouraged generally for the urban poor. In his alienation from the urbanized values of the empire's elite, the huntsman is a reflection of Dion himself in exile. Even in antiquity there was doubt about the literal truth of Dion's self-presentation as a vagabond, but it served him well as a standpoint for engaging in social critique.

**The Greek novels**

The writings of Dion, Pausanias, Philostratos, Lucian, Arrian and others are examples of a late blossoming of travel-themed literature in Greek in the period of the Roman Empire. In part this trend may simply reflect the reality that the educated elite were travelling more frequently in this period, but the geographically and socially fluid subject position that travel writing enables may also have appealed to the Greeks as a way of responding to the changes accompanying the absorption of the old Greek world into the new world of Rome. This is one explanation for the return to prominence in this period of imaginative travel fiction in the form of the so-called Greek novels. Five examples of extended prose fiction in Greek survive in their entirety from the first few centuries CE: _Callirhoe_ by Chariton, _The Ephesian Tale_ by Xenophon of Ephesus, _Leucippe and Cleitophon_ by Achilles Tatius, _Daphnis and Chloe_ by Longos and the _Ethiopian Tale_ , by Heliodoros. All of these, with the exception of _Daphnis and Chloe_ , are travel narratives at heart, following the adventures of a youthful couple as they are torn apart and eventually reunited by a series of voyages, quests and abductions. Scholars have debated whether such travel motifs are merely structural or also thematic, adding depth and dynamism to the characterization of the main figures (Morgan 2007). Bakhtin famously argued that the Greek novels inhabited a static chronotope in which the central couple, despite their many adventures and predicaments, remained the same caricatures of youthful ingenuousness that they were at the start of their travels (Bakhtin 1981: 86–110). A clearer case for travel's effect on a character comes in Apuleius' comedic novel (based, as noted, on a Greek original), in which the main character finds redemption both on the physical plane, in that he is turned from a donkey back into a human, and on the spiritual, in that his restoration is accompanied by initiation into the salvation-cult of Isis, ambiguous though that 'salvation' may be. In the case of the Greek novels, many scholars have noted the congruence of their typical plot with the pattern of separation, absence and reintegration characteristic of _rites de passage_ (Lalanne 2006), and have argued that for the original audience this pattern linked the tales to texts such as the _Homeric Hymn to Demeter_ (600 BCE), in which the wanderings of the goddess Demeter in search of her abducted daughter provide a blueprint for the ritual actions of initiates in her mystery cult at Eleusis. Mystery cults and salvation cults like those of Demeter, Isis, and Christ were growing in popularity at the time the novels were written, and the backdrop of these trends in religion must be kept in mind when gauging the intent and impact of the Greek novels. In general, travel was an integral aspect of many Greek and Roman religious practices, and the echoes of such practices in ancient literature are a fertile topic of current research (Rutherford 2013: 339–354). The novels certainly continue the tradition of using travel to explore issues of self and other (Whitmarsh 2011). The journeys in these texts range uniformly between Greek parts of the Mediterranean world and points to the east and south, replicating the trajectory of Herodotus' ethnographies and resonating with the burgeoning cross-pollination of cultures in the eastern Mediterranean at this date.

**Christian travel**

Coeval with the Second Sophistic and the emergence of the Greek novel is the earliest Christian literature. Four common elements of Christian ethology are well suited to generating travel accounts: proselytizing, persecution, eremitism and pilgrimage, and beginning with the New Testament (most concentrated in the _Acts of the Apostles_ ), numerous such narratives were produced. Recent scholarship has identified a number of interesting intertextual relationships between Christian travel-texts and contemporary non-Christian literature, including the Greek novels (Konstan and Ramelli 2014). Christian pilgrimage literature is mostly a phenomenon of the Middle Ages and later. Still, there is one unique pilgrimage account that antiquity might justly claim: the _Pilgrimage of Egeria_ (late fourth century CE), a partially preserved epistolary record in Latin of a woman's journey to the biblical lands from her home in the far west of Europe (Wilkinson 1999). In her letters to her community of Christian women back home, Egeria gives us a glimpse of the early Christian communities in places like Mount Sinai and Jerusalem, and attests to the development, even at this early date, of a physical and cognitive infrastructure for receiving pilgrims and orienting them in the biblical landscape (Sivan 1988). From the pen of this intrepid Christian woman at the very end of antiquity, we have an example of what the previous centuries had only rarely produced, an unabashedly subjective account that captures the author's personal experience of the pains, joys and revelations of travel.

In sum, the literature of the ancient Mediterranean is not as richly populated with genuine travel narratives as one might expect from the resplendent beginnings represented by the _Odyssey_. Yet there are numerous texts that both attest to the importance of travel in ancient cultures and foreshadow many of the potentialities of travel writing in subsequent eras, including its ability to express and scrutinize notions of individual identity, social and political structures, and personal and cultural interrelationships.

**Select bibliography**

Akujärvi, J. (2005) _Researcher, Traveller, Narrator: Studies in Pausanias' Periegesis_ , Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell.

André, J.-M. and Baslez, M.-F. (1977) _Voyager dans l'antiquité_ , Paris: Fayard.

Bakhtin, M. (1981) _The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays,_ trans. M. Holquist and C. Emerson, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Casson, L. (1994) _Travel in the Ancient World_ , 1979, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chevallier, R. (1988) _Voyages et deplacements dans l'empire romain,_ Paris: Armand Colin.

Clarke, K. (2001) _Between Geography and History: Hellenistic Constructions of the Roman World_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Desideri, P. (2007) 'Dio's Exile: Politics, Philosophy, Literature', in J. Gaertner (ed.), _Writing Exile: The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond_ , Leiden: Brill.

Dougherty, C. (2001) _The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer's_ Odyssey, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Elsner, J. (1992) 'Pausanias: A Greek Pilgrim in the Roman World', _Past and Present_ 135: 3–29.

Elsner, J. (1997) 'Hagiographic Geography: Travel and Allegory in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana', _Journal of Hellenic Studies_ 117: 22–37.

Elsner, J. (2001) 'Describing Self in the Language of the Other: Pseudo (?) Lucian at the Temple of Hierapolis', in S. Goldhill (ed.), _Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Chinese Travel Writing

_James M. Hargett_

'Travel literature' in its Chinese context is not a well-defined literary genre. Many different types of works are identified as such by literary historians and critics, and the structure, content, and purpose of these various types of writing have all changed over time. Travel writing in China is accordingly often subsumed under such diverse headings as geography, literature, history, and even ethnography, whilst travel literature, as a distinct literary form, was not seriously studied in China until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Initial interest in the genre was expressed by the appearance of several anthologies of travel writings dating from the imperial period (that is, from before 1911). One early and well-known example is Bei Yuanchen   and Ye Youming's   _Selections of Travel Records from the Successive Eras_ ( _Lidai youji xuan_   , 1980). This collection, and its numerous subsequent analogues, includes selections of travel literature arranged chronologically through the successive dynastic eras. More recently, between 2004 and 2009, three book-length studies of travel literature have been published in Chinese. By far the most useful of these is Mei Xinlin   and Yu Zhanghua's   _Zhongguo youji wenxue shi_   ( _History of Travel Literature in China_ , 2004). The great value of this work lies in its broad chronological breadth (from ancient times to the present), its close reading of individual texts and their value in the genre's development, and its attention to varieties (or sub-genres) of travel literature.

Since travel literature was not considered a formal variety of prose writing in imperial China – rather, it was generally regarded as a form of informal writing related more to geography than to literature – modern anthology compilers in China needed a name (in Chinese) to denote travel literature. The 1979 edition of the authoritative Chinese dictionary _Sea of Words_ ( _Cihai_  ) provided the needed designation: _youji_   (pronounced 'yo', as in ' _yo_ -yo'; 'gee', as in ' _gee_ whiz'), which translates literally as 'travel ( _you_ ) records ( _ji_ )'. The _Cihai_ dictionary entry for _youji_ defines the form as follows:

_Youji_ : a literary genre; a type of prose. It employs a lively writing style and vivid description that records and narrates what is seen and heard during a journey about the political life of a certain place, its social life, local conditions and customs, and landscape scenes, famous spots, historic sites, and so on. Moreover, it expresses the thoughts and feelings of the author.

( _Cihai_ 1979: 2: 2239)

Anthology compilers, literary historians, and readers have since embraced the term _youji_ with great enthusiasm.

Unlike the diverse nature of their counterparts in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere, the overwhelming majority of travel literature authors in imperial China were members of the scholar-official class. These men spent their entire youth preparing for civil service examinations which, when passed, usually provided a prestigious position in the government bureaucracy. In their capacity as scholar-officials, many of these men spent their careers essentially travelling to and from different official posts in the provinces. With a just a few notable exceptions, virtually all traditional travel literature was written by these scholar-officials about places they visited in China. They were not, like most of their Age of Discovery counterparts in the West, 'outsiders' observing and writing about unfamiliar foreign lands.

The development of Chinese travel literature is a continuous process that has its origins in the Six Dynasties period (220–589), beginnings in the Tang dynasty (618–907), florescence in the Song (960–1279), and proliferation in the late Ming (1368–1644) and early Qing (1644–1911). Although scholar-officials in pre-modern China certainly wrote poetry about their travels, most literary historians (and the editors of the _Cihai_ dictionary) regard _youji_ as 'a type of prose' writing. The development of this form through the dynasties was a _dynamic_ process. Changes that took place in the genre's form and content over time were the result of fluid interplay between authors and audiences, and literary milieus and cultural institutions.

A major critical concern is how later examples of the genre relate to earlier ones. Unlike the composition of traditional Chinese verse, where skillful borrowing from master poets of the past was encouraged and admired, there seems to be very little direct literary borrowing from earlier texts in traditional Chinese prose travel literature. Instead, the single, most important factor that links individual travel works and travellers over time is _place_. When the well-known Song dynasty writer Lu You   (1125–1210) visited the famous Three Travellers Grotto (Sanyou dong  ) in western Hubei in 1170 (Strassberg 1994: 209–12), he was obliged to acknowledge and quote from the works of distinguished literary men who had visited the cave earlier and written accounts about it. In the history of travel writing in China it is this association between individual texts about _one place_ , accumulated over time, which mainly defines how separate works in the genre relate to one another.

Another key aspect of Chinese travel literature is its _visual_ quality. Essentially, authors are creating cinematic-like word-pictures of places – places they want readers to 'see' by _reading a text_. This concept is quite alien in today's video world, nevertheless it is central to understanding Chinese travel literature. The modern critic Yu Kwang-chung (Yu Guangzhong  ) has observed that the language of what he calls the 'landscape journal' (or Chinese travel literature) is more effective when it is 'sensuous' rather than 'intellectual', because the 'sensory data' provided by the author allows readers 'to visualize, to be there, and share the experience' (Yu 1983: 23). To Yu's insightful comments I would add the following observation: a key quality that distinguishes travel literature from other varieties of prose literature is that it narrates _movement through_ space and place. In its Chinese context, 'place' refers to a particular environmental setting with identifiable traits, such as a distinguishing name, special topographical features, and/or specific historical, cultural, and literary associations. Traditionally, the Chinese attached great value to such places. 'Space', on the other hand, is a larger construct, abstract in nature. Imagine a giant tableau, onto which is inscribed a cultural construct that includes all places, their unique characteristics, and the relationships among them. As travellers move across and through this giant tableau, they perceive both how individual places are unique, _and_ how they all ultimately assemble together into some sort of unity (such as China's ancient network of 'sacred mountains'). This sense of motion is in many ways the defining quality of travel literature, differentiating it from static depictions of landscape where scenic details are often simply enumerated in shopping-list form.

Now we turn to sample selections from four authors whose _youji_ are critically important in the development of travel literature in China.

**Li Daoyuan  and China's first extended landscape descriptions in prose**

Most scholars agree that the birth of true landscape prose (and poetry) in China took place around the fourth century. In the present context 'true' means literary texts in which landscape is appreciated mainly for its aesthetic appeal. The content, style, and language of these prose texts – which are China's first _youji_ – vary greatly, and were composed in a number of different genres, the most important of which are the rhapsody ( _fu_  ), letter ( _shu_  ), preface ( _xu_  ), commentary ( _zhu_  ), and record ( _ji_  ) (Hargett 1989: 14–16). Among extant examples of prose _youji_ surviving from the Six Dynasties period, the _Commentary on the Waterways Classic_ ( _Shuijing zhu_  ) by Li Daoyuan   (d. 527) is especially important because it contains extended, highly literary descriptions of landscape that influenced numerous later _youji_ authors. Typical of his descriptive style is the following passage, which describes the famous Three Gorges along the middle reaches of the Great (or Yangzi) River:

The two banks along the 700 _li_ [one _li_  is roughly one-third of an English mile] stretch of the Three Gorges link with the mountains, without the slightest opening in between. Tiered crags and layered walls hide the sky and block out the sun. Unless it is high noon or midnight, you will never see sunshine or moonlight. With the arrival of summer, the River's waterline rises to the hills, and travel is obstructed and cut off in both directions [. . .] In the seasons of spring and winter, white torrents rush into green pools, where swirling clear ripples cast their reflections. Sheer stacks beget many unusual cypress trees; suspended springs and cascading waterfalls fly and scour among them. Such purity, abundance, loftiness, and luxuriance – truly this has tremendous gusto and appeal!

(Li Daoyuan 1984: 34.1067–68)

In contrast to earlier depictions of landscape, Li Daoyuan does not engage in moralizing or praise and blame; nor does he provide any utopian visions of antiquity. On the contrary, his emphasis is upon describing an attractive outdoor scene that he himself presumably witnessed while travelling as a government official along China's waterways. This reflects a new attitude towards nature, adopted by many writers during the fourth and fifth centuries in China, whereby attractive outdoor landscapes were more highly appreciated than previously (Holzman 1996: 1–24, 121–54).

Li Daoyuan's _Commentary on the Waterways Classic_ is notable for its great length (forty chapters), which far exceeds any previous prose work devoted mainly to topographical description. More importantly, however, Li's descriptions are distinctly _literary_ in quality. One notable technique used in Li's depiction of landscape, which distinguishes it from most other landscape prose writers of the Six Dynasties, is the 'scene-comment' construction, where the author describes a scene then follows with a quick (usually one-line) personal response. In the passage above, for example, we find two authorial comments: 'Unless it is high noon or midnight, you will never see sunshine or moonlight', and 'Truly this has tremendous gusto and appeal!' Finally, it should be mentioned that Li does not limit himself to describing attractive outdoor scenes. He also refers to and quotes from over 400 earlier literary, historical, and geographical texts, and often chronicles local customs, traditions, and folktales. Whereas the origins and sources of earlier geographical accounts in China are sketchy, undocumented, and often mixed with legend, Li Daoyuan's _Commentary on the Waterways Classic_ introduced an entirely new approach to writing about place. The hallmark qualities of this approach are first-hand observation coupled with judicious review and citation of earlier textual sources and local traditions. Most subsequent authors of literary travel journals produced in China, especially those dating from the Song dynasty (960–1279) and thereafter, followed this same approach.

**Liu Zongyuan  and the birth of travel literature in China**

From the time Li Daoyuan completed his _Commentary_ until the early ninth century, landscape descriptions continued to be written by a number of authors, but with one major difference: prose accounts of landscape were now more often composed in the ' _ji_ ', or 'record', form of prose writing. The purpose of a _ji_ was to make a record of an event that actually took place, thus many of these works were commemorative or dedicatory in nature. At the same time, the _ji_ form was also employed to record lengthy journeys, some even to foreign lands. Two prominent examples are _Records of the Buddhist Kingdoms_ ( _Foguo ji_   ) by Faxian   (337– _c_. 422) and _Records of the Western Kingdoms during the Great Tang_ ( _Da Tang Xiyu ji_  ) by Xuanzang   ( _c_. 602–664), both of which provide records of trips to India by prominent Buddhist monks (Faxian 1965; Xuanzang 1996).

Although numerous _ji_ or 'records' survive from the Six Dynasties and Tang periods, surprisingly few of these texts chronicle pleasure excursions to scenic landscape locations. Early and mid-Tang dynasty writers preferred poetry over prose to celebrate and commemorate their visits to scenic areas. This situation, however, changed in the mid-eighth and early ninth centuries, largely because of the efforts of one writer: Liu Zongyuan (773–819).

Liu Zongyuan achieved prominence early in his political career, and he seemed destined for a successful career as a public official. In 805, however, his political associates fell from power. The result for him was demotion in rank and banishment to Yongzhou  , a backwater and miasmic region in the far south. During his years of exile there, Liu Zongyuan composed his famous _Eight Records of Yongzhou_ ( _Yongzhou ba ji_  ) (Nienhauser et al. 1973: 66–79). These essays, which chronicle daytrips around Yongzhou, have served as models for landscape writing ever since. Among the best is the third, titled 'Record of a Little Hillock West of Flat-Iron Pool' ('Gumu tan xi Xiaoqiu ji'   ):

Eight days after finding West Mountain, I traced along a path northwest of the mountain pass for two hundred paces, and next found Flat-Iron Pool. Twenty-five paces west of the pool, where its waters rush and deepen, a fish dam has been built. At the edge of the dam there is a hillock where grow bamboos and trees. The rocks that suddenly spring up, lying prone and proud looking, bearing earth as they protrude, and vying to form fantastic shapes, are practically beyond count. Those that descend, toppling downward in layer after layer, resemble livestock drinking at a creek; those that ascend, poised to charge upward in pointed ranks, resemble bears clambering up a mountain.

The hillock is smaller than an acre, and one could fence it in and possess it [. . .] Since I was fond of this place, I bought it. Li Shenyuan and Yuan Keji accompanied me on the outing [to Flat-Iron Pool], and all of us were greatly delighted at this unexpected good fortune. Then, gathering tools, we rooted up the weeds and mowed away the grasses, cut away the inferior trees, and built a roaring fire and burned them. The choice trees then stood out, the attractive bamboos were disclosed, and the marvelous rocks were displayed.

Indeed! If you took the surpassing beauty of this hillock and removed it to Feng, Hao, Hu, or Du, then those gentlemen who prize sightseeing would vie to buy it, each day offering a thousand more gold, yet be all the more unable to obtain it. Abandoned now in this county, farmers and fishermen pass by, and yet they ignore it.

(Liu Zongyuan 1979: 29.765–66)

This passage contains four organization components found in virtually all subsequent Chinese travel literature: (1) introduction; (2) description of an attractive landscape or historical site; (3) author's reaction; and (4) conclusion. The introduction provides a brief identification and description of the geographical setting. In the description section that comes next, the author delineates the landscape in selective, highly compact language. He then usually reacts to the scene just described. Not surprisingly, most writers in their reaction will express admiration for the beauty of the landscape, though this can vary in intensity and length from author to author. The authorial reaction component in 'Record of a Little Hillock West of Flat-Iron Pool' is quite detailed because Liu Zongyuan's admiration for the scene he describes is overshadowed by the disappointment he feels over its neglect by local residents and its unavailability to 'connoisseurs' in populated areas such as Feng, Hao, Hu, or Du, who could properly appreciate its pristine beauty. That Liu Zongyuan was living in political exile in a remote area when he wrote his 'Eight Records', and – like the hillock and pool – was thus 'neglected' by the emperor and those in power in the capital, is no coincidence. Like the hillock and pool, he now finds himself abandoned in a rural area where his 'beauty' (that is, talent to serve the emperor) cannot be properly appreciated.

Liu Zongyuan's importance in the development of _youji_ writing cannot be overstated, for he was the first author of the traditional period to make accounts of travel an integral part of _ji_ , or 'record', writing. More than anyone else, he is alone responsible for creating the prose genre known today as 'travel record literature'. The one quality that perhaps most characterizes his _youji_ writings is their spontaneity. The result is a word-picture charged with motion and dynamism. Liu's verbal vitality is especially apparent in the following lines from the fourth of his 'Eight Records', where he describes a pool near Little Hillock:

Near its banks, rocks from the depths _unfold upward_ and _lay exposed_ , _forming_ islets, _forming_ cays, _forming_ bluffs, and _forming_ cliffs. Azure trees and halcyon creepers _screen_ and _entwine_ , _waver_ and _touch_ ; in irregular patterns they _fan_ and _brush_.

(Liu Zongyuan 1979: 29.767)

Liu Zongyuan's abundant use of action verbs (italicized here for emphasis) brings a dynamic and cinematic quality to his descriptions, inviting the reader to share the author's experience and adventure.

**Fan Chengda  and the florescence of travel literature**

Most Chinese travel literature written during the Tang and Song dynasties chronicles brief daytrips to scenic sites of literary or historical interest. Two well-known examples are 'Record of a Trip to Baochan Mountain' ('You Baochan shan ji'  ; Strassberg 1994: 173–77) by Wang Anshi   (1021–1086) and 'Record of a Trip to Stone Bell Mountain' ('Shizhong shan ji'  ; Hargett 1989: 46–47) by Su Shi   (or Su Dongpo  , 1037–1101). These daytrip essays are brief, usually running to no more than a few hundred Chinese characters in length. The occasion of the journey serves one central purpose: to function as a stimulus for advancing a specific philosophical or moral argument. Wang Anshi's journey to Baochan Mountain is a good example. After a brief introduction, Wang describes how he and four travelling companions decided to explore the inner recesses of the cave on the mountain. After penetrating only a short distance, however, one of his comrades became fearful that their torch would burn out and so the group halted their progress and turned back. Wang Anshi later had some regrets about this, noting:

the most unique, magnificent, fabulous, strange, and extraordinary scenery in the world is usually found in these dangerous and distant places that people rarely reach. Therefore, only those with ambition can reach them [. . .] Those with strength enough to go farther but who do not try will be ridiculed by others and will blame themselves. However, he who exhausts his ambition, even if he cannot go further, can still be without regrets. Who could ridicule him then? This is the insight I obtained from this journey.

(Strassberg 1994: 176)

What begins, then, as a description of a cave on a well-known mountain, in the end becomes a moral allegory on a shortcoming in human nature. Similarly, the purpose of Su Shi's essay on Stone Bell Mountain is to debunk a myth perpetrated by Li Daoyuan and others about a mysterious 'chiming of bells' heard on the mountain. Su chastises Li for not investigating the 'bells' first-hand and instead simply repeating misinformation passed on by others; as it turned out, Su Shi himself discovered that the so-called chiming of bells was in fact the sound of river water rushing through a huge, porous rock in a channel at the foot of the mountain.

The term 'embassy account' refers to diary-format reports by Song dynasty envoys of their visits to the northern border states of Liao   (907–1125) and Jin   (1115–1234) between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Both of these foreign states menaced China with frequent incursions across its borders, and so at various times the Song made treaties or alliances with them. In 1126, however, the Jin successfully invaded China and eventually occupied and controlled most of the northern half of the country. One outcome of this situation was the establishment of formalized diplomatic channels that shuttled Song and foreign envoys back and forth between their respective capitals (Hargett 1989: 52–58). Many of these envoys kept journals of their embassy experiences while on the road. These texts constitute the second variety of Song dynasty _youji_.

Most of the surviving embassy accounts date from the twelfth century and describe journeys to the Jin court in Yanshan (modern Beijing). Among the best known and frequently studied of these texts are _Lanpei lu_   ( _Record of Grasping the Carriage Reins_ ) by Fan Chengda (1126–1193) and _Beixing rilu_   ( _Daily Record of Northern Travels_ ) by Lou Yue   (1137–1213). These works describe diplomatic embassies to the Jin court – Lou's in 1169–1170, Fan's in 1170. Song embassy accounts are valuable because they contain abundant information on geography, customs, roads, markets, local commodities, the status of Chinese refugees in the north, and much more. In his embassy account Fan Chengda voiced harsh criticisms of the Jin and the efforts they made to build a new capital for themselves in northern China.

[Chinese] conscription labourers numbering 800,000, as well as military labourers numbering 400,000, worked on the project for several years. The number of those who died is beyond calculation. The lands [excavated by the Jin] all housed ancient [Chinese] cairns and barrows which, without exception, were dug up and abandoned.

(Hargett 1989: 57)

Lou Yue's indictment and tone of disgust is even harsher:

The Jin absorb the fat and blood of the people in order to supply their nests and dens. [Their] treasuries and storehouses are mostly located at places around the supreme capital [. . .] Thus, the people of Henan are greatly impoverished and specie is becoming increasingly scarce.

(Walton 2002: 25)

The third and final variety of Song dynasty _youji_ are the river diaries, so-called because they describe lengthy trips along rivers. Although only a handful of these texts are extant, they are important not only because their literary content is proportionately greater and qualitatively more significant than the daytrip essay and embassy account, but also because these works helped to establish the prototype of the literary travel diary in traditional China, which proliferated during the subsequent Ming and Qing dynasties.

Two diaries, both composed in the 1170s, play an especially important role in the birth and development of the river diary: Lu You's _Record of Passing into Shu_ ( _Ru Shu ji_  ) and Fan Chengda's _Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu_ ( _Wuchuan lu_  ) (Chang and Smythe 1981; Hargett 2007). Lu You's diary chronicles a lengthy excursion undertaken in 1170 along the Great River from his home in Zhejiang to Sichuan. Fan Chengda's _Wuchuan lu_ , composed in 1177, records roughly the same river itinerary but in the opposite direction; that is, from Chengdu (in Sichuan) to his home in Suzhou (in modern Jiangsu province). Both works describe trips to and from government posts.

One feature that immediately distinguishes the Song dynasty river diary is length: Lu Yu's _Ru Shi ji_ alone comprises six lengthy chapters (or sections). The reason for this is quite simple: these works describe extended excursions over great distances of water and land. The _Ru Shu ji_ and _Wuchuan lu_ , for instance, each cover a trip of about 1,800 English miles. Also, since travelling officials like Lu and Fan did not, as a rule, have any specific political, diplomatic, or intelligence duties to perform while on the road, they had more time for sightseeing. The Great River hosts some of the most beautiful and spectacular scenery in all of China, as well as several famous mountains and numerous historical sites, so it is no surprise that these places would attract the attention of a travelling scholar-official and inspire description and commentary in his diary. To illustrate the rich detail found in Song river diaries, let us consider Fan Chengda's description of his ascent of Mount Emei in Sichuan, which appears in his _Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu_. Although Fan was anxious to return home after an extended tour of duty in the provinces, he stopped his progress in order to undertake a ten-day side trip to Mount Emei, one of the most famous Buddhist mountains in all of China. Fan not only visited the mountain, but in fact made the extremely difficult ascent to its summit. While there, he observed a rare optical phenomenon known today as a 'Glory'. To most modern observers, a 'Glory' is an optical phenomenon that occurs when an observer stands on the ledge of a great height – with bright sunshine and water drops present in the air – and observes his own shadow reflecting on the clouds below. At the same time, this shadow is ringed by a rainbow or multi-coloured halo. Through Fan Chengda's eyes, however, what was observed was not some 'optical phenomenon', but instead a rare 'vision' or 'manifestation' of the mountain's resident Bodhisattva, who, tradition says, only appears to the most pious and devout. Here is Fan's account:

I paid a second visit to the hall on the cliff and offered prayers. Suddenly a dense fog arose in the four directions, turning everything completely white. A monk said: 'This is the Silvery World.' A short time later, there was a heavy downpour and the dense fog retreated. The monk said: 'This is the rain that cleanses the cliff. The Bodhisattva is about to make a Great Manifestation.' White clouds again spread out below the cliff, gathered thickly, and mounted upward to within a few yards of the edge, where they abruptly halted. The cloud tops were as smooth as a jade floor. From time to time raindrops flew by. I looked down into the cliff's belly, and there was a great globe of light lying outstretched on a flat cloud. The outer corona was in three rings, each of which had indigo, yellow, red, and green hues. In the very centre of the globe was a hollow of concentrated brightness. Each of us onlookers saw our forms in the hollow and bright spot, without the slightest detail hidden, just as if we were looking in a mirror. If you raise a hand or move a foot, the reflection does likewise. And yet you will not see the reflection of the person standing right next to you. The monk said: 'This is the Body-absorbing Light.' When the light disappeared, winds arose from the mountains in front and the clouds scurried about. In the wind and clouds there again appeared a huge, globular form of light. It spanned several mountains, exhausting every possible colour and blending them into a beautiful array. The plants and trees on the peaks and ridges were so fresh and alluring, so gorgeous and striking, that you could not look at them directly.

(Hargett 2008: 66–67)

**Xu Xiake  : China's greatest travel writer**

Xu Xiake (1587–1641) is often regarded as China's greatest travel writer. This is partly because of the incredible distances covered in his journeys – Xu visited sixteen of China's modern provinces in total – and partly because of his amazing literary productivity while on the road. His surviving _youji_ corpus totals over 400,000 Chinese characters, which in modern editions fill two hefty volumes. However, while there is certainly no shortage of praise for Xu Xiake and his prominence and status as traditional China's most prolific and notable travel writer, there has been considerable disagreement among critics over two related issues: first, the place of Xu's travel journals in the overall history of travel writing in pre-modern China; and second, the literary value of his _youji_. Some critics, such as Li Ciming   (1830–1894), have gone so far as to dismiss Xu's travel journals altogether because (Li claims) the late Ming traveller composed _youji_ in a manner that neither acknowledges nor reflects the _youji_ writing style of Liu Zongyuan, Fan Chengda, and other masters of the past (Ward 2001: xi–xii). Like many critics before him, Li Ciming judges the quality of a literary work by how it relates to, and draws influence and inspiration from, the literary monuments of the past.

Such criticism, in my view, reveals a basic misunderstanding of the history and development of travel literature in ancient China. Clearly, to better understand and more fairly judge the literary qualities of Xu's travel writings and their place in the history of _youji_ , a different approach is needed. I propose to do just that by examining some sample diary entries from Xu Xiake's two trips to Yellow Mountain (Huangshan  ; in Anhui province), undertaken in 1616 and 1618, respectively. These entries exhibit the writing style that defines all of his _youji_ writing. A key element in this style is the manner in which he narrates _movement over and through landscape_ :

Second day of the month. I descended from [Mount] Baiyue ten _li_ , then moved westward along the foothills and reached South Stream Bridge. Ferried across Big Stream, followed along a smaller stream and proceeded north along the mountain. After 10 _li_ , the precipice between the two mountains looks like a gate, bundling the stream in between. Crossed it and then descended to some level farmland, which was very spacious. After 20 more _li_ is Hog's Trough. Climbed up to Tiger Ridge by means of a small trail, which was very steep. Reached the ridge after 10 _li_ , and 5 _li_ beyond there, the foothills. To the north gazed at the various peaks of Yellow Mountain, whose multiple layers seems like they could be plucked. After another 3 _li_ is Old Tower Col, where the creek is very wide and water is swollen. There is no bridge, except for some timbers thrown across the entire creek. I waded across with great difficulty. After 2 _li_ stopped to spend the night at High Stream.

(Xu Xiake 1985: 1.17)

Xu Xiake's straightforward and almost barebones style of narrative can be traced back to some travel accounts in the Tang, such as Xuanzang's record of his trip to India and the surviving travel diary of the Tang dynasty official Li Ao   (772–836) titled _Diary of a Trip South_ ( _Lainan lu_  ; Strassberg 1994: 127–31), and more specifically to Fan Chengda, Lu You, and others, who made this style an essential element of _youji_ writing. Xu Xiake also preferred this same sort of direct, narrative style. So, what is for Li Ciming the supposedly 'unpolished and awkward' prose style of Xu Xiake was in fact the established register of travel narrative language of _youji_ and had already been in place for hundreds of years. However, in Xu Xiake's travel writings it is _the_ defining characteristic, and there is a reason for this: Xu and his predecessors wrote in this simple, yet detailed style with the idea of providing a sort of guidebook to future sightseers following similar itineraries. Moreover, if Xu Xiake's journals reveal an intense aesthetic appreciation of many of the sites he visited, this appreciation is expressed in a manner different from that employed by most Tang and Song _youji_ writers. The register of language Xu uses to convey his delight in beautiful landscapes and scenic mountain areas is abundantly endowed with literary flavour and value. As an example, consider the following passage, written during Xu Xiake's second visit to Yellow Mountain:

From time to time a dense fog would move in and move off. When the first bank of fog moved in, nothing could be seen. Looking out towards the various heights of Lotus Flower [Peak], most of them were enveloped in fog. As I alone ascended to Heavenly Capital [Peak], when I moved to the front of it the fog would retreat to the back of it, and as I crossed over to the right, the fog would then exit from the left. As for the pines, they were still twisted and upright, sweeping this way and that. The cypresses, although as big as a [man's] arm, all clung flatly to the surfaces of rocks in the manner of lichen. On such lofty mountains the wind is formidable, and the foggy mists come and go as they please. Looking at the various peaks below, at times they appeared [out of the fog] as emerald isles, while at other times they were completely enveloped in a silvery sea. But looking further down the mountain, I beheld a completely different view: there the sunlight glittered brightly and brilliantly.

(Xu Xiake 1985: 1:40)

Above all, the author's first priority here is _narration of the journey_. This writing style produces a veritable word-picture of the human experience of moving across a landscape. To accomplish this, Xu uses multiple action/movement verbs (fog _moving_ in and out, pine trees _sweeping_ this way and that, cyprus trees _clinging_ to rocks, peaks _enveloped_ by a silvery sea of fog and mists), which gives the imagery in his prose a sense of constant motion. His main goal is to recreate, via narration of physical movement and description of scene, _the experience of the journey_. Although his word-picture makes appeal to various human senses, the emphasis in the Yellow Mountain diary entries is on the visual appeal of the landscape. No scenic detail is omitted; no physical difficulty of the ascent (and there were many!) goes unmentioned. Xu Xiake was neither an observer, recalling some leisurely outing to a scenic spot with friends (a popular topic in Song dynasty travel writing), nor did he have any interest in utilizing prose _youji_ in order to engage in philosophical or moral discourse. Instead Xu Xiake (by choice) plays the dual roles of 'narrator' (he provides the narrative) and 'actor' (he is the centre of the action). With a little imagination and a willingness to participate, then, the attentive reader can undertake the very same journey vicariously through Xu's prose.

By the late Ming period virtually every major writer composed travel literature (some, of course, more than others). As has been documented in numerous sources, travel and especially sightseeing reached unprecedented heights during the Ming. Prominent writers such as Qian Qianyi   (1582–1664) often went on outings to well-known landmarks with friends as a form of leisure activity and socializing, and it was common to compose poetry on such occasions and a prose _youji_ account to commemorate the event. What is remarkable, however, is how significantly the prose travel literature produced by these authors differs in style, and how different Xu Xiake's style differs from their styles. I would argue that much of late Ming _youji_ falls in a general category that Mei Xinlin and Yu Zhanghua call 'erudite travel literature' (Mei and Yu 2004: 255–60). The idea here is that different authors produced different forms of 'learned' travel literature wherein emphasis not only falls upon chronicling and describing a journey and the sights witnessed along the way, but also on _displaying the literary prowess of the author_. Xu Xiake never wrote in this style, and if one compares Qian Qianyi's prose account of his visit to Yellow Mountain in 1641 (McDowall 2009) with Xu's diary entries, stylistically these texts are worlds apart. The language register in Qian's account is extremely rich in allusions to past works of history, philosophy, and literature, quotations from gazetteers, and references to various historical figures. In many ways, Qian Qianyi's prose account of his trip to Yellow Mountain seems more like a literary event than an account of a journey.

That Xu Xiake throughout his life would continue to produce a form of _youji_ dramatically different from almost all of his contemporaries tells us something that is quite significant: by the Ming period authors who wrote prose travel literature had numerous options regarding style and content. Since Chinese travel literature had few hard and fast generic rules, by the late Ming _youji_ had become a loosely defined prose genre that could be manipulated and changed to fit different literary needs.

China in the Qing era (1644–1911) became more expansionist. Founded by the Manchus, a conquering, non-Chinese people, the Qing dynasty in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries annexed the island of Taiwan and extended Chinese control into Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet and other regions of central Asia. The administration of this expanded and more multi-ethnic realm generated a proliferation of both literary and non-literary modes of travel writing. An atlas of China's vast territory was produced in 1717, followed later in the eighteenth century by _The Comprehensive Gazetteer of the Great Qing Realm_ ( _Da Qing yitong zhi_  , completed in 1746) and by _The Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations_ ( _Huang Qing zhigong tu_  , _c_. 1769), an 'illustrated catalogue of the different ethnic peoples of the empire' (Teng 2004: 5). Geography was also revitalized in this period, emerging as a key discipline in Chinese intellectual culture, with a new emphasis on empirical observation. These developments helped with the control and maintenance of empire at a practical level; just as crucially, they served an important ideological function, Emma Teng has suggested, by 'help[ing] to naturalize Qing expansionism through the production of a re-imagined imperial geography' (ibid.: 6).

Literary modes of travel writing such as the _youji_ played a part in this imperial enterprise. A wave of frontier travel literature emerged, with this non-traditional destination offering writers 'the opportunity to do something new and fresh, to cover new ground, as it were. Liberated from the need to dwell on historical models, the traveller as explorer and eyewitness observer took centre stage' (ibid.: 19). Other writers, meanwhile, handled the genre in a more traditional style. Important and influential travel literature composers are Zhang Dai   ( _c_. 1597– _c_. 1679), Gu Yanwu   (1613–1682), and Yuan Mei   (1716–1798), all of whom produced texts with various themes that are generally representative of Qing dynasty _youji_. The first of these prominent themes is nostalgic reminiscence about pleasure trips taken earlier during the glory days of the former Ming dynasty (that is, before the Manchu conquest in 1644).Zhang Dai, a wealthy literati under the Ming who became a recluse living in poverty after the founding of the Qing, produced in his later years elegant sketches that describe his travels as a wealthy young man to famous scenic areas in south China (Strassberg 1994: 335–51). Gu Yanwu, on the other hand, was a fervent Ming loyalist and historian interested mainly in following a rigorous research method based on sound historiographical and philological principles. Thus, in travel writings such as 'Record of Five Terraces Mountain' ('Wutai shan ji'  ; Strassberg 1994: 357–60), Gu's main interest is in producing a text based on a personal visit to Wutai and a comprehensive investigation of what earlier writers had to say about the mountain. Many other Qing writers followed this same scholarly approach in their travel writing.

The collapse of the Qing government in 1911 was followed by decades of political division, invasion by Japan (1930–1940s), and civil war in the late 1940s. The founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 finally unified the government and brought an end to the foreign presence in China. Because several major economic and political and economic issues plagued China over the next three decades (mainly, the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976), little literature of any sort was produced. This situation changed, however, when China's economic resurgence began in the 1980s. One result of this new economic direction has been tremendous growth in travel and tourism, both inside China and more recently to foreign destinations. Both business and recreational travel are increasingly sanctioned, and indeed approved, by the ruling Communist Party, with mobility in these regards now equated with modernity. At the same time, the industries and infrastructures which support these travellers are highly state-controlled, and that control extends to the many magazines and websites which are today the principal medium for Chinese writings about travel (see Nyiri 2010). As a consequence, almost all of these accounts are tourist-oriented ('Look Out for the Big Monkeys on Mount Emei! They Stole My Backpack!') and lacking in literary sophistication. Expatriate Chinese writers have produced more extended and ambitious forms of travel writing or travel-infused fiction – examples include Gao Xingjian's _Lingshan_ ( _Soul Mountain_ , 1990) and Ma Jian's _Red Dust: A Path through China_ (2001) – yet in China itself, it seems, the _youji_ tradition has currently fallen into abeyance, to be replaced by the video camera and cell phone.

**Select bibliography**

Bei Yuanchen  and Ye Youming   (1980) _Lidai youji xuan_   ( _Selections of Travel Records from the Successive Eras_ ), Changsha: Hunan Renmin chubanshe.

Chang, C. and Smythe, J. (1981) _South China in the Twelfth Century_ : _A Translation of Lu Yu's Travel Diaries_ , _July 3_ – _December 6_ , _1170_ , Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press.

Chaves, J. (1988) 'The Yellow Mountain Poems of Ch'ien Ch'ien-i (1582–1664) Poetry as _Yu_ - _chi_ ', _Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies_ 48(2): 465–92

Chaves, J. (2013) _Every Rock a Universe_ : _The Yellow Mountains and Chinese Travel Writing_ , Warren, CT: Floating World Editions.

Cihai (1979) _Sea of Words_ , Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe.

Faxian   (1965) _A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms_ , New York: Dover Publications

Hargett, J.M. (1989) _On the Road in Twelfth Century China_ : _The Travel Diaries of Fan Chengda_ ( _1126_ – _1193_ ), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

Hargett, J.M. (2006) _Stairway to Heaven_ : _A Journey to the Summit of Mount Emei_ , Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Hargett, J.M. (2008) _Riding the River Home_ : _A Complete and Annotated Translation of Fan Chengda's (1126–1193) Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu_ (Wuchuan lu), Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press.

Holzman, D. (1996) _Landscape Appreciation in Ancient and Early Medieval China_ : _The Birth of Landscape Poetry_ , Hsin-chu, Taiwan: National Tsing Hua University.

Li Chi (1974) _The Travel Diaries of Hsü Hsia-k'o_ , Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Li Daoyuan   (1984) _Shuijing zhu jiao_   ( _Commentary on the Waterways Classic, with Collations_ ), Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin chubanshe.

Liu Zongyuan   (1979) _Liu Zongyuan ji_   ( _Collected Works of Liu Zongyuan_ ), Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.

McDowall, S. (2009) _Qian Qianyi's Reflections on Yellow Mountain_ : _Traces of a Late Ming Hatchet and Chisel_ , Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press

Mei Xinlin   and Yu Zhanghua   (2004) _Zhongguo youji wenxue shi_   ( _History of Travel Literature in China_ ), Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe.

Mirsky, J. (ed.) (1965) _The Great Chinese Travellers_ : _An Anthology_ , London: Allen and Unwin.

Nienhauser, W.H. Jr, Hartman, C., Walls, J. W., Crawford, W. B., and Neighbors, L. (1973) _Liu Tsung-yüan_ , New York: Twayne Publishers.

Nyíri, P. (2010) 'Struggling for Mobility: Migration, Tourism and Cultural Authority in Contemporary China', in S. Greenblatt (ed.), _Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Spence, J.D. (2007) _Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man_ , New York, Viking Press.

Strassberg, R.E. (1994) _Inscribed Landscapes_ : _Travel Writing from Imperial China_ , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Teng, E.J. (2004) _Taiwan's Imagined Geographies_ : _Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures_ , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tian, X. (2011) _Visionary Journeys_ : _Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China_ , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.

Yu Guangzhong   (1983) 'The Sensuous Art of the Chinese Landscape Journal', _Renditions_ 19–20: 23–40.

Walton, L. (2002) ' "Diary of a Journey to the North': Lou Yue's _Beixing rilu_ ', _Journal of Song-Yuan Studies_ 32: 1–38.

Wang, Y. (2013), _Reverie and Reality_ : _Poetry on Travel by Late Imperial Chinese Women_ , Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Ward, J. (2001) _Xu Xiake_ ( _1587_ – _1641_ ): _The Art of Travel Writing,_ London: Curzon Press.

Wills, J.E. (2007) 'Journeys Mostly to the West: Chinese Perspectives on Travel Writing', _Huntington Library Quarterly_ 70(1): 191–201.

Xu Xiake   (1985) _Xu Xiake youji jiaozhu_  , ed. Zhu Huirong  , Kunming: Yunnan Renmin chubanshe.

Xuanzang   (1996) _The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions_ , Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research.

Zhang, E.C. (2011) _Transformative Journeys_ : _Travel and Culture in Song China_ , Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

Indian Travel Writing

_Shobhana Bhattacharji_

According to Romila Thapar, 'the Indian has been an inveterate traveller for many millennia' (1980: 1). This long tradition has encompassed many different itineraries, and many different agendas and motives for travel. Indian men and women have historically made journeys for reasons of religion (on pilgrimages, but also to escape communal violence), trade, migration (both enforced and voluntary), education, diplomacy, science, journalism, and, of course, to produce literary accounts of their travels. That said, the literary and textual archive by no means reflects accurately the many centuries of Indian travel. Travel writing from India ebbs and swells over time, but, as in Europe, it burgeons in the nineteenth century. Prior to this date texts corresponding to the European travelogue (i.e. a first-person, ostensibly factual account of the writer's own travels) are comparatively rare, although records of travel exist in other forms, such poetry and myth. By the mid-twentieth century, in contrast, there are millions of travellers, many of whom write letters, articles, books, blogs, and newspaper columns about travel, but here other problems loom. Is all this travel writing? Who should be included as an Indian writer? The _Guardian_ began a travel writing section in 2000, with annual round-ups of the best travel writing from around the world. Indians did not figure in it until the end of that decade when V.S. Naipaul, Pico Iyer, and Salman Rushdie were featured; whilst all are Indian by descent, none of them live in India and they all write in English.

Indians are similarly absent from the fairly comprehensive Wikipedia entry for travel writing. Why do Indians tend to be invisible in Eurocentric round-ups of this sort? For US media and scholarship, interest in Asia has generally focused on China and Japan, although this began to change in the 1980s when the USA revived the 'Great Game' in Afghanistan, fighting for control of Central Asian oil. For the old colonial nations of Europe, India was more visible, but accumulation of knowledge in all forms, including studies of travel writing, gravitates towards 'privileged sites of processing and consumption in imperial centers where academic institutions set global standards' (Ludden 2003: 1060). India has now begun to appear waveringly on the margins of travel writing surveys, and there have been a handful of recent anthologies and academic studies on this theme (Burton 1998; Sen 2005; Khair et al. 2006; Alam and Subrahmanyam 2007; Fisher 1996, 2007; Bhattacharji 2008; Mandal 2010). A few critical editions of key historic travelogues are also now available (Fisher 1997; Khalidi 2006; Lambert-Hurley 2007; O'Quinn 2008; Hasan 2009; Lambert-Hurley and Sharma 2010). Yet the great majority (and variety) of Indian travel writing remains little known.

A problem with a pan-Indian project like this is how to access the material. India has twenty-two official languages (and by some reckonings more than 1,000 languages in total), many of which boast significant literary traditions. Since no one knows all these tongues, scholars must depend on help from others to learn about literature in other traditions, but even then they face significant problems. The Indian language press is supposedly worth $1 billion, although there are no reliable statistics. But it certainly publishes thousands, if not millions, of books, journals, pamphlets, and newspapers each year, within which, by extrapolation, there is travel writing in its diverse forms. But what and where is it? Further research is needed here, and even then there is little chance of recovering much of this material because of poor paper and binding which cause rapid deterioration of printed works, exacerbated by quick remaindering and pulping.

What is not in doubt is that India over the centuries has produced a vast quantity of travel writing. Merely a preliminary mapping of the genre in the _Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature_ requires some eighteen pages (of small, double-columned text), spanning more than twenty linguistic traditions (see Lal et al. 1992: V, 4368–4386). Of necessity, then, this chapter can consider only a tiny fraction of Indian travel writing, most of which still awaits discovery. Until the archive is sufficiently large, theoretical categories and definitions of Indian travel writing can only be extremely tentative.

**Early Indian travel and travel writing, 600** **BCE** **–1500** **CE**

According to Sumerian sources, the region we now recognize as the Indian subcontinent (embracing modern-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) had trade links with Mesopotamia as early as the third millennium BCE. From the first millennium BCE, trade and diplomacy became linked, along with the export of Buddhism, 'the major missionary religion which arose in India' (Thapar 1980: 1). In the third century BCE, the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka despatched emissaries to parts of Asia (contiguous with his empire) and to the eastern Mediterranean. They were followed by Buddhist missions to Khotan, Yarkhand, Miran, and Tunhuang in Central Asia, and thence to China in the early centuries of the Christian era. Around this period, navigators also learned to harness the monsoon winds to sail between southern Arabia and the west coast of India. This led to an extensive maritime trade between the Red Sea, southern Arabia and the coasts of peninsular India. Indian traders also explored overland routes to Rome through Afghanistan, Persia, and the eastern Mediterranean, and merchant embassies visited the courts of the Roman emperors from the time of Augustus to the fifth century CE. According to Roman sources, one mission travelled for four years to gift the Roman emperor elephants and precious stones. Indians were also involved in the silk trade from China, and from around 50 BCE Buddhism began to enter China, being taken there by monks and merchants from India, Central Asia, and Persia. In approximately 150 CE, monks in Luoyang, the Chinese capital during the second half of the Han dynasty, established the first centre for translating Buddhist teachings from Sanskrit into Chinese. The leading translators included Indians, and a few of their names survive in their Chinese forms. This is the earliest known instance of travel by Indian scholars.

In a region comprised at this date of numerous small kingdoms, trade, diplomacy, and warfare also provided the stimuli to extensive travelling by Indians within the Indian subcontinent. In the first millennium BCE, moreover, Varanasi (Benares) was established as an important spiritual site for both Hinduism and Buddhism, attracting pilgrims from all over India and generating, as a consequence, several pilgrimage routes and the travel infrastructures to support them. Between the seventh and seventeenth centuries CE, the cults of Balajee in South India (Tirupati) and Jagannath (Puri) developed, and are still important pilgrimages for Hindus, with their complement of how-to guides for pilgrims.

Between 700 and 1500 CE, wider geopolitical developments greatly affected the nature of Indian travel. Partly as a consequence of the Mongol migrations and invasions in Central Asia, trade between Asia and the Middle East was increasingly conducted by sea, and so became dominated by Arab merchants. To bypass these Arab intermediaries, Italian merchant missions (such as the family of Marco Polo) in the fifteenth century CE tried to establish direct trade with Asian centres, bypassing Arab ports and territories: this process led to Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci 'discovering' America. Meanwhile, the Chola kings became interested in Indian commerce with southeast Asia, and their navies probably cleared the seas for Indian merchants. Traders may also have pushed as far afield as Russia – reached via Persia – in this period. But as Thapar notes, 'with the arrival of the Portuguese [in the sixteenth century] and, later, with the setting up of the East India Trading Companies by many European states [. . .] the ventures of the Indian merchant were curtailed' (1980: 4). This disruption of the networks and infrastructure linking the countries around the Indian Ocean – east Africa, the Middle East, and India itself – brought to an end an era of considerable cosmopolitanism and sophistication; a period skillfully evoked in the historical sections of Amitav Ghosh's twentieth-century travelogue, _In an Antique Land_ (1992).

Some scholars have suggested that Indian culture, or at least high-caste Hindu culture, frowned upon travel for any reason other than pilgrimage (see Sen 2005: 1–3). The crossing of the sea especially, it has been argued, was proscribed for Hindus by the taboo of Kaala Pani (literally, 'black water'). The activities outlined above would imply that in the ancient and medieval eras such shastric (ritual) proscriptions held little force even for Hindus – if indeed they existed at all. There is some evidence to suggest that whilst there were nominal proscriptions on travel in ancient shastric texts, Kaala Pani only gained widespread currency in the nineteenth century, after the growth of (and as a response to) European influence in the subcontinent. It is true that Indian culture across all the faiths yields few texts prior to 1500 that resemble the modern Western notion of travel writing, but this is also true of the Western literary tradition until the latter part of the medieval period. Yet information about distant places and tales of travel and adventure in remote lands circulated in texts such as the _Dasakumaracharita_ ( _The Tale of the Ten Princes_ , seventh century CE), and in folk tales, which often begin with formulae like 'Once upon a time a traveller was journeying through a jungle'. India's great mythological epics also preserve traces of travel and of geographical knowledge. Certainly, much of the travelling recorded in these texts is highly fanciful, involving demons, flying chariots, magic locomotion of all kinds. Nevertheless, like much modern travel writing, many poems of real or fictional travel during this period – the _Mahabharata_ and the _Ramayana_ (both fifth to fourth century BCE), and Kalidasa's long poem _Meghadutam_ (fifth century CE) – mix facts with their fictions. In _Kumarasambhava_ (fifth century CE), for example, Kalidasa is remarkably accurate in his topographical mapping of Mount Kailash, home of Shiva on the Tibetan plateau, where it stands alone, towering, with the lakes Mansarovar and Rakastal at its feet and golden land all about it. There is a similar knowledge of the land in the _Mahabharata_. In section IX of the _Bhishm Parva_ (fifth to fourth century BCE), Sanjay describes _Bhartavarsa_ (the land of Bharat or India) as a geographical and cultural territory, identifiable by its rivers and provinces. Echoes of this are found in the _Vishnu Purana_ (in its final form by the fourth century CE), and later in the medieval Assamese poet Shankar Dev and in Amir Khusrau's _Sultan-Nameh_ or _Nuh-Sipihr_ ( _Book of the Tughluqs_ or _The Nine Heavens_ , _c_. 1318).

Elements of travel writing also exist in fictional accounts of the _digvijayas_ (conquests) in the _Mahabharata_ and _Ramayana_ , in devotional accounts of the saints, religious heads and poets, and in lyrical reminiscences of homesick lovers like the Yaksha in Kalidasa's _Meghadutam_ that later inspired several _sandeshakavyas_ (message poems) with verbal maps and descriptions of seasons, places, people, and patterns of life. Pilgrimage generated a varied literature, encompassing poems, meditations, and guidebooks to routes and rituals, although with the partial exception of the latter material these texts seldom focus on the journey itself: the saint Namdev's Marathi _Tirthayatra_ ( _Pilgrimage_ , fourteenth century), for example, is an autobiographical poem about travelling with his guru, Jnyaneshwar, but is principally descriptive of holy places rather than travel. There is more sensitive and realistic description of travel in _Lila Charitra_ (1276), the Marathi biography of Sri Chakradhara by Mhaimbhatt, a Mahanubhav writer. From the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we get texts by Jain monks such as Ambadev's _Samararasa_ (1314); in the fourteenth–fifteenth century the Maithili poet Vidyapati's Sanskrit _Bhuparikrama_ and _Kirtilata_ in Abahatta about his journey to Jaunpur; in Nepali, _Raja Gagariraj ko Yatra_ (1493); in Rajasthani, Manikyachandra Suri's _Prithvicharitra Aparnam 'Vagvilas'_ (1421); and Sangha Kalash's _Samyakatvarasa_ (1448), all of which describe people, places, and travel.

**Indian travel and travel writing, 1525–** _ **c**_ **. 1800**

With the battle of Panipat in 1525 and subsequent conquest of Delhi, Zahiruddin Mohammad Babur inaugurated the Moghul dynasty in India, assimilating much of the subcontinent into the Indo-Persian and wider Muslim world. The finest travel literature in India during this period came from the Moghul court. Babur himself wrote the magnificent _Babur-Nama_ ( _Life of Babur_ , completed 1529), which describes his life, battles, politics, and travels. The text contains little personal reflection, but has descriptions of places Babur visited, flora and fauna, and techniques of hunting, fishing, and gardening, geographical overviews of Fergana, Transoxiana and the areas around Kabul, and a long description of Hindustan. Many other memoirs, biographies, and histories from the Moghul period contain first-hand travel descriptions in this way. For example, Babur's daughter, Gulbadan Begum (1523–1603), wrote the _Humayun-Nama_ ( _Life of Hamayun_ , _c_. 1585), a biography of Babur and her brother Humayun which was later illustrated at the behest of the fifth Emperor, Shah Jehan. Yet if this material contains some elements of travel writing, it is also worth keeping in mind Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam's warning that we may 'do violence to _other_ aspects of the texts, by forcing them into the mould of the travel account' (2007: 21).

Moghul rule brought about more mobility for Indians within the wider Muslim world. That said, the majority of travel accounts arising from the Moghul era recount journeys _to_ rather than _from_ India. As Alam and Subrahmanyam point out, Indo-Persian travel literature between 1400 and 1800 generally involves

travellers [. . .] moving initially from west to east (or perhaps more accurately from north-west to south east) in an Asian context. They thus voyage from what were considered in the epoch to be the central lands of Islam to areas such as India or Southeast Asia.

(2007: 94)

Yet Indians did travel in the opposite direction, with some Muslims, for example, undertaking the _hajj_ , or pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. The Moghul Emperor Akbar first organized _hajj_ at state expense, with a subsidy for pilgrims; he also founded a hospice for pilgrims at Mecca and signed a treaty with the Portuguese in 1575 to allow pilgrim ships through the Red Sea. The journey was arduous and dangerous, however, which perhaps explains why no Moghul male rulers went on _hajj_. In contrast, the Moghuls trusted their well-read and intelligent women and sent many of them to Mecca, and also on trading missions; e.g. Hamayun's future wife, Bega Begum (1511–1582), his sister Gulbadan Begum (1523–1603), and Salima Sultan Begum (1539–1612) – Bairam Khan's widow and Akbar's future wife. Of these, Gulbadan recounts her seven-year journey to Mecca and back in the _Humayun-Nama_. Three centuries later, in 1870, another woman pilgrim, Nawab Sikandar Begum, also produced a noteworthy and detailed account of the _hajj_ (see Lambert-Hurley 2007). Notable men who went on _hajj_ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries include Nawab Kalbe Ali Khan of Rampur (who went to Makkah in 1872, accompanied by the poet Dagh Dehlavi, and brought back rare manuscripts, including a seventh-century parchment manuscript of the Quran attributed to Hazrat Ali). These manuscripts became part of the famous Rampur library. Other writers and scholars who went on _hajj_ were Syed Ahmad of Rae Bareili (1824), credited with introducing Wahhabism to India, the poet Shefta (1842), Maulana Siddiq Hassan Khan Bhopali (1872), noted writer G.M. Munshi (1876), Maulana Mashuq Ali (1909), and Abdul Majeed Daryabadi (1929).

Possibly because of the taboo of Kaala Pani, more Indian minorities travelled abroad than Hindus, 'including Parsis, Armenians, Indo-Portuguese, and Muslims – all of whom had cultural ties to lands west of India' (Fisher 2007: 159). Notwithstanding shastric restrictions, however, Hindus continued to travel within the Indian subcontinent, producing some notable travel accounts. In the early 1700s, for example, the Assamese King Rudra Simha (1696–1714) sent two envoys – Ratna Kandali and Arjundas Bairagi – to the court of King Ratmanikya of Tripura, seeking his support for the invasion of Bengal. They recorded their journey on foot through Cachar and the foothills of Mizoram in _Tripura Buranji_ ( _Chronicles of Tripura_ , 1724). Written 'in the racy style of medieval chronicles' (Satchidanandan 2008: 2), it is a careful account of landscape, habits, dress, deities, temples, manners, and beliefs of people, and of intrigues in the Tripura court. Religion and pilgrimage also continued to generate an extensive literature which sometimes touched on travel even if it was not primarily travel literature. Journeys are frequently recounted, for example, in hagiographies, texts 'in which the travels of a saint such as Chaitanya (in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) are described by a later author' (Alam and Subrahmanyam 2007: 11). Bijoyram Sen's _Tirthmangal_ ( _Happy Pilgrimage_ , 1770), a verse account of a pilgrimage undertaken by the poet's patron, may similarly be considered an early Bengali (though Indo-Persian inflected) travel narrative.

In the eighteenth century, as European and especially British influence began to grow in India, so more Indians began to travel to Europe. As Michael Fisher notes, in the early modern period, 'tens of thousands of Indian men and women of all classes entered England, exploring life there and producing knowledge about India and England' (Fisher 2007: 153; see also Visram 2002). But their narratives were mostly oral. The late eighteenth century, however, witnessed the appearance of the first written accounts of travel to Europe. Two notable Indo-Persian travelogues are Mirza Sheikh Itesamuddin's _Shigurf-Namah-I-Valaet_ , or _Vilayet Nama_ ( _Travels In Britain_ , 1799), which recounts a three-year stay in Britain as part of a diplomatic envoy, and Mirza Abu Talib Khan Isfahaani's _Lubbu-s Siyar_ (1803), which was translated into English in 1814 as _Travels in Asia, Africa and Europe during the Years 1799–1803_ (see Hasan 2009). Paremakkil Thoma Kathanar's _Vartamanappustakam_ or _Romayatra_ ( _Modern Book_ , or _Roman Journey_ , _c_. 1780) is 'a pioneering work of literary prose in Malayalam' (Satchidanandan 2008: 3), being simultaneously the first Malayalam travel account and an early instance, if not the first recorded example, of Indian Christian travel writing. The narrative recounts an eight-year journey from Kerala to Rome, via the Cape of Good Hope, South America, and Lisbon, undertaken in order to bring the Syrian Jacobite Church under the direct control of the natives in consultation with the Pope. If these narratives described Europe for Indian audiences, in _The Travels of Dean Mahomet_ (1794) European readers received an account of India by an Indian author, the first ever to publish a book in English (see Fisher 1996, 1997; Narain 2009). Mahomet's text describes some twenty years of service in the army of the East India Company as it traversed northern India, before concluding with an account of the author's emigration to Ireland in 1784. With texts such as these, we see the first emergence in Indian literary culture of the sort of first-person narratives of travel that we now principally recognize as 'travel writing'; and accounts of this type also begin to appear in the major south Indian languages (such as Telegu) towards the end of the eighteenth century, partly influenced by the European 'voyages and travels' genre.

**Indian travel writing,** _**c**_ **. 1800–1947**

In 1800, William Carey established the Mission Press at Serampore and the Fort William College was started. Greater sophistication in vernacular prose dates from this time. In 1857, _Yamuna Paryatan_ ( _A Tour of the Yamuna_ ) – the first Marathi novel published – was about a journey. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were more novels and more translations than ever, and an Indian elite had emerged who could afford to travel, read, and write; many of them travelled within and outside India for education and employment. Literary magazines appeared and travel by rail, road, and water became easier. Indeed, for many members of this new elite, travel was perceived as both a mark of modernity and a key means of reforming and modernizing their communities by providing information about cultural, economic, and political developments in other regions of the world (see Sen 2005). These late nineteenth-century travellers were mostly upper-middle class and male. A famous instance is the poet Rabindra Nath Tagore (1861–1941), whose father took him right across India from Bengal to Dalhousie, now on the border with Pakistan. In 1881, Tagore published an epistolary account of his impressions of Europe. Virtually a one-man travel industry in his time, Tagore later travelled to China, Japan, England, and the USA, writing letters and essays about his travels.

Women moving from natal to married homes and back to have babies, migrant workers, and refugees from famine were among the many poor and illiterate travellers whose journeys have not been recorded. Mulk Raj Anand's English novel _Two Leaves and a Bud_ (1937) is about indentured and migrant labour in the Assam tea gardens, but there is more work to be done on this kind of travel. From both the official and private journeys of well-to-do male travellers, however, there flowed a great variety of prose and verse narratives, epistolary accounts such as Enugula Veeraswamayya's Telugu text _Kashiyarachitra_ ( _Description of a Journey to Kashi_ , 1838), memoirs, and exilic and diplomatic journeys written up both by travellers and by others on their behalf. An example of the last is the Manipuri _Chingthangkhomba Maharaj Ganga Chatpa_ ( _Maharaj Chingthangkhomba's Pilgrimage to the Ganga_ , 1801–1803), by Wahangba Nadhabram and two others, about the pilgrimage of Bhagyachandra Maharaj to Nabdvip. They also composed _Chandrakirti Jila Changba_ ( _Visit of Chandrakirti to Cachar_ , 1876) about Chandrakirti Maharaj's 1876 journey to Silchar to meet the Governor General of India, Lord Northbrook. Exilic journeys often double as political documents, e.g. B.K. Sinha's _In Andamans: The Indian Bastille_ (1939). Sinha was an associate of the revolutionary Bhagat Singh. Also in this category are Barinda Kumar Ghosh's _Nirbasiter Atma Katha_ (1928), translated into English as _The Tale of My Exile_ ; M.K. Gandhi's _My Experiments with Truth_ (1925–1929); and J.L. Nehru's _An Autobiography_ (1936), which all include sections on periods spent abroad. Another notable autobiography with a travel dimension is the travel writer, explorer, and scholar Rahul Sankritayayan's _Meri Jivan Yatra_ ( _My Life's Journey_ , 1944). The Hindu taboo of crossing the ocean, famously confronted by Gandhi when he went to study law in England, had been broken in the nineteenth century by the Tagore family and other eminent Bengali traveller-reformers like Ram Mohun Roy and Swami Vivekanand. In 1913, Anandakrishna Shashtri published a Sanskrit essay on the problem of crossing the sea. The term 'Kaala Pani' was also used synonymously as a name for the political prison in the Andamans, and provided the title of V.D. Savarkar's 1927 Marathi novel based on his incarceration in the Cellular Jail at Port Blair.

Nineteenth-century travel writing in many Indian languages (including Persian, accounted at this date an Indian language) includes Yusuf Khan Kambalposh's _Ajaebat-e-Farang_ or _Tareekh-e-Yusufi_ ( _Wonders of Europe_ , _c_.1842) about visits to England, France, Egypt, and Arabia; and Nawab Karim Khan's _Siyahatnama_ ( _Book of Travels_ , 1855), also about a visit to England. Other notable texts are Hashim Ali Rizvi's _Mirat-ul-Bilad_ ( _Mirror of the Land_ , 1822); Mir Izzatullah's _Kitaab-e-Maseer-e-Izzatullah_ or _Safar Namah Izzatullah_ (1825; English translation, _Travels in Central Asia_ , 1872); Abdul Kadir Khan's _Hasmat-e-Kashmir_ ( _History of Kashmir_ , 1832), which also included brief accounts of Tibet and Badakshan; and Mirza Sangin Beg's _Sair-ul-Manzil_ ( _A Tour of Buildings_ , 1826), a topographical account of the principle buildings of Delhi and its suburbs later supplemented by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan's 1847 Urdu account of the monuments of Delhi. Another traveller was Fath Nawaz Jang, or, as he was originally named, Mahdi Hasan Khan. Khan was one of the outsiders brought in by Salar Jung I, Diwan of Hyderabad, when he reformed the state administration. Rising rapidly to become Chief Justice, then Home Secretary, Khan was sent to London in 1888 in connection with a case concerning the Hyderabad Mining Company. He kept a detailed diary of his year-long travels. The journal was published in London for private circulation and was later translated by his friend Aziz Mirza as _Gulgasht-i-Firang_ ( _Roaming in the Garden of Europe_ , 1889); an English translation is also available (Khalidi 2006).

The American Presbyterians established their first mission in Punjab at Ludhiana in 1834, which contributed greatly to the development of Punjabi language and literature in the later nineteenth century. In 1898, the Religious Book Society of Lahore published an anonymous Punjabi travelogue, _Asia di Sair_ ( _Travels in Asia_ ). However, Lal Singh, who wrote under the pen-name Kamla Akali, is often regarded as the father of Punjabi travel writing; his travelogues include _Mera Vilaiti Safar Nama_ ( _My Travels in England_ , 1931) and _Sailani Desh Bhagat_ ( _The Travelling Patriot_ , 1955). Like other pilgrim literature, Sikh pilgrim literature from Punjab tends to remain within the religious community. Among major Sikh pilgrimages within India are those to shrines marking the route of Guru Nanak, the traveller-founder of Sikhism. One of these is Panja Sahib in Hasn Abdal, Pakistan. A huge, well-preserved, well-run gurudwara marks the place where a thirsty Nanak leaned his palm in desperate exhaustion against a rock, whereupon a stream of water burst from the rock and he quenched his thirst. The rock bears the imprint of Nanak's palm ('panja'), hence Panja Sahib. Records of such pilgrimages must have been written up and should be widely available.

New technologies of travel – canals, railways, and rest houses – meant more travel for both work and pleasure. The first railway opened in 1853, running from Bombay to Thane. In 1873, C. Chinaswami Shastri published a short Tamil poem in folk metre about the introduction, wonders, and benefits of the railways. In the twentieth century we have Bill Aitken's railway books, several rollicking journeys by non-Indians, and outstanding films. However, on the whole, the volume of railway literature by Indians does not match the size of Indian Railways, which is said to be the world's largest employer. The same may be said of literature of the sea, although obviously there was much travel by sea, as Indians visited Indonesia, Syria, Egypt, France, Japan, South America, Portugal, Germany, the USA, and Britain. In the twentieth century, waves of communities – chiefly Anglo-Indians – emigrated to Australia and Canada. An interesting Urdu work from 1894 is Shibli Numani's _Safarnama-e-Rum-wa-Misr-wa-Shan_ ( _Travels in Turkey, Egypt and Syria_ ). In 1934, Shiv Prakash Gupta wrote up his travels in America, Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, England, and Ireland. The coastal Bengalis and Gujaratis seem to have travelled abroad more than others, at least if we judge by the number of published travel accounts. Between 1864 and 1866, from Gujarat alone, we have the travels of M.R. Nilkanth, Karsandas Mulaji, and S. Dhaneshvam. From 1887, Jahangir Baherji Marjhaban began his prolific output with a translation of _Gulliver's Travels_.

Travel by land, with and without roads, produced the most travelogues. The extraordinary Indian cartographers Nain, Dolpa, and Mani Singh Rawat, known in British survey literature as the Pandit explorer surveyors, are the finest examples of travellers on unmapped routes without roads. Their journeys in Tibet and the Himalayas are well documented (see Hopkirk 1982; Pathak and Bhatt 2006).

As the race for resources among imperial nations sharpened the rivalry between Russia and Britain, the British extended the road from Chittagong (now in Bangladesh) to Kabul. This Grand Trunk Road (now Sher Shah Suri Marg), vital to the Great Game of political chess for control of Afghanistan and Central Asia, was made famous in Kipling's _Kim_ (1901). Among other travel documents and stories associated with the route is the North Indian journey of Bishop Herber – the first Lord Bishop of Calcutta in the 1820s – westward from Calcutta to Meerut where he consecrated the St John's garrison church. In the early twentieth century this route was also walked by the Sikh convert to Christianity, Sadhu Sundar Singh, who sought to emulate Christ by seeking out robbers and other dangers in the high Himalayas, travelling along the Hindustan Tibet Road (a branch or extension of the Grand Trunk Road) between 1908 and 1917. Singh's account of his journey, delivered orally to C.F. Andrews who produced a written account in 1934, offers a spiritual geography unlike the actual topography of the region. However, Reverend T.E. Riddle of the New Zealand Baptist Mission is more scientifically modern in his description of the Hindustan Tibet Road in _The Vision and the Call: A Life of Sadhu Sundar Singh_ (1987), which describes Riddle's search for Sadhu Sundar Singh (who disappeared on his last Tibetan journey).

Christian travel is another form of Indian travel writing awaiting further research. Christian Indians went on pilgrimage; travelled for jobs; travelled to escape persecution by their natal families when they converted to Christianity; went in search of other Christians to marry; travelled to talk about the Gospels; and travelled in imitation of Christ. The nineteenth century saw the great Christian migration of _Bhadr_ Bengalis – Bannerjees, Chatterjees, Mukherjees, Bhattacharjis, and other high-caste converts – from Bengal, partly in search of livelihoods but also to escape famine. Missionaries did not record the names of converts from lower castes, so we know nothing of their journeys. Indian Christian women are unusual in that after Christianity freed them of gender and caste taboos, they travelled within India and abroad in search of education and jobs. Pandita Ramabai and Cornelia Sorabji are the most written about (Chakravarti 1998; Burton 1998; Gooptu 2011), but there were others, such as Lilavati Singh, Constance Prem Nath Dass, Dr Mayadas – who graduated in medicine from Edinburgh and served with the British Indian Army in France during the First World War – and Mrs Chuckerbutty and her daughter. A branch of the Kapurthala ruling family converted to Christianity. One of the princes, Maharaj Singh, the first Indian governor of Maharashtra after 1947, travelled to England and the US in the late nineteenth century and left an admiring record of his Western hosts and their culture. But on the whole, Indian Christian travellers have gone unnoticed as a special category of travellers, either because their writings have been subsumed in Christian literature and therefore separated from secular travel writing; or because their spiritual geography clashes with contemporary scientific surveys, as in the case of Sundar Singh; or because there is simply not enough of an archive of the hundreds of pilgrims who must have written diaries and letters. The women who travelled for study within and outside India either became known for some other aspect of their lives (e.g. Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman lawyer from India) or were simply not written about, and their diaries and letters were not preserved or published.

An interesting category of travel writing in this period is translations of famous travel books from English into Indian languages. Mungo Park's 1795 African travel narrative was translated anonymously into Urdu as _Safar-Nama Mungo Park Sahib ka Bayan Men Mulk Habsh Ke_ (1853), whilst Muhammad Husain Khan translated Ibn Battuta's travels from Arabic into Urdu as _Aja-e-Bul-e-Asfar_ or _Safr-Nama-e-Ibn-e-Batuta_ (1898). Chunilal Bapuji Modi's _Rabinson Crusonu Caritra_ (1881) and Jahangir Bahramji Marhjaban's _Guliverni Musahario_ (1888) translated _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Gulliver's Travels_ into Gujarati; Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_ was translated many times; and _Rasselas_ was twice translated into Malayalam (1894, 1895). Byron – sometimes called the pioneer of modern travel literature – crops up frequently. In 1930, Ganti Jogi Somayji wrote _Ramchandruni Hampiyatra_ ( _Ramchandruni's Pilgrimage to Hampi_ ) in verse, glorifying the Vijayanagar period of Andhra's history. Its hero, Ramachandra, is an English-educated young man clearly modelled, as the author acknowledges, on Byron's Childe Harold. Jogesh Chunder Dutt's _The Indian Pilgrim_ (1877) described places of historical and religious interest within India in nine-line stanzas akin to the Spenserian stanza Byron used in _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_. Radhanath Roy's Oriya poem _Mahayatri_ ( _The Great Travellers_ , 1893) tells of the last journey of the Pandava brothers, a journey also retold by Anand Charan Tarka Chudamani in twenty-two Sanskrit cantos titled _Mahapratashthanam_ ( _Journey into a New World_ , 1901).

**From 1947 to the present day**

In this varied and turbulent phase of Indian history, some categories of travel literature persisted and new ones appeared. Partition witnessed the largest mass migration of people in history but the literature of this brutal, involuntary travel is sparse. We have a few searing works: Khushwant Singh's _Train to Pakistan_ (1956), Bhisham Sahni's _Tamas_ ( _Darkness_ , 1974), Krishna Baldev Vaid's two-part autobiographical novel in Hindi, _Guzara Hua Zamana_ (1981; English translation _The Broken Mirror_ , 1994), and _Uska Bachpan_ (1962; English translation S _teps in Darkness_ , 1995). But the despair of the migrations drove language out. The literature of Partition is mostly contained in government reports and academic studies of policies and action – such as Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin's _Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition_ (1998) – or oral narratives. An interesting work is a Marathi novel based on the life of refugees in Punjab, G.N. Dandekar's _Binduchi Katha_ ( _Bindu's Tale_ , 1947), whilst the metaphor of a journey in which everything has been left behind and the future is confused yet hopeful is encapsulated in the film _Railway Platform_ (1955).

Pilgrimage continued after Partition and has become a vast enterprise. Hindus obviously form the greatest number of pilgrims in India. A special sort of Hindu pilgrim literature is the small, cheap pamphlets advising pilgrims on what to wear and carry, and prescribing ritual and prayer for every stage of the pilgrimage. There is little or no description of actual landscape, since the goal is cleansing the soul by focusing on the divinity and abnegating the self. However, Sivani's _Arunachalam (Tiruvannamalai): An Endless Experience_ (2007) is a spiritual guide to the Sri Arunacheleswara Temple with a route map of the Giripradakshna route and etymology of Arunachalam, the mountain said to be a manifestation of the god Shiva. One of the finest modern secular pilgrimages of the Char Dham Yatra in the Garhwal Himalaya is Stephen Alter's _Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage to the Many Sources of the Ganga_ (2001). In pilgrim season and out, Alter covered the _Char Dham_ (the four abodes or seats), a collective name for four pilgrim sites in Garhwal: Yamnotri, Gangotri (the sources of the rivers Yamuna and Ganga), Kedarnath, and Badrinath. His always interesting, moving, and sometimes sad narrative combines myth, history, and actual experience. Born in India to American missionary parents, Alter lives in Mussoorie in the Himalayan foothills, which he knows like the native he is.

Also in this genre of secular sacred pilgrimages is Bill Aitken's characteristically free-wheeling _Seven Sacred Rivers_ (1992). A naturalized Indian, Aitken (b. 1934) hitchhiked overland to India in 1959 and now lives in Mussoorie. A trekker, steam engine fan, former ashram inmate, and for many years the Honorary Librarian of the Himalayan Club, his books include _Divining the Deccan: A Motorbike to the Heart of India_ (1999), _Footloose in the Himalaya_ (2003), _The Nanda Devi Affair_ (1994), _Touching Upon the Himalaya: Excursions and Enquiries_ (2004), and _Exploring Indian Railways_ (1994).

Partition separated at least two communities, the Sikhs and the Muslims, from their most holy places. Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi Muslims of all classes occasionally succeed in visiting shrines in each others' countries, especially the sites associated with the Sufi saints Nizamuddin Auliya in New Delhi, Garib Nawaz in Ajmer, and Moiudddin Chishti at Fatehpur Sikri. A record of their experiences would add to the travel archive. Pilgrim literature of other religions in India needs to be discovered and archived, although Narendrapal Singh's _Furrows in the Snow_ (1963) is a fascinating modern account by a Sikh Army officer who travelled in Afghanistan with his ten-year old daughter in a Jeep Station Wagon. Part personal account and part history, it is a secular and sacred pilgrimage which recounts visits to several Hindu and Sikh temples in Afghanistan. (The Sikh empire of Maharajah Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) extended westwards and included Kabul; thus Afghanistan had a large Sikh population until at least the 1960s.) The sites visited include the Guru Nanak Temple in Kabul and the Khalsa Temple built in memory of Bhai Gurdas, 'a great Hindu saint, writer and philosopher', which housed a handsome 1712 copy of Shri Dasam Granth by the tenth and last guru Gobind Singh, who formalized Sikhism into a religion.

A special category of Indian travel writing is that produced by travellers motivated by socialist ideology and admiration for the USSR. In 1871, an anonymous Indian from Calcutta wrote to the First International in London seeking permission to open a branch in the city. By 1936, when the Progressive Writers Association was formed, several writers had written about the USSR. Also in this category are Nehru's _Soviet Russia_ (1928), about his 1926 visit; Anant Kanekar's 1940 Marathi travelogue _Dhukyatunlal Taryakade_ ( _Through the Fog, Towards the Red Stars_ ), about his travels through Europe and the Soviet Union from April to July 1937; Diva Chandra Talukdar's Bengali novel _Bidrohi_ ( _The Enemy_ , 1948) in which the hero goes to China and Afghanistan to spread his revolutionary ideas; and Navtej Singh's Punjabi _Desh Wapsi_ ( _Going Home_ , 1955). Satyanaran Sinha's _On a Forbidden Flight_ (1955), records his flight from Bombay to the Baltic coast. G.V.K. Murthy's _And Then Came the Sunshine_ (1973) recounts his tour to the USSR, which he previously knew only through the travelogues of diplomats like K.P.S. Menon, the Russian writers, and Lenin.

In spite of the extreme mobilization of people during the world wars, Indians produced little war literature of any sort. Some letters to home by Indian soldiers in the First World War have been published but a great deal needs to be done to discover how Indians in these circumstances coped with travel and new places.

While there are several works about leaving India for education, work, or to relocate, there are some reverse journeys in which the writers attempt to come to terms with belonging to two nations, e.g. Shantha Rama Rau's _Home to India_ (1945) and the poet Dom Moraes' _Gone Away_ (1960), a lovely memoir about growing up in Bombay and travelling with his journalist father from the age of fifteen until he left for Oxford and stayed on in England. In 1959, he returned to India to interview the Dalai Lama, who had been given political asylum in India. As well as publishing _Gone Away_ , an outcome of that assignment, Moraes then stayed on in India and produced more travel books. Two stand out: _The Penguin Book of Indian Journeys_ (2001) maps modern India through uniformly well-written travel works by both Indian and non-Indian writers. They cover the length and breadth of India, its tribes, seasons, politics, wars, elections, and railways. Strongly marked by its editor's personality, _Indian Journeys_ looks ahead to _Out of God's Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land_ (2002), in which Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa visit many flashpoints of recent political and religious unrest during an almost six-year long journey across India.

In the 1990s, travel writing burgeoned. Books, essays, fiction, non-fiction, newspaper columns, and blogs rolled out about small-town India, the mountains, and journeys across the world – on foot, by car, or by motorcycle – via strange routes. Like Moraes and Srivatsa's _Out of God's Oven_ , much recent travel writing about India is contemporary political history. Travels in India's so-called Red Corridor, the tribal belt from Jharkhand to Andhra Pradesh and west to Haryana, the site of Maoism, has produced excellent work in all languages, especially by journalists; two in English are Sudeep Chakravarti's _Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country_ (2008) and Daleep D'Souza's _The Curious Case of Binayak Sen_ (2012). Others, however, have produced more humorous accounts. Among motorcycle journeys is the Sikkimese P.G. Tenzing's _Don't Ask Any Old Bloke for Directions: A Biker's Whimsical Journey Across India_ (2009). A bureaucrat assigned to the Kerala cadre, he resigned from government to travel at random for a year, without a plan, on a 350 cc bike. He has no description of the usual kind, no indication of north, south, east, or west, but plenty of information on the impact of the weather. He ate anything, drank a lot, and only complained about boorishness, which he thought was at its worst in the North Indian plains. One of the best books of travel in recent times, this unpretentious book conveys the whizz, whizz, whizz of Tenzing's rapid criss-crossing of India.

Literary travellers have abounded since the nineteenth century: examples include Tagore, R.K. Narayan, Kaka Kalelkar, and Nirad Choudhury. After 1988, a crop of talented novelists also wrote travel literature. I. Allan Sealy did a trip from _Yukon to Yucatan: A Journey of Discovery in the Footsteps of America's First Travellers_ (1994) and wrote of the Grand Trunk Road in his novel _Trotter-Nama_ (1998). Stephen Alter crossed the border from _Amritsar to Lahore_ (2000), while Amitav Ghosh's _In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveller's Tale_ (1992) offered an account of his anthropological fieldwork in Egypt, whilst simultaneously exploring medieval trade between North Africa and India's Malabar Coast. Ghosh has since produced a volume of travel essays, _Dancing in Cambodia and At Large in Burma_ (1998), and there is also a strong travel element to many of his novels. Vikram Seth journeyed from China via Tibet to India and wrote it up in _From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet_ (1981). Pankaj Mishra's _Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India_ (1995) was followed by _A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and Its Neighbours_ (2013) in which Mishra tries to break out of the 'casually inherited prejudices' (Mishra 2013: n.p.) that have marred writing about East Asia and so augment the weak Indian tradition of writing about the region. Amitava Kumar's _Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey Through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate_ (2005) recounts his journey back to India after marrying a Pakistani woman and having to come to terms with anti-Muslim sentiments in his family. He has also edited _Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate_ (2004) where he notes:

Distance produces a shift in perspective and the immigrant writers find that they are discovering not only the new country but also the place they have left behind. A new India is explored and mapped in the imagination of the writer abroad.

(Kumar 2004: xiv)

The issue of expatriate travel writers brings us full circle to the trio of authors mentioned at the outset of this chapter, whose work is most commonly used in the West to exemplify 'Indian' travel writing. Naipaul, Rushdie, and Iyer have of course made important (and Naipaul's case, controversial) contributions to the genre, and their books shed light not only on the places they visit but also on the Indian diaspora of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet as this chapter has hopefully demonstrated, any discussion of Indian travel writing traditions really needs to look beyond these three somewhat problematic figures, to recognize the wealth of home-grown travel literature over the centuries.

**Select bibliography**

Alam, M. and Subrahmanyam, S. (2007) _Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Anand, M.R. (1993) 'From the Progressive to the Post-Modern', in N.K. Bhattacharjee and A.J. Thomas (eds), _Best of Indian Literature_ , Vol. II, Book II, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.

Bhattacharji, S. (2008) _Travel Writing in India_ , New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.

Burton, A. (1998) _At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain_ , Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chakravarti, U. (1998) _Rewriting History: Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai_ , Delhi: Kali for Women.

Choudhury, C. (2010) _India: A Travellers' Literary Companion_ , New Delhi: HarperCollins.

Codell, J.F. (2007) 'Reversing the Grand Tour: Guest Discourse in Indian Travel Narratives', _Huntingdon Library Quarterly_ 70(1): 173–189.

Dass, S.K. (1991) _A History of Indian Literature, Vol. VIII; 1800–1910, Western Impact: Indian Response_ , New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.

Fisher, M.H. (1996) _The First Indian Author in English: Dean Mahomed (1759–1851) in India, Ireland, and England_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fisher, M.H. (ed.) (1997) _The Travels of Dean Mahomet,_ Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fisher, M.H. (2007) 'From India to England and Back: Early Indian Travel Narratives for Indian Readers', _Huntingdon Library Quarterly_ 70(1): 153–172.

Gooptu, S. (2011), _Cornelia Sorabji, India's Pioneer Woman Lawyer: A Biography_ , New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Hasan, M. (2009) _Exploring the West: Three Travel Narratives_ , New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Hofmeyr, I. (2008) 'Indian Ocean Lives and Letters', _English in Africa_ 35(1): 11–25.

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Khair, T., Leer, M., Edwards, J.D., and Ziadeh, H. (eds) (2006) _Other Routes: 1300 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing_ , Oxford: Signal Books.

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Arabic Travel Writing, to 1916

_Nabil Matar_

Until the early twentieth century, travel was a way of life for Muslims, due to the absence of political borders, the open markets, and the commonality of language (not withstanding dialectical differences) across much of the Muslim world. As Ignati Iulianovich Karchkovski (1987) has shown in his magisterial _Tārīkh al-adab al-jughrāfī al-'Arabī_ ( _History of Arabic Geographical Writings_ , first translated 1963), the Arabic library is rich in travel writing about regions from Morocco to Iraq and from al-Andalus to Sind and Hind (modern-day Pakistan and India). Since the 1990s, dozens of accounts have been edited and published in Abu Dhabi in the ongoing _Ruwwād al-Mashriq al-'Arabī_ ( _Pioneers from the Arab East_ ) and _Irtiyād al-āfāq_ ( _Explorers of the Horizons_ ) series. As Mu ammad A mad al-Suwaydī, general editor of the latter, writes in the series Foreword, 'travelogues constitute one of the oldest genres in the Arabic literary legacy'.

In this chapter, 'Arab'/'Arabic' is used to signify not an ethnic but a linguistic/cultural identity. Ibrahīm ibn Ya'qūb al-Tar ūshī (d. 999) was originally Jewish, while the Moroccan Abū al-Qāsim al-Zayānī (d. 1838) was proud of his Berber heritage; seventeenth-century Murta a Bayk al-Kurdī was a Kurd, and Athanasius Aghna ius Nūrī who travelled in 1899 to the 'India of the English' was an Iraqi metropolitan: along with the vast majority of Muslims, they all thought and wrote in Arabic.1 The first surviving Arabic account of travel inside the Islamic world is by Imām al-Shāfi'ī (d. 820) who travelled from his native Gaza to Egypt; while the first accounts outside the lands of Islam described the embassy of al-Ghazal (d. 864) from al-Andalus to the land of the Majūs (Denmark; see El-Hajji 1970), the (possible) spying mission of Sulaymān al-Tājir to India and China, written _c_. 850 (see Ziadeh 1974), and the captivity of Harūn ibn Ya yā _c_. 886 to Byzantium and Rome. The last accounts I will discuss belong to 1916, when the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France partitioned the Arabic-speaking regions under Ottoman rule into states with artificial borders. The implementation of that agreement took place after the end of the First World War and put an end to the earlier open space of Muslim travel.

In Arabic writing, terms used for 'travel' were distinctive in their allusiveness. _Rih·la_ (literally, journey) was used in the Qur'ān about Quraysh's 'summer and winter [trading] journey' (Q 106: 2), but Ibn 'Ᾱbid al-Fãsï in the sixteenth century separated flight ( _rah·ala 'an/_ travel away from) from desire ( _rah·ala ilā/_ travel toward):

Scholars, God have mercy on their souls, gave two reasons for travelling the world: Flight and Desire.

**Flight** : 1. To escape from Dār al- arb and emigrate to Dār al-Islām. This is obligatory and will remain so until the Day of Judgment; 2. To escape from a land of heresy which he is unable to reform; 3. To escape from a land where evil prevails, for every Muslim should seek virtue; 4. To escape physical harm, as God said about His prophet Moses; 5. To leave a city where there is disease, but He excepted the plague [. . .]; 6. To escape in order to protect his wealth, for wealth is as valued as one's blood.

**Desire** : 1. To pursue knowledge, as God says in Sūrat al-Rūm; 2. To perform the pilgrimage to Mecca, if possible, for it is a _fard·_ [duty]; 3. To participate in _jihād_ , although there are specifications; 4. To search for livelihood, for it is a duty, by going hunting, wood- or grass-gathering; 5. To trade and increase wealth, which is permitted by God's grace; 6. To seek wisdom, for its benefit is well known; 7. To see new regions as the Prophet said: 'It is appropriate to travel to three places, Mecca, Medina, and Bayt al-Maqdis (Jerusalem)', but God alone is most knowing; 8. To defend outposts against the enemy, and there is great reward in this; and 9. To conduct visits _ziyārāt_ (to holy shrines).

(Al-Fāsī 1993: 121–122)

Only in modern times did _rih·la_ come to include tourism in the nineteenth-century sense of the word. Other terms include _siyāh·a,_ which describes the wandering of a Sufi seeker; while _safra_ / _safāra_ means 'journey' but became associated with an ambassadorial mission – thus the coining of the term _safīr_ (ambassador).

Until the early modern period most surviving travelogues were authored by Sunni Muslims, although some were by Shī'ites practicing _taqiyya_ (dissimulation). Many Sunni travellers felt a keen sense of difference from the _rāfid·a_ (non-Sunni), as Ibn Jubayr (who travelled in 1184) and Ibn Ba  ūta (d. 1377) reveal; other writers, however, were less strident about the religious Other. Al-Masu'ūdī (d. 956) wrote knowledgeably about Christian history in a manner that no contemporaneous West European traveller-historian could (or would) write about Islamic history, while Abū Ray ān al-Bayrūnī ( _fl_. 1030) visited India and described the Hindus and their religion in great detail. Generally, travellers felt at ease in Islamic regions although after the Ottoman conquests of the Middle East and North Africa (excluding Morocco) in 1517, some emissaries such as 'Ali ibn Mu ammad al-Tamagrūtī, who travelled in 1590 from Morocco, and al- asan ibn A mad, who travelled in 1650 from Yemen, were critical of the 'Turks'. Travelling in _Bilād al-Nasārā_ (the lands of the Christians), writers were sometimes confused: A mad ibn Qāsim was tense during his disputations with Christians and Jews in France in 1612, but later he fell in love with a French girl and prayed to God to release him from her temptation (Ibn Qasim 1997). The Sufi Mus afa As'ad al-Luqaymī (d. 1764) visited Christian sites during his _ziyārat_ (site visits), showing how every village in Palestine and around Damascus celebrated a prophet or a holy man; in Jerusalem alone, he stated, a thousand prophets had been buried (2001: 173). Both 'Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1731) and Mu ammad ibn 'Uthmān al-Miknāsī (d. 1799), from the Mashriq and the Maghrib respectively, treated the Bethlehem of Jesus' birth as a holy site; the former composed a poem in praise of Jesus and of the monks who played the organ (1990: 298). From the nineteenth century on, both Muslim and Christian writers enjoyed travel in Christian/European and non-Christian countries, or as Muhammad Bayram al-Tunisi called them ( _c_. 1884–1893: end of vol. 1), 'mixed' and 'associationist' lands, meaning respectively lands where different religious groups coexisted and lands of polytheists. In 1909, and during his long journey from Alexandria via Russia to Japan and Korea, Prince Mu ammad 'Ali Pasha, brother of the Egyptian khedive, was quite at ease in his meetings with Christians and Shintos. Religious difference was not an unnegotiable barrier: travellers often found more to admire culturally and technologically than to fear theologically.

The survey below is divided into two sections: from the beginnings of Arabic travel writing to 1798, and from 1798 to 1916, these being respectively, according to Sa'īd Binsa'īd al-'Alawī's designations in _Urubbā fī mir'āt al-rih·la_ ( _Europe in the Mirror of Travelogues_ , 1995) periods, first of Muslim self-assurance, and then of defeat, discovery, and awakening. Although it will not be possible to mention all travellers, it is safe to state that the largest number of Arab writers travelled eastward, from al-Maghrib and al-Andalus towards the Azhar in Cairo and the holy lands of Palestine and Arabia and beyond. But there were movements in other directions, too: al-Muqaddasī travelled in 985–990 from his native Jerusalem westward, and Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khatīb travelled south to Morocco from his native al-Andalus between 1347 and 1362, while the Iraqi priest,  anna al-Mūsallī, reached Central America in 1668. With the beginning of the Arabic Renaissance in the nineteenth century, travellers turned to the European West, especially France and Britain, and to Russia and Japan: their writings were so transformative that they played a major role in modern Arab history.

**The period of self-assurance: from the beginning until 1798**

Muslims have historically made up the largest number of monotheists who visited, lived, prayed, and sometimes died near their holy shrines. Because _hajj_ is a _fard·_ (duty), every Muslim tried to fulfill it and a pilgrimage caravan of thousands of camels annually left from Morocco, via Algeria, to join up with the pilgrimage caravan from Egypt toward Mecca, while another caravan left from Damascus, which included worshippers from Anatolian and Central Asian caravans. Carrying with them the _kiswa_ (cover) of the Ka'ba, men and women travelled under the protection of the _Amīr al-h·ajj_ , or Prince of the Pilgrimage, in one of the largest annual trans-continental movements of people towards the same destination.

After pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, many sought theological schools in Yemen, or went to India for instruction in alchemy and astronomy. Damascus and Jerusalem, Baghdad and Cairo attracted students in search of libraries and scholars: al-Kha īb al-Baghdādī (d. 1071) wrote about his _rih·la_ in search of Hadith sources, while al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) wrote in his famous spiritual autobiography, _al-Munqidh min al-d·alāl_ ( _Deliverance from Error_ , _c_. 1100), of how he wandered in the first three cities in search of religious certitude, before dying in Naishapur, near the Iranian–Afghani borders. In Fez, the Qarawiyīn mosque and university drew many students from North Africa, including the Tunisians Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) and Ibn Qunfudh (d. 1408). Biographical dictionaries show how men travelled widely in search of mentors, living in the mosque, the _madrasa_ (school), the Sufi lodge, or the local shaykh's home. Throughout, they kept in touch with their home communities by means of letters sent with the pilgrim caravans (al-Fāsī received a letter in Mecca from Fez via Cairo, as did al-Miknāsī two centuries later in 1787). On long journeys, and to defray expenses, some travellers settled into jobs as scribes, or judges, or teachers, and they traded in portable goods to sustain themselves financially, as al-Muqaddasī admitted; but Ibn Jubayr had enough money with him that he did not starve on board the long crossing from Palestine to Sicily, as some Christian pilgrims nearly did. From al-Muqaddasī to al-Zayānī, there is evidence that travellers used maps, and al-Idrīsī (d. 1161), who travelled from Ceuta to settle in Sicily, drew maps with extensive descriptions of itineraries: many are reproduced in Youssef Kāmal's vast, five-volume collection _Monumenta cartographica Africae et Aegypti_ ( _Cartographic Records of Africa and Egypt_ , 1926–1951). But no atlases were produced (or have survived?) in Arabic in the post-Ortelian period: the translation of the Blaeu atlas by Abu Bakr al-Dimashqī for Sultan Mehmed IV in 1675 never left the Ottoman court. Perhaps that is why travellers followed well-trodden routes, accompanied by co-religionists and local protectors in accordance with the famous Arabic saying, ' _al-rafīq qabla al-tarīq_ ' ('the companion before the road': qtd in al-Kurdī _c_. 1620: 18)

No traveller mentioned being accompanied by his wife/wives. Some bought slaves (and had children from them): al-Fāsī married so many times during his travels that it is difficult to count his progeny. Nevertheless, and until the modern period, no other religious community saw as many women travel across continents as Muslims. Although there is no Arabic account similar to the pilgrimage accounts of Egeria (travelled 383–384) or Margery Kempe (d. _c_. 1438), there were far more women who went from Morocco or Anatolia or India to Mecca than ever Euro-Christian women went to Jerusalem. Princess Khinātha, one of the wives of Mulay Isma'īl of Morocco (reg. 1672–1727) was literate, but she did not write about her pilgrimage to Arabia; it was the son of the famous Moroccan jurist, Abū al- asan al-Yūsī (d. 1691), who described her journey, adding that her followers were of little faith, honesty or intelligence. Only in the twenty-first century did a woman,  alima Bankaer 'Ayy, write about her pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, in _Rih·latī ilā al-h·ajj_ ( _My Travel to the Pilgrimage_ , 2007).

For women, as for men, pilgrimage was always dangerous, given the attacks by brigands of all shades and colours. Travel was not a promenade: al-Muqaddasī was 'thrown out of mosques, and wandered in wildernesses and got lost in deserts': 'on many occasions, I nearly drowned and was attacked by highway robbers [. . .] I was imprisoned and accused of being a spy [. . .] and so many were the times in which I was exposed to murder plots' (2003: 408). At the same time travellers feared the sea, not because of any religious dictum but because of the dangers of drowning or piratical attacks. In the Red Sea, Ibn Jubayr sailed on a dangerously overcrowded ship, and Ibn Khaldūn lost his whole family to shipwreck near Alexandria; Al-Mas'ūdī mentioned the danger of the Rūm (Byzantine Christians) who arrived by sea to kidnap people even from Mecca and Medina. In the 1570s, Badr al-Dīn Mu ammad al-Dimashqī, like many other travellers, wrote pages about the terror of the winds and storms even as he crossed the Bosphorus. In the Mediterranean, there were Spanish, Maltese, and Italian pirates, while the English pirate John Avery (d. _c_. 1696), based in Madagascar, seized women pilgrims of the Mughal emperor's court as they sailed in the Indian Ocean. That is why most travellers chose never to dip their toes in the sea, even on journeys of thousands of miles.

While some journeys were short – it took al-Nābulusī forty-five days to visit Jerusalem and its environs from Damascus – others lasted for decades. Al-Ghirnā ī (d. 1170) spent fifty-four years in travel, visiting in the course of his life Persia, Russia, and Maygar. He died not in his native Granada, but in Damascus. 'Ali  adr al-Dīn al-Madanī (d. 1708) left Medina to travel to India, where he lived for forty-eight years. He then returned to Medina and travelled to Iraq and died in Shiraz. None travelled in more regions of the world than al-Mas'ūdī who, from the age of twenty, went to Persia, China, West Africa, Arabia, Syria, the Byzantine Empire, and Central Europe before settling and dying in Egypt, ever remembering his native Iraq, even though 'time has separated me from it' (1989: II, 70). Also starting young in his travels, Ibn Ba  ū a rivaled him in his range of journeys, spending thirty years on the road – from the Maghrib to India – after which he returned to his native Tangier where many a visitor still reads the _fātih·a_ (opening chapter of the Qur'an) at his (alleged) tomb. Travel could take a lifetime: many never returned nor left record of their journeys, while others kept notes which they later turned into travelogues. The Sufi poet Khalid all-Balawī finished his account over a quarter of a century after his return from his pilgrimage between 1336 and 1340, but al-Miknāsī finished writing only months after his return in 1788. Al-Ghirnā ī and Ibn Ba  ū a dictated their travelogues after their journeys, although how they managed to remember all the people they met and the places they visited is perplexing. Inevitably, many manuscripts were lost to robbers or to shipwrecks: Yūsuf al-Imām lost all his books and writings to the 'Christians' near Alexandria as he was on his way back to Tunis from Mecca in 1712. That is why some accounts have survived only in fragments, thanks to later copyists – as in the case of the travels of Ibn Wahb al-Qurashī from Basra to China in 870, whose account was included in Abu Zayd al-Sirāfī's tenth-century account – _Min akhbār al-S·īn wa-l-Hind_ ( _News about China and India_ ); and Ibn Ya'qūb, whose descriptions of the Slavonic regions of Central Europe survive in al-Bakrī's _Kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik_ ( _The Book of Roads and Kingdoms_ , 1040–1094). Other travelogues, a large number of which are pilgrimage accounts, remain in manuscript at libraries stretching from Western Europe and Morocco to Russia and India.

Generally, travellers used the Hijri calendar, although Ibn Jubayr varied between the Muslim and the Christian names of the months, as did al-Miknāsī half a millennium later (1785). Al-Nābulusī, who wrote about three journeys in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, was meticulous in recording distances, dates, and even fractions of hours spent on the road. Al-Muqaddasī was self-conscious of his literary style and the factual method he used. Al-Ghirnā ī, however, was a more credulous travel writer:

Some merchants told me that at one time, they caught a big fish. They stuck ropes into its ear and dragged it whereupon the ear opened and from it came out a beautiful, white girl with black hair and red cheeks, among the most beautiful of women. From her navel to half her leg, she had white skin, as if cloth, that clung to her body to cover her private parts. The men pulled her on land as she slapped her face and pulled her hair and bit her arm and breast, shouting and screaming as women do. Then she died in their hands. Blessed be God for His wonders and creations.

(Al-Ghirnā ī 2003: 97–98)

He also described men whose heads were in their chests, anticipating the fantasies of Sir John Mandeville and the Ottoman Turk, Evliya Celebi (d. 1683). Nonetheless, when A mad ibn Yusuf al-Qaramānī (d. 1610), a compiler interestingly comparable with his English contemporary Richard Hakluyt, wrote his world history, he relied heavily on travel lore as had al-Idrisī half a millennium earlier. Although al-Qaramānī wrote down some fantastical information (as did Hakluyt, who included Mandeville's account in his first edition of _Principall Navigations_ in 1589), it was Arab travellers such as Ibn Jubayr and al-Idrīsī who left behind the only detailed measurements of the Alexandria lighthouse and other historical sites. Only in the writings of Muslim travellers can we find descriptions of mosque interiors, _madrasas_ , religious foundations, and many sites that have since disappeared and which no outsider could visit.

Travellers were well read, and modern editions of their works sometimes include lists of books they mentioned, which could run into dozens of names: Abu 'Abdallah Mu ammad al-'Abdarī (travelling in 1289) cited 162 texts, and al-Mas'ūdī even more. Such breadth of reading shows that although travel writing was not recognized as a distinct literary genre, travelogues circulated widely across the Arab–Islamic world. A Moroccan might cite the same sources that an Aleppan did, and a story told by the Meccan al- usaynī in 1629 was repeated by the Tunisian historian, al-Wazīr al-Sarrāj (d. 1736) a century later. Al-Is āqī knew the travelogue of his contemporary al-'Ayyāshī in the seventeenth century, as well as of al-'Abdarī, written centuries earlier. The mobility of texts created a 'republic of letters' that stretched from Morocco to Arabia and India, which is why travellers copied from one another, just as they often did in medieval Europe. Ibn Ba  ū a copied from Ibn Jubayr (whom he credited), and al-Zayānī from al-Miknāsī (whom he did not credit), but al-Muqaddasī, rather pompously, stated that all that he wrote was new and original.

Some writers focused on specific places and cultures, as with al-Bayrūnī's description of India, but al-Mas'ūdi, who was a traveller, geographer, astronomer, chronicler, physician, and jurist all in one, wrote an encyclopedia of world geography and history. Others focused on their peculiar social environments. Ibn Qunfudh mentioned women ascetics in Fez in 1689, and Abū 'Abbas al-Qādirī described the Christian monasteries in Egypt which could only be reached by a _quffa_ (basket). Writers were not unwilling to express personal views: al-Miknāsī wrote a moving lament on the death of his slave (during his third journey), while al-Bakrī wrote love poetry to the Prophet Abraham; al-Nābulusī stood in awe before the Rock in Jerusalem (pondering how, in past times, it had supposedly hung in mid-air), and the Damascene Mu ammad ibn A mad Sukaykir (d. 1579) searched for new chess strategies during his journey from Aleppo to Istanbul. Although travellers infused their accounts with numerous expressions of piety, they could still be light-hearted: thus the jokes about passing wind by al-Mas'ūdī, about the people of Homs by al-Dimashqī, and three pages of couplets about fleas by al al- usaynī.

Stylistically, travellers wrote in plain prose that sometimes included colloquialisms and neologisms, especially as they ventured into new lands where they described what they had never seen before. A few showed off their rhetorical talents, attempting _saja'_ (rhymed prose) _–_ especially al-Muqaddasī and (rather tiresomely) Murta a Bayk al-Kurdī – or adding their own verse compositions, sometimes including a few _maqāmāt_ (short stories in rhymed prose) as in the five examples by al-Miknāsī in his second travelogue (1781–1783). The majority of writers wrote chronological accounts of their travels, and, with the passage of time, the tradition of the encyclopedia-like travel book, such as al-Mas'ūdī's or al-Idrīsī's, declined. But it did not completely die out: in the late eighteenth century, al-Zayānī wrote _al-Tarjumanah al-kubra_ ( _The Great History_ ), which included descriptions of natural resources and peoples, rivers, precious stones, and countries. His book is an inventory of peoples – Arabs, Berbers, and Turkic – at whose peripheries are the French, English, and Flemish, but his knowledge of the non-Islamic world is very limited. Interestingly, he tried to verify information in earlier writings, and when he showed Ibn Ba  ū a's description of Indian customs to Indians he met in Mecca, he triumphantly noted that they declared them inaccurate.

Encountering cultural differences was always a challenge. Ibn Fa lan, travelling _c_. 921, found the medical practices of the Rūs appalling, as did Usāmah ibn Munqidh (d. 1188) when he observed the Franks in their Crusader kingdoms two centuries later. While travellers wondered at or denounced differences among non-Muslims, they also criticized aberrations among their own. Ibn Jubayr lashed out at the Muslim customs officers in Egypt and Arabia, as did al-Balawī. Abu Sālim al-'Ayyāshiī (travelling in 1661–1663) was appalled that Gazans smoked in their beautiful central mosque and did not take their shoes off before entering it; al-Yūsī denounced the baths of his native Morocco, where there were ' _manākir mafd·u¯ha_ ', 'immoral deeds' ( _c_. 1700: 98). Al-Khiyārī wrote pages on the status of coffee under canon law, but in his last travelogue (1785–1788), al-Miknāsī denounced the coffee-drinking custom of the Turks along with their _ifranji_ (non-Arabic) diplomatic customs.

From the seventeenth century on, two new developments occurred. First was the appearance of detailed travelogues by Muslim emissaries to Western Europe, chiefly Moroccans, who spent extended periods of time in one country and described the social and administrative infrastructures of the modernizing European states: Spain, Holland, France, Malta, and Italy. From the Mashriq, there is only one account by the secretary of the Lebanese prince Fakhr al-Dīn II, about Italy and Malta between 1613 and 1618. These ambassadorial accounts furnish the first accurate information in Arabic about the break between Catholics and Protestants, about the New World and its native populations, and more generally about European customs and practices such as the Inquisition and tobacco, banks and bullfights, paper factories, hospitals, and postal services. Moroccan travellers generally ransomed Muslim captives, which imbued their accounts with anger at the captors; those who went to Spain, such as Mu ammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahāb al-Ghassānī in 1690–1691, A mad ibn Mahdī al-Ghazāl in 1766, and al-Miknāsī, were heartbroken as they recalled the glory of al-Andalus. Frequently, they denounced the _Nas·ārā_ (Christians) for their violence to Islam, whilst simultaneously being deeply impressed by what they saw.

The second development was the travel of Christian Arabs within the Islamicate world as well as to Western Europe and to America (see Ayalon 1984). Until the Frankish invasion of the Crusades, the largest Christian population outside Western Europe lived in the Arab–Islamic empires. Although these Christians left numerous writings in science and history, after the Ottoman conquest of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in 1516–1517, Orthodox and Catholic Christians went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem as well as to the monasteries of  aydnāyā, outside Damascus, and St Catherine's in Sinai. In his 1753 account, Khalīl Sabbāgh gave a description of the inside of the latter monastery, where many Syrian alms-givers had scratched their names on the walls. Others travelled outside the Ottoman dominions: Būlus of Aleppo's long journey via Anatolia to Moscow in the late 1660s furnishes the longest description of Russia in any language to that date. Although al-Idrissī had written about sailors venturing west from al-Andalus to discover the Atlantic Ocean, only  anna al-Mū allī, an Iraqi Catholic, crossed the Atlantic to America in the late 1660s: because he was a priest he was given permission by the Spanish authorities to travel to regions prohibited to non-Catholics. Other Iraqi Catholics travelled to Rome, as did Khidr the Chaldean (i.e. Syriac Catholic) in 1725 and Simon the Metropolitan to India in 1720.

Despite all the novelties and differences that were encountered, no traveller ever admitted that he had lost his sense of regional and religious identity, at least not on paper. Al-Muqaddasī repeatedly affirmed to his interlocutors in the Maghrib that he was _Filast·īnī_ , Palestinian (2003: 362). Few travellers acquired the language(s) of the regions they visited, generally relying on Arabic and the _lingua franca_ of the Green/Shāmi/Rūmī Sea (no Arab writers used the name 'Mediterranean'), or on translators. Al-Bayrūnī learned (some) Sanskrit and others knew Turkish and Persian; since much Greek geographical lore had been translated into Arabic from the ninth century on, al-Mas'ūdi and Ibn Khaldūn among others were able to use Greek and Latin material in translation, from Aristotle to Pliny and from Hippocrates to Ptolemy, as well as information from Syriac, Farsi, and other languages. In the seventeenth century, there is evidence that Andalusian/Morisco exiles or former captives spoke West European languages – chiefly Spanish.

**Defeat, discovery, and awakening: 1798–1916**

In _The Arab Awakening_ (1938), George Antonius suggested that the Arabs were awoken from their lethargy by Napoleon's bombardments of Egypt and Palestine. Muhammad Ali Pasha, the ruler of Egypt between 1805 and 1849, sent Muslim students and military advisors to France and other parts of Europe for education and training, at the same time that he sent officials on information-gathering missions, as with Salīm Qub ān's exploration and description of the Upper Nile in 1839–1840. The French colonization of Algeria in 1830, followed by the British domination of Egypt half a century later, opened up access to Western Europe and to regions under British and French rule and beyond: India, Japan, Russia, southern Africa, and the USA. Travel writers described industrialization, education, political institutions, women's roles, and scientific innovation at the same time that they began to show anxiety about European cultural and imperial hegemony. Authors continued to be exclusively male: the first 'Arab' woman travel writer was Princess Salme bint Said of Oman, but she wrote her _Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar_ (1888) after eloping to Germany and adopting the German name of Emily Ruete. In this period, travel accounts were increasingly published as opposed to circulating in manuscript and they frequently ran to several editions. Copyright started playing a role in distribution and the Cairo publisher of the travels of Mu ammad Bayram al-Khāmis al-Tūnisī (d. 1889) warned that any use of material without the authorization of the author would lead to prosecution 'according to the laws' (al-Tūnisī 1965: title page).

I will follow Nazek Saba Yared (1996) in her division of this period into two sub-periods: 1826 to 1882 and 1882–1918. In the first period, a chief destination for students and government officials was France, where they encountered the legacy of the French Revolution and concepts of nationhood and freedom. A shaykh from al-Azhar, Rafā'a al- ah āwī was the first to write about France after arriving there in 1826. He was followed by other Egyptians, all of whom reflected, sometimes approvingly, sometimes not, on parliamentary representation, theatre, art museums, and various social and cultural institutions. Al- ah āwī even developed an interest in antiquities. The role of women in Western society engaged all writers, and while al- ah āwī admired French women for their freedom, Lebanese A mad Fāris al-Shidyāq, travelling in 1866, denounced British women for immorality. In contrast, Francis Marrāsh, after his visit to France in 1867, called for equal work and education opportunities for women in his native Syria. All travellers marvelled at the wealth and grandeur of European cities: in 1855, Salīm Bustrus was dazzled by royal palaces, museums, and cathedrals in Italy, France, Germany, and Austria but al-Shidyāq criticized the materialism of the West, from London to Paris, and the pollution that industrialization precipitated. For the first time, a ruler travelled to see for himself: in 1875, the prince of Zanzibar went on a tour of England, made possible by British ships. His assistant, an Iraqi Christian Yahvā Luwīs al- abunjī, collected the notes kept by the court scribe, Zāhir ibn Sa'īd, and published them in book form as _Tanzīh al-abs·ar wa-l-afkār (Amusing the Eyes and the Mind_ ). The British Empire was making possible not only physical but also social and religious mobility. It also made way for the travel novel: Ali Mubarak's 1872 _'Alamaldīn_ describes the journey to Europe of an Azhar student in the company of an Englishman (see al-Qadi 1981). The former returns to Egypt with the full conviction that there were common grounds between European and Islamic cultures.

Travellers differed in their reactions, not so much because of their religious backgrounds but because of their national and geographical affiliations. Al- ah āwī summarized and defended the ideas of the French Revolution, as did the Tunisian Khayr al-Dīn (whom al-Shidyāq praised) and who listed in his travelogue the numerous European innovations and institutions that were worthy of adaptation. But Salīm Bustrus praised the Ottomans and ' _mamlakat dawlatinā al-'aliyya_ ' ('our elevated royal government' [2003: 76]) _._ The Moroccan Mu ammad ibn 'Abdallah al-Saffār thought that all the developments in 1846 France were not equal to the purity of his Islamic religion, but Abū Jamāl al-Fāsī, also from Morocco, considered London in 1860 a 'glorious city' (' _madīna 'azīma_ ' [1967: 19]) and in 1876, Idrīs al-Ju'aydī, scribe to the Moroccan ambassador Mu ammad al-Rabā ī, wrote with admiration about France, Belgium, England, and Italy, and expressed wonder at the electrical bulb, invented by those _shut·ār_ (intelligent ones) in Rome. Years later, in 1885, the Moroccan ambassador to Spain, al-Karkūdī claimed that the telephone had been inspired by Muslim children whispering through reeds. The Arabic language teacher to Russia between 1840 and 1850, Shaykh al- an āwī, described the academic institutions in St Petersburg, but was also intrigued by the religious culture of the Orthodox Church. Whether they admitted it or not, all travellers were challenged by the West and had to confront its political, religious, and imperial transformations. That is why many of them prepared by familiarizing themselves with Western literature and philosophy, generally preferring French to English writers.

Parallel to the interest in Western European countries was the Arabs' interest in their own regions. Mu ammad  ādiq wrote a tome about his pilgrimages and travels in the Hijaz in 1860, and Lebanese Bu rus al-Bustāni wrote about Kisirwān, Lebanon, in 1870. Muhammad ibn 'Umar al-Tūnisī wrote a detailed account about the Darfur region in Sudan as he tried to locate his family roots; Egyptian-born Rashīd Ri a, the famous reformist, travelled to Syria, Istanbul, and India to consolidate Islamic unity, serializing his account in his own newspaper, _Al-Manār_ ( _The Lighthouse_ ), between 1909 and 1913. The world was opening up to the Arabs, regionally and internationally.

In 1882 Britain took control of Egypt, and in 1916 the Sykes-Picot Agreement launched the European scramble for the Islamicate world. Between these dates, the majority of Arabic travel writers evince an agenda that is as much ideological as geographical, being eager to compare and contrast, and then pass judgment on the West as well as on their home communities, especially in Egypt. Mu ammad Farīd (1868–1919) was a sightseer, but also a political activist, promoting the nationalist cause of his people and criticizing French colonialism in Algeria; Mu ammad Amīn Fikrī (1856–1899) was an Egyptian government official, and Mu ammad al-Mawayli ī (1868–1930) was an exile who visited North Africa and Western Europe and denounced French violence. But Mu ammad Kurd 'Alī (1876–1953) travelled to the Levant in 1915 to garner support among the Arabs for the Ottoman cause during the First World War. He went also to Western Europe and was so well read that he wrote a history of Western civilization, in the same manner that Jirjī Zaydān (1861–1914) had begun to write about the history of Arab–Islamic civilization long before his 1912 journey to Europe. The travelogue was becoming a means to reflect on conditions at home and to encourage respect for the Other. In 1911, the Azhar shaykh Mustafā 'Abd al-Razzāq, described with deep emotion his French hostess in her Christian prayers:

When we were about to leave, the hostess took her son to a corner in the garden where she had a small statue of the Virgin Mary, between the bowers and the branches. She stood in awe and then she started singing to the mother of Christ. It appeared to me that she reached _fanā'_ (ecstasy) in her prayers and devotions, as the stone statue melted by her invocations. The horizons echoed her song and angels with wings bore her words, along with us, to the world above where we can see nothing but souls and lights, and hear nothing but the pencils on the tablet of destiny.

('Abd al-Razzāq 2004: 37)

Although Mu ammad Bayram al-Khāmis al-Tūnisī may have been the first medical tourist when he travelled to France for treatment (along with the Lebanese Bustrus a few years earlier), he also wrote an exhaustive account of the world, based both on his own travels and his readings. He described America and the 'advances and freedoms' which the 'strangers' there had attained (1883–1893). The first traveller who wrote about America was the Egyptian Idwār Ilyās in 1876 but the best travelogue was by Mu ammad 'Ali Pasha who, influenced by de Tocqueville, sailed in 1912 and wrote _al-Rih·la al-amerikiyya_ ( _The American Journey_ , 1913). Improved transportation by rail and sea expanded the range of destinations and British ships carried the Egyptian Shaykh 'Ali A mad al-Jirjāwī all the way to Japan in 1906 to participate in a conference on religions; while the Trans-Siberian train made possible Prince Mu ammad 'Ali's crossing from Vienna via Moscow to Vladivostok, and then via the Sea of Japan to Japan and Korea. Between 1913 and 1915, the Egyptian prince Yūsuf Kamāl went on a safari to India and Tibet and wrote about shooting game, enjoying natural scenery, studying Muslim ruins, and playing polo. These two men of the ruling family in Egypt travelled in comfort and luxury, accompanied by assistants and amanuenses. Wealthy and culturally attuned, no others could imitate their _siyāha_ , as Kamāl entitled one of his works (2004).

**Conclusion**

Arabic travel writing reflects the happy combination of piety and curiosity that marked the civilization of Islam. Large numbers of Arabs wrote what we would now dub travelogues, some of which are masterpieces of Arabic literature; others are encyclopedic works about the medieval world. The Sykes-Picot partition of the Arabic-speaking world in 1916, and the subsequent establishment of British, French, Spanish, and Italian mandates over the Arab world, created artificial borders requiring passports and permits which curtailed travel. In _Ayyāmī_ (1992), Damascus-born, Jerusalem-educated, and Beirut-buried Nicola Ziadeh (1907–2006) described how he and his friends, who used to walk all over Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, were stopped by French soldiers as they crossed the newly marked Lebanese borders in the 1920s.

Unfortunately, after the independence of the Arab countries, travel for citizens became even more difficult, as national conflicts closed borders and autocratic governments denied visas and imposed severe restrictions on mobility; pilgrims could no longer continue after Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina to new lands. Western countries also imposed limitations on travel and tourism resulting in long queues in front of their embassies. Be that as it may, the Kuwait-based _Arabi_ ( _The Arab_ ) monthly magazine continues to include a report about a foreign land or society accompanied by excellent photographs, and some of the Berlitz travel guides about Western countries have been translated into Arabic, especially countries that attract immigrants. Travel writing has continued to be a popular genre in Arabic but is now mainly produced by ambassadors and press correspondents, diplomatic attachés and exiles – overwhelmingly men who can get visas, have money, and who want to tell stories about themselves and their acquaintances in foreign lands. There is no longer the sense of discovery that dominated past accounts, which may explain the eager editing and publishing of earlier Arabic travelogues, full of perspicacity and exploration, curiosity and knowledge.

**Note**

1 I do not discuss here Muslim accounts not originally written in Arabic, such as Leo Africanus/Hasan al-Wazzan's _Della descrittione dell'Africa et delle cose notabli che ivi sono_ (1550), or the pilgrimage account by an anonymous sixteenth-century Andalusian, _Ibtihālāt al-H·ajj_ , ed. 'Abd al-Hādī Sa'dūn (Cairo: Sanābil al-kitāb, 2011).

**Select bibliography**

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Al-Fāsī , Y. ibn 'Ᾱ. ibn M. (1993) _Rih·la_ , ed. 'A. M. al- ibsī, Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī.

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Hayden, J. and Matar, N. (eds) (2012) _Through the Eyes of the Beholder: the Holy Land, 1517–1713_ , Leiden: Brill.

Hermes, N.F. (2012) _The European Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture (Ninth-Twelfth Century AD)_ , New York: Palgrave.

Ibn Ba  ū a (2003) _Tuh·fat al-nadhdhar fī 'ajā'ib al-ams·ār_ , Sidon: al-Maktaba al-' riyya. English translation (2001) _The Travels of Ibn Battuta_ , trans. H.A.R. Gibb, New Delhi: Goodword Books.

Ibn Fa lān (2003) _Rih·la_ , ed. S. Lu'aybī, Abu Dhabi: Dār al-Suwaydī li-l-nashr wa-l-tawzī'. English translation (2012) _Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness_ , trans. and ed. C. Stone and P. Lunde, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Kamāl, Y. (2003) _Siyāh·atī fī bilād al-Hind al-Inglīziyya wa Kashmīr 1913–1914_ , ed. J. Mul im, Abu Dhabi: Dār al-Suwaydī li-l-nashr wa-l-tawzī'.

Krachkovskii, I.I. (1987) _Tārīkh al-adab al-jughrāfī al-'Arabī_ , trans.  . al-D. 'U. Hāshim, Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī. First published 1963–65.

Al-Kurdī, M. ( _c_. 1620), _Kitāb tahdhīb al-at·wār fī 'jā'ib al-ms·ār_. MS Sprenger 23 in reel 1369, University of Jordan, Center for the Study of Bilād al-Shām.

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Al-Tamagrūtī, 'A. (2002) _Al-Nafh·a al miskiyya fī as-sifāra a t-Turkiyya_ , ed. 'A. al-L. al-Shadlī, Rabat: al-Ma ba'a al-malakiyya. Partial French translation (1929) _Relation d'une ambassade marocaine en Turquie,_ trans. Henry de Castries, Paris: Paul Guethner. Partial English translation (2009) _Europe through Arab Eyes_ , trans. N. Matar, New York: Columbia University Press.

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European Travel Writing in the Middle Ages

_Anthony Bale_

Mass transit is not an invention of the modern world, even though modernity has consistently celebrated speed, technologies of movement, and space–time compression through communication and intercultural contact. Whether through battles, crusade, pilgrimage, trade, or migration, movement across the known world was an aspect of life for very many people long before the invention of the aeroplane. It is therefore unsurprising that travel – as a subject, theme, and formal framework – is a constant of medieval literary culture, from empirical guides to the sites of the Holy Land to rhetorical satires of dubious activities during pilgrimages, even though travel writing as a genre was not yet clearly defined.

This chapter explores the dominant themes and forms of medieval travel writing, showing how texts both reflected and created the wider world. My aim is to elucidate some of the thought processes associated with travel writing and so account for the most common frameworks for the depiction of travel in medieval writing.

**Pilgrimage and the pilgrimage guidebook**

The most common genre of medieval text that might best be called 'travel writing' is the _itinerarium_ , both an itinerary of holy places and a first-hand account of a pilgrimage. Such _itineraria_ are structured around movement from place to place in a highly teleological order: all pilgrimages have a _telos_ ('end' or 'goal') in the relic or shrine to be visited, where prayers were offered and, in the later Middle Ages, an indulgence (a pardon of temporal punishments in purgatory due for sins) received (Zacher 1977).

The medieval Christian tradition that paired writing with pilgrimage, joining the physical movement to Jerusalem with narrative, can be traced back to very early sources. Eloquent examples include the _Peregrinatio_ ( _Pilgrimage_ ) of the fourth-century Galician traveller Egeria and _De locis sanctis_ ( _Of the Holy Places_ ), written by Adamnan (a seventh- century Irish bishop) and descriptive of the travels of Arculf, a Merovingian bishop shipwrecked off Scotland, who recited his account to Adamnan. Such accounts are spare and economical, rigidly focused on the holy sites (see Campbell 1991: 20–45). They are, however, certainly 'travel narratives', structured around narrating movements through places. Indeed, Egeria's text appears to be the earliest first-person narrative of a journey in the Western tradition. But whether first-person or third-person, these accounts are seldom 'personal' in terms of conveying the author's inner world and their subjective thoughts and feelings. The journeys of both Egeria and Arculf received textual form as religious memories of places previously visited, and their texts were useful for readers to imagine the biblical landscape and liturgical 'routes' associated with the Holy Land.

Unlike a contemporary travel guide, with its helpful lists of prices, tips, and information for a _future_ trip, medieval travel writing was often read _after_ or _in place of_ visiting the actual site: in other words, medieval travel writing can be defined as a mnemonic form, designed for remembering a place. To be a pilgrim – literally, one who travelled to a holy place – was to engage with a narrative about the organization of sacred space. As Mary Carruthers has pithily commented, medieval pilgrims 'came not to see something new, but to recollect things well known to them already' (2000: 43). This is not to say that medieval travel writing never had practical uses but, on the whole, medieval travel writing can be defined as a kind of imaginative or mental travel in and of itself. Writing was a map; reading was a journey; and a journey was a kind of reading. As Carruthers notes, 'monastic rhetoric developed an art for composing meditative prayers [. . .] that conceives of composition in terms of making a "way" among "places" ' which were 'routes through the things in one's memory' (2000: 60).

The earthly Jerusalem and other pilgrimage sites were far from inaccessible to Western Christians. During the Abbasid and Fatimid control of Palestine, from the eighth to eleventh centuries, Christian pilgrims visited as independent travellers. Later, they visited as Crusaders (Jerusalem was taken by the Crusaders in 1099, but retaken by Saladin in 1187). Following the collapse of the entire mainland Crusader kingdom in 1291 and the rise of the Mamelukes in Palestine, a Franciscan-led pilgrimage industry developed, licensed by the Islamic rulers (Chareyron 2005; Morris 2005). Christians landed at Jaffa, stayed in Franciscan-run hostels, walked or rode to Jerusalem, and visited the biblical sites, often spending a night in vigil locked in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They usually followed a rigid itinerary of places associated with the life of Christ, including Bethlehem and the River Jordan. Throughout the period, there were also vigorous Jewish and Muslim pilgrimage industries in Jerusalem (see Adler 1930; Elad 1995). From the twelfth century, there was rapid development of pilgrimages to other places, especially the shrine of St James at Santiago de Compostela in Spain (Ashley and Deegan 2009). Large numbers of people went to Rome, which came to surpass Jerusalem in popularity, and to sites such as Aachen in Germany (where the reliquary, containing clothing of Christ, Mary and John the Baptist, was consecrated in 1239), Assisi in Italy (to venerate St Francis, who founded the Franciscan order there in 1208), and Canterbury in England (to visit St Thomas a Becket's shrine, started in 1220). Other notable destinations included Cologne, where the shrine of the Three Kings was installed in 1164; Loreto, where the Virgin's house, miraculously transported, 'landed' in 1294; Vézelay, which claimed the relics of Mary Magdalene from about 1050; and Walsingham, where the priory was founded around the Holy House, a copy of the Virgin's house at Nazareth, in 1169. The popularity of pilgrimage led to an international culture of travel, which transcended gender, class, literacy, and national boundaries (Dyas 2001; Sumption 2001; Webb 2000; Whalen 2011).

With the development, in the mid-fourteenth century, of the Franciscan-controlled pilgrimage industry in the Holy Land, Christian travellers' texts increasingly combined the spiritual benefits of pilgrimage with its practical elements. It is common to read lists of expenses and prices alongside extravagant prayers and miracle stories. Thomas Brygg, an English pilgrim who travelled to Jerusalem in 1392, paid a great detail of attention to listing the mundane costs of travelling: six and a half ducats for entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, four _grossi_ to enter Christ's sepulchre itself, two _grossi_ to leave the church (Hoade 1952: 84). In almost all such accounts – even those explicitly focused on devotional sites/sights – there is an element of curiosity. Foreign customs and controversies were remarked upon, the 'eye of faith' distracted by things off route. William Wey (1407–1476?), a devout English pilgrim who left a voluminous Middle English and Latin account of his travels to Palestine in 1458 and 1462, included one of the earliest versions of the legend of Count 'Flak' the Impaler (Vlad III of Wallachia, 1431–1476/7), 'who seized his brother and inserted a stake in his anus which he drove in up to his throat' (Bandinel 1857: 99–101). Wey's story of Vlad is at once an entertaining anecdote and an arresting warning of foreign deviance and violence, and it serves the pilgrimage narrative's pious purposes in showing Vlad's defeat of his Muslim enemies, the Turks.

Elsewhere, travel writing usually involved censuring 'wayward', 'foreign' beliefs. For instance, the Anglo-Irish friar Symon Semeonis (or Simon Fitzsimons), who travelled to Palestine in 1322–1323, read the Koran in translation in order to refute it. Whilst he admired the devotion of the Muslims, he was extremely abusive about his Jewish guide (Hoade 1952). Meshullam of Volterra, an Italian Jew who travelled via Egypt to Jerusalem in 1481, denounced as 'idolaters' the Karaite and Samaritan Jews he encountered in Cairo (Adler 1930: 171). Christian and Jewish travellers frequently describe the perceived hostility of the local Arabs, although often without incident. Meshullam of Volterra said that between Cairo and Jerusalem 'an Arab on horseback lying in wait came to meet us, but when he saw that we were many and strong, and with bows and riding on horseback, he fled' (Adler 1930: 175), whilst German pilgrim Felix Fabri said that 'had we not travelled with so great a force, [the Arabs] would have fallen upon us and beaten us with stones, stick, and staves, as often befalls pilgrims' (Fabri 1893: 246). Such non-events show the holiest site as a contact zone, the texts recording anxiety about the intentions and reactions of other groups.

With a kind of 'imperial gaze' (Kaplan 1997), which objectifies and trivializes the people encountered abroad, medieval travellers often mention the physical beauty and sexual availability of peoples abroad. Margery Kempe, an Englishwoman who went to Jerusalem in 1413–1414, noticed a 'handsome' Saracen guide who assisted her (Windeatt 2004: 173). The (admittedly idiosyncratic) German nobleman Arnold von Harff (d. 1506) was very frank about the sexual opportunities available abroad: his list of useful phrases in Greek includes 'woman, shall I marry you?', 'good woman, let me sleep with you', 'woman, I am already in your bed', and, in Hebrew, 'Woman, let me sleep with you tonight' (Letts 1946: 91, 220). In showing the pilgrims' wandering eyes 'consuming' the foreigners, such carnal asides bring into question the supposedly godly nature of pilgrimage.

Curiosity and hostility were often united in accounts of the Greek Christians of the eastern Mediterranean. Sir John Mandeville, writing _c_. 1356, defended his inclusion of a hostile description of Greek Orthodoxy thus:

if all these things are not relevant to the journey, they are nevertheless relevant in so far as I have undertaken to show some of the customs and manners and differences of these countries. And because this is the nearest country that varies from, and conflicts with, our faith and religious texts, I have written it here so that you can see the differences between our faith and theirs, for many people take great pleasure and comfort to hear talk of unfamiliar things.

(Mandeville 2012: 14)

This passage encapsulates the paradox of much medieval travel writing. Mandeville highlights 'conflicts' and 'differences' between home and abroad, yet his account of the Greek Christians implicitly queries the truth of Latin Christianity. Noting that 'Even though it is true that all people in the land of Greece are Christian, it's a very different faith from ours' (Mandeville 2012: 12), Mandeville opens up a world of relativism and similarities, and his text has been seen as both cosmopolitan (in that it is reasonably generous to foreigners) and a critique of Christendom (Lochrie 2009; Higgins 1997). His recourse here to the 'pleasure and comfort' in 'unfamiliar things' invokes entertainment, curiosity, and a pleasure in difference that sits uneasily with the pious intentions of the directed pilgrim.

This reflects a consistent interest in cultural relativism, often expressed through ideas about language, found throughout medieval travel writing. Manuscripts of Mandeville's _Book of Marvels and Travels_ usually include (corrupt) alphabets of 'Egyptian' (Coptic), 'Jewish' (Hebrew), and 'Saracen' (Arabic) languages. Other alphabets, real and imaginary, were also often added. This multiplication of languages in travel writing can be seen as what one scholar has called a 'perspectival game' (Kupfer 2008: 58), in which the reader is asked to discern true significations from false. Likewise, William Wey included Anglicized vocabularies, translating phrases from Middle English into Greek ('Gyff me that: _doys me tutt_ '; 'Wher ys the tavern? _Ella canawte?_ '), and Latin into Hebrew ('Domus: _beth_ '; 'Panis: _leem_ ') (Bandinel 1857: 102–116). Arnold von Harff, in the late fifteenth century, made much of languages, including semi-accurate word-lists in Western Slavonic, Albanian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Hungarian, and Basque, and, via Mandeville, various alphabets (Letts 1946). The keen interest that medieval travel writers took in the _forms_ of language might be read as relativism – almost cosmopolitanism – in the encounter with foreigners staged here. Certainly, the repeated focus on alphabets challenges the idea that medieval travellers uncomplicatedly saw what they wished to see: to encounter foreign languages was to develop a critical perspective and to query the act of interpretation (see Cooper-Rompato 2011). Yet, like a modern anglophone tourist shouting in broken French, the snippets of languages given by medieval travellers are generally essentialist, incorrect, and instrumental, deployed largely in matters of faith, food, money, and sex.

**Virtual pilgrimage, fantasy, and curiosity**

One anthology of travel texts, by the Italian Franciscan Franceschimus de Pontrenato ( _fl_. 1383–1393), shows the interconnectedness of pious and practical travelling. Franceschimus' book (now MS 1153 in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven) includes a calendar, texts for the Office of St Francis and others, various saints' lives, religious poems in Italian describing scenes from the life of Christ, a list of infelicitous dates, extracts from St Bridget of Sweden on the Passion of Christ, a list of the indulgences to be received at the holy sites in Palestine and at Rome, and Franceschimus' own travel journal to Jerusalem. Given how much reading Franceschimus had evidently done _about_ the Holy Land, it is remarkable that the journal has almost no narrative but comprises a list of the distances and journey-times between Mediterranean ports and the fees he was required to pay 'Saracens' for entry to the sites: one florin for his mule, five _grossi_ to enter the Holy Sepulchre, two ducats to travel to the River Jordan, and so on. Whilst Franceschimus made the journey to the Holy Land, it is clear from his anthology (of which he was the scribe) that actual travel was considered alongside, or even subordinate to, imaginative and devotional kinds of travel. In keeping with Franciscan devotion, which encouraged intense and intimate meditation on the humanity of Christ and the saints, the texts in Franceschimus' anthology assist the mind's eye, and the heart, in 'travelling' through space and time in order to gain the most effective religious experience.

Travel – real or imaginative – was often concerned with consolidating the traveller's identity. In 1358, the celebrated Italian poet Petrarch (1304–1374) was invited to travel to the Holy Land by his friend, Giovanni Mandelli, a Milanese nobleman. Petrarch declined; he cited his 'fear of the sea', fearing 'nausea worse than death itself' (Cachey 2002: proem 3, proem 5). However, addressing Mandelli, he wrote that

since you have requested it, I will accompany you with this writing, which will be for you like a brief itinerary. You have followed the usage of lovers, asking of me, whom you will miss, the image with which you will be able to console yourself during your absence, not the image of the face which changes daily but rather the more stable effigy of my soul and my intellect, which, however small it may be, is surely the best part of me. Therefore you will see here not this body, the house of your friend, which some who see it believe falsely to be the whole man, but you will contemplate that friend with inner vision, since, as Cicero says, 'The mind of every man and not that figure that one can point at with a finger is the man.'

(Cachey 2002: proem 7)

The resulting text was Petrarch's _Itinerary to the Sepulchre of Our Lord Jesus Christ_ (1358). As the above quotation shows, Petrarch considered his text to be an adequate proxy for making the journey: 'I will accompany you with this writing', he says, pointing out the power of the literary imagination as well as the physical body to move through space and time. This is a direct statement of Petrarch's belief that to write was to travel. Petrarch's _Itinerary_ is, in fact, better thought of as a description of the Italian peninsula, blending mythology, folklore, topology, and lyrical appreciation of the landscape. Petrarch found an enchanting beauty and splendour in Italy's domestic landscape and magnificent towns; to travel to Jerusalem, it appears, was to appraise one's homeland.

Only the very last part of the text deals with the Holy Land, as Petrarch observes to Mandelli that 'already before setting out from home you had considered and frequented every place within your soul', to see 'that city made sacred by the death of the Lord and in the places nearby the things that you have already seen with your mind' (Cachey 2002: chapter 16.2, chapter 16.3). Thus Petrarch's spare description of Jerusalem is entirely a mnemonic guide to a few key sites from the Bible: the River Jordan, the Temple, Calvary, the Holy Sepulchre, Mount Zion and the Mount of Olives, the Valley of Jehoshaphat, the Sea of Galilee (Cachey 2002: chapter 16.4). Then follows a brief guide to a few other sites – Bethlehem, Sodom, Sinai, Alexandria – and Petrarch signs off: 'I don't know if you are at this point tired of travelling; certainly I am tired of writing [. . .] and here be the end of the road for both of us' (Cachey 2002: chapter 21.0).

Petrarch's _Itinerary_ may seem playfully postmodern: a travel guide written by a traveller who explicitly states that he never travelled. However, Petrarch was merely adopting a widespread idiom of mental or virtual pilgrimage that was central to the idea of travel in medieval literary culture (Beebe 2008; Rudy 2011). By the fifteenth century, the making of a virtual pilgrimage, through reading and contemplation, could accrue the same spiritual benefits as going on the actual journey. As Kathryne Beebe has described, Felix Fabri stressed that 'that those who travelled in spirit saw more and merited better rewards (and indulgences) than those who went physically' (Beebe 2010: 43).

This 'virtuality' is related to the genre of _mirabilia_ or 'wonders of the East'. Fantastical and fictional, _mirabilia_ nonetheless took the form of 'witnessed' journeys. Pre-eminent amongst these was the _Description of the World_ (1298), composed by Marco Polo (1254–1324) and Rustichello da Pisa ( _fl_. 1300). This influential book, which describes a journey to the Far East and which first appeared in French but was widely translated, is not the journal of a pioneer; Polo travelled along an established trade and diplomatic route. Rather, it is important because it gained a wide readership and played a key role in establishing a medieval Western tradition in which the East was a land of prodigies and monsters. Polo describes in great detail a wide range of 'marvels', a term that could encompass the miraculous and the monstrous, the unusual and threatening, the supernatural and the misunderstood. These marvels include strange animals ('large mastiffs, as big as donkeys'), alien religions ('idolaters, and truly an evil lot'), wonderfully ornate and rich cities ('there are quite 6,000 stone bridges, under which one, and even two, galleys abreast might pass') (Benedetto 1950: 183, 181, 233). Polo also describes unusual local customs: in Tibet, the men who burn thick canes in order to scare off wild animals and old women who bring their daughters to have sex with visiting travellers in return for a jewel which demonstrates their experience as lovers (Benedetto 1950: 179, 181). He describes a massive bird of Mogadishu like a gryphon. However, this bird, Polo says, is not half-bird and half-lion like a gryphon, but 'made just like an eagle'. Those who have seen it say it is 'is so big and so strong that it can take up an elephant in its talons [. . .] and then let it fall down to the ground, so that it is dashed to pieces' (Benedetto 1950: 343). Marco's marvels are not 'against nature' or fantastical prodigies, but often 'embellishments' or 'exaggerations', which gave rise to the nickname _Il Milione_ , the book of a million lies or fancies (see Gaunt 2013: 116–135; Larner 1999). Despite such embellishment, however, Polo was concerned with asserting the primacy of the eyewitness. For instance, in his account of the gryphon of Mogadishu, Polo states that 'about this bird I will tell you what those who have seen it relate; then I will tell you what I myself have seen'; he then corroborates the accounts of it, saying 'I, Marco Polo, measured it, and I found it to be 90 of my spans in length [. . .] truly it was a marvellous sight to see' (Benedetto 1950: 343–344).

A parallel but more spectacular tradition of marvellous monstrosity, ultimately dating back to Pliny (23–79 CE) and Solinus (third century CE), was firmly entrenched in the medieval literary imagination through Alexander romances. These texts, popular throughout Europe, described the fantastical adventures of Alexander the Great as he supposedly travelled to India in search of marvels, after his successful military campaigns. The Middle English poem _Kyng Alisaunder_ describes 'merueiles' (marvels) such as people who lived in water like 'ypotami' (hippopotami), 'bristled [. . .] as hogges / And stynken as water-dogges' (Smithers 1952: 301); people who stood 'alday on on[e] fote / And neuere wery' (Smithers 1952: 303); the vegan, teetotal Brahmins, men 'of hard liif and stronge penaunce' (Smithers 1952: 310); and a one-eyed challenger, 'blak as any pycch' (i.e. pitch)', who 'had noithere nekk ne throat – / His [head] was in his body' (Smithers 1952: 310). The Alexander romances knit curiosity with military conquest, foreshadowing the later Orientalist 'conquest' of the East through a kind of fantastical desire; a discourse of emergent and expanding nationalism shot through with a curiosity about what lies beyond the known world (Heng 2003).

The influence of Alexander romances is seen in Mandeville's prose _Book of Marvels and Travels_ , which emerged in England and France around 1356, and very quickly became widely read and translated into almost all the major European languages, from Gaelic to Danish (see Higgins 1997). The author-narrator 'Sir John Mandeville' describes how he travelled from England to Cairo and Jerusalem; in Cairo he claims to have been a mercenary at the Sultan's court, whilst in Jerusalem he visited all the holy sites. After the Holy Land, the narrative moves East – into the realm of wonders, marvels, and fantasies, such as Amazons, Pygmies, and dog-headed men. Mandeville's _Book_ is not an eyewitness account: 'Mandeville' is almost certainly a fictional persona adopted by the true author, many of the peoples he described have never existed, and even where the author does describe real, geographical locations it is often clear he is repeating other accounts of those places. However, what may appear to us as marvellous and incredible actually served the purpose of authenticating texts like Mandeville's, because marvels and prodigies were what readers expected from this genre of writing. At the same time, Mandeville's _Book_ is not entirely false in the information it presents: it includes, for example, learned, sophisticated excurses on the roundness of planet Earth. Mandeville's _Book_ is a _florilegium,_ a compilation of excerpts from others' writings, including Latin travel guides. Phenomenally popular and widely read, it was used both as a practical guide-book to Jerusalem and Palestine and as a literary source for wonders (by Chaucer and the _Pearl_ -poet and eventually Thomas More, who drew upon Mandeville in _Utopia_ ). Most arrestingly, Mandeville's fanciful world was often understood, in the Age of Discovery, as a precedent and template: the New World was found to hold within it a marvellous truth, in the form of hitherto unknown peoples, strange fauna, and riches (Greenblatt 1992).

**Satire and condemnation**

Medieval travel writing did not necessarily glorify travel or attempt to engage the reader's desire for wonder: in fact, it frequently made travel deeply unappealing. Meshullam of Volterra commented acidly of Jerusalem that 'It is not to be wondered at that foreigners who go there get ill; the wonder is that they do not all die' (Adler 1930: 195). Meshullam blamed the journey, the heat, and the city's draughts.

However, for Christian pilgrims the difficulties of travel could be mapped, imitatively, onto Christ's _via cruces_ (way of the cross), as the narrative of the difficult journey took on the symbolic cast of the archetypal difficult journey, that of Christ to Calvary. In this way, the difficult actuality of travel could be transformed into an apostolic or Christ-like narrative; a good example is Margery Kempe, whose autobiographical _Book_ , composed in the late 1430s, is structured through pilgrimage. Towards the end of the _Book_ , Kempe – aged, frail, unwell, penniless, beset by detractors, and terrified of bandits – slowly makes her way from Danzig to Wilsnack, to Aachen, to Calais, to Canterbury, and then home to Norfolk: a route, by foot and by cart, of over a thousand miles. This punishing journey through some of the major pilgrimage shrines of Europe gives a formal narrative completeness to Kempe's _imitatio Christi_ (imitation of Christ). She had started her adult life as a haughty businesswoman in Lynn, but this final journey confirmed the steadfastness of her humility and piety.

Emphasising her ordeal, Kempe, or her scribe, may also have had in mind the many voices and authorities that considered travel – and in particular women's travel (Daichman 1986) – to be illicit and morally dangerous. As a thirteenth-century Latin satire against marrying chirped:

The wicked wife seeks leave to ride
To pilgrims' abbeys far and wide;
The brothels offer more delights
Than visiting the holy sites.

(Blamires 1992: 126)

Indeed, an important part of the travel writing genre in medieval times is the anti-travel narrative. The potential for sin on the Jerusalem pilgrimage is uproariously evoked in in the figure of Frate Cippolla in Giovanni Boccaccio's _Decameron_ (1349–1353). This corrupt friar describes a journey through the Mediterranean to the Holy Land: first, having left Venice, he goes the wrong way, to Rome and then Sardinia, travelling west rather than east, hinting at illicit enterprises or ignorance. He then claims to have gone through the Bosphorus and on to places called 'Truffia' and 'Buffia'; made-up, nonsense places, suggestive of swindling (Italian _truffa_ , fraud) and silliness (Italian _buffa_ , comic). Frate Cippolla (whose name itself, 'Onion', has something of the ridiculous about it) then claims to have seen some minor wonders (water running downwards!) and ridiculous marvels (flying prune-hooks!). This is a parody of medieval travel literature, and the medieval taste for wonder, as seen in popular texts like those byMarco Polo and Mandeville.

A hilarious litany of unimpressive or impossible relics follows: 'the finger of the Holy Spirit', a Seraph's tuft, a Cherub's nail, 'some of the rays of the star that appeared to the Magi in the East', St Michael's sweat, and so on. Frate Cippolla is mocking his gullible audience, whose appetite for relics and Eastern wonders allows him to get away with it. Boccaccio is also critiquing frivolous fantasies of Jerusalem: through Frate Cippolla, he suggests that people too often prize the Earthly Jerusalem, the bits and pieces of sacred archaeology, above the Heavenly Jerusalem.

Boccaccio's story was probably known to Geoffrey Chaucer, whose _Canterbury Tales_ ( _c_. 1387) takes from the _Decameron_ the form of a sequence of stories, but puts this into the frame of a travel narrative: a group pilgrimage from Southwark to the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury. Travel – movement towards the shrine – at once sustains Chaucer's poem and undercuts it: the pilgrims never reach their destination. Moreover, several pilgrims are travelling for illicit reasons: the Prioress should have been enclosed in her priory rather than roving to Canterbury, the Wife of Bath knows much about 'wandering by the way', the Pardoner goes on pilgrimage to rip off gullible pilgrims. But, as the _Canterbury Tales_ suggests, to travel in the Middle Ages was to build a world out of stories: it is the journey, not the journey's end, which sustains the making of narrative.

**Select bibliography**

Adler, E. (1930) _Jewish Travellers_ , London: Routledge.

Ashley, K. and Deegan, M. (2009) _Being a Pilgrim: Art and Ritual on the Medieval Routes to Santiago_ , Aldershot: Ashgate.

Bandinel, B. (1857) _The Itineraries of William Wey,_ Edinburgh: Roxburgh Club.

Beebe, K. (2008) 'Reading Mental Pilgrimage in Context: The Imaginary Pilgrims and Real Travels of Felix Fabri's "Die Sionpilger"', _Essays in Medieval Studies_ 25: 39–70.

Benedetto, L.F. (1950) _The Travels of Marco Polo_ , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Blamires, A. (ed.) (1992) _Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cachey, T.J. (ed. and trans.) (2002) _Petrarch's Guide to the Holy Land_ , Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Campbell, M. (1991) _The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing 400–1600,_ Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Carruthers, M. (2000) _The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images 400–1200,_ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chareyron, N. (2005) _Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages_ , New York: Columbia University Press.

Cooper-Rompato, C. (2011) 'Traveling Tongues: Foreign-Language Word-Lists in Wynkyn de Worde and William Wey', _Chaucer Review_ 46: 223–236.

Daichman, G. (1986) _Wayward Nuns in Medieval Literature_ , Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Dyas, D. (2001) _Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 700–1500_ , Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

Elad, A. (1995) _Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship: Holy Places, Ceremonies, Pilgrimage_ , Leiden: Brill.

Fabri, F. (1893) _Wanderings in the Holy Land_ , 2 vols, London: Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society.

Gaunt, S. (2013) _Marco Polo's Le Divesement du Monde_ , Woodbridge: Boydell.

Greenblatt, S. (1992) _Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World,_ Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Heng, G. (2003) _Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy_ , New York: Columbia University Press.

Higgins, I.M. (1997) _Writing East: The 'Travels' of Sir John Mandeville_ , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hoade, E. (ed.) (1952) _Western Pilgrims 1322–1392_ , Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press.

Kaplan, E.A. (1997), _Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the 'Imperial Gaze'_ , London: Routledge.

Kupfer, M. (2008) "Letres . . . Plus Vrayes": Hebrew Script and Jewish Witness in the _Mandeville_ Manuscript of Charles V', _Speculum_ 83: 58–111.

Larner, J. (1999) _Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World,_ New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Letts, M. (ed.) (1946) _The Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff Knight_ , London: Hakluyt Society.

Lochrie, K. (2009) 'Provincializing Medieval Europe: Mandeville's Cosmopolitan Utopia', _PMLA_ 124: 592–599.

Mandeville, J. (2012) _The Book of Marvels and Travels_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Metlitzki, D. (1977) _The Matter of Araby in Medieval England_ , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Morris, C. (2005) _The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West: From the Beginning to 1600_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rudy, K. (2011) _Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages_ , Turnhout: Brepols.

Smithers, G.V. (ed.) (1952) _Kyng Alisaunder,_ London: Oxford University Press.

Sumption, J. (2001) _Pilgrimage_ , London: Faber.

Webb, D. (2000) _Pilgrimage in Medieval England_ , London: Hambledon.

Whalen, B. (2011) _Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Reader_ , Toronto: Broadview.

Windeatt, B. (ed.) (2004) _The Book of Margery Kempe,_ Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

Zacher, C. (1977) _Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England_ , Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Western Travel Writing, 1450–1750

_Matthew Day_

In July 1607, William Keeling, Commander of the English East India Company's third voyage to the East Indies, became becalmed in the Atlantic Ocean. Consequently, he sent for 'the Booke' to evaluate his options. Examining Richard Hakluyt's _Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation_ (1598–1600), he decided to head for Sierra Leone to find water. He made a good decision. As Samuel Purchas, the editor of Keeling's subsequent account of the voyage, commented: 'This saved the Company, [. . .] 20000. pounds, which they had bin endamaged [. . .] if that Booke had not given light.' Playing on the Horatian trope that reading should bring both profit (i.e. useful instruction) and pleasure, Purchas noted, 'M. _Hackluits_ books of Voyages are of great profit' (1625: I, sig.2Q4v). In a virtuous circle, the text on board Keeling's ship helped salvage his journey, the success of which elicited a further narrative subsequently included in a later collection of travel accounts, Purchas's _Hakluytus Posthumous or Purchas his Pilgrimes_ (1625).

The episode exemplifies part of Francis Bacon's 1620 adage that 'printing, gunpowder and the compass' had 'exert[ed] more power and influence over the affairs of men' than any other 'mechanical discoveries' (Bacon 1994: 131). In the early modern period advances in navigational techniques (combined with developing European military power) made possible a rapid expansion in travel. Correspondingly, travel writing emerged from being relatively non-existent as a genre to having diverse literary traditions. It extended in geographical scope, increased in quantity and developed offshoots in a range of literary forms including the novel, drama, and poetry. By the end of the period under consideration here, the most important or popular travel accounts frequently reached a very wide market, being extensively reviewed in periodicals and often crossing international boundaries through translations. In Germany, 'travel literature was among the most popular vernacular reading matter in the seventeenth century' (Bepler 1994: 183) while in England, by the middle of the eighteenth century, 'voyages and travels' were firmly established as one of the period's most frequently printed genres (Batten 1978; Edwards 1994).

This upsurge of travel writing reflected, and as shown above also enabled, an enormous increase in European travellers in the early modern period. Most notable was the rise of extended oceanic voyages. Beginning with the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, Europeans rounded Africa's Cape of Good Hope to reach India and Asia; via the Straits of Magellan at the tip of South America, they circumnavigated the world. When Columbus happened upon the West Indies in 1492 and in later voyages 'discovered' America, he showed the way for other European nations to embark on New World colonization. Elsewhere, the English and Dutch undertook whaling and fishing voyages in the Arctic regions and searched for a northern passage to China. Via Cape Horn, they reached the Far East and South Pacific to engage principally in trade but also in piracy and war. By the end of the period scientific discovery had emerged as another rationale for journeys. These far-flung voyages were accompanied by a rise in travel within Europe and the Mediterranean, undertaken for reasons as diverse as diplomacy, religion, trade, and education, culminating in the emergence of the Grand Tour. Within their own countries, workers migrated for employment and the more fortunate indulged in tourism. Mainly these activities were the preserve of men, as opportunities for women to travel remained constrained. Nevertheless, some women travelled: migrating to the Americas (Vickers 2003: 81–82), gaining a religious education in Europe (Games 2008: 37–38) and, occasionally, enjoying cultural and tourist activities. The written record, however, like travel itself, was dominated by men. Only at the very end of the period, in the eighteenth century, did women begin to publish travelogues, although some manuscript accounts by women, such as Celia Fiennes's record of touring Britain in the 1690s, were written and circulated before this.

In what follows, I chart the main forms of European travel and its associated texts. Before doing so, however, I address two more general topics: shifting cultural attitudes to travel and travel writing and the emergence and consolidation of a new genre labelled by contemporaries 'voyages and travels'.

**Cultural attitudes to travel and travel writing**

Despite its increasing popularity, not everyone approved of travel. On land, highwaymen, lawlessness and confrontation with native populations or other European nations made travelling hazardous. At sea, shipwreck, capture, piracy, and slavery were very real dangers, as was mutiny. These perils formed the basis of objections to travel (Warneke 1995: 1–14) but moral concerns were also voiced. In England Roger Ascham complained that Italy was not fit 'for yong men to fetch either wisdom or honestie from' (1570: sig.H3v). Thomas Nashe mocked Hakluyt's collection of long-distance voyage narratives, and though Bishop Joseph Hall thought travel for 'Matter of trafique, and Matter of State' acceptable, he remained sceptical of 'Travell of curiosity' (1617: sigsA6v, A8r). Influenced by Thomas More's _Utopia_ (1516), which depicted an imaginary world to satirize colonial aspirations, Hall attacked travel per se, observing 'I see not [. . .] any profit or worth in the world contained in travell' (1609: sig.8v).

Objections to travel included complaints about cost and the potential for moral corruption. Protestants feared that spiritual degradation would result from encounters with Catholicism or other religions; commentators of all creeds feared the effects of transculturation and rebuked travellers who returned 'full of words, vanitie, [and] mis-dispositions' (Hall 1617: sig.A5r). Colonists too were criticized: English Protestants were challenged about their failure to undertake missionary work, while Bartolomé de las Casas lambasted the Spanish Conquistadors for their brutal conduct in his _Brevissima relacíon de la destruycíon de las Indias_ ( _Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies_ , 1552). Translated into multiple languages, it helped initiate the Black Legend of Spanish atrocities (Wagner and Parish 1967).

Moral anxieties also extended to travel writing and the effects of reading it. Travel writers were notorious for their hyperbole and mendacity and satirists such as Ben Jonson attacked readers who – inspired by accounts of easily accessible gold – sought to make easy money in the New World. However, gullibility and greed were not the only causes for concern. Some commentators felt that the wonders and marvels often reported by travellers – most notoriously in the medieval narratives of figures like Polo and Mandeville, but also in the more sober, empirical accounts of early modern discoverers – might inflame and infatuate the imagination (see Lamb 2001). In 1710, the Earl of Shaftesbury lamented travel writing's deleterious effects on good taste which 'must of necessity grow barbarous, whilst _Barbarian_ customs, Savage Manners, _Indian_ Wars and Wonders of the _Terra Incognita,_ employ our leisure Hours' (Shaftesbury 1710: sig.N1v). His complaint reveals a fear that Augustan notions of good taste inspired by the classical world would be overwhelmed by a fascination with the exotic and the curious. Just as those who opposed travel thought it would corrupt the traveller, so Shaftesbury feared that travel writing, and the reading of it, might have a detrimental effect on the civilized reader.

Despite this, travel and travel writing had their defenders. Francis Bacon deemed travel 'in the younger Sort [. . .] a Part of Education; In the Elder, a Part of Experience' (1985: 56). William Lithgow thought that it brought 'understanding, experience, patience, and an infinite treasure, of unexprimable [inexpressible] vertues' and that writing it up revealed 'the governement of States, the authority and disposition of Kings and Princes; the secrets, manners, customs, and Religion of all Nations, and People' (1614: sig.B1r). In 1710, Joseph Addison claimed that there was no class of books he more delighted in (Batten 1978: 1). Tobias Smollett agreed, claiming that travel writing enabled readers to

choose the most entertaining route, embark with the most agreeable companions, view remote cities and their governments, extend [their] acquaintance thro' all the nations of the globe, and interest [them]selves in a succession of incidents and adventures, that at once improve the mind and delight the imagination.

(Smollett 1756: I, sigs A2r-v)

By the mid-eighteenth century, indeed, travel writing was well established as one of the most respectable and intellectually important genres of the age (Batten 1978). Offering a blend of useful information and literary pleasure, the travelogue was by this date a form that was central to ongoing debates in science, philosophy, and many other disciplines, whilst remaining accessible and interesting to less sophisticated readers on account of its narrative element. Such, at least, was the generic ideal, although not every account succeeded in combining profit and pleasure to the satisfaction of contemporary critics.

**The emergence of the 'voyages and travels' genre**

Travel writing's eighteenth-century respectability, which led to reviewers recommending travelogues as appropriate reading matter even for women and children, reflects a stabilization of the genre across the early modern period. At the start of the period, travel writing was not a clear, well-defined genre or set of sub-genres (Sherman 2002: 20). A generic norm emerged only slowly, while much diversity of style and form remained. Columbus's discovery was first announced by letter (Thacher 1967: II, 3–72), while Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation spawned a wide variety of texts. Moreover, authors adopted different strategies depending on their purposes and aspirations for self-fashioning. Christopher Farewell promoted trade and complained against the East India Company, while Sir Walter Ralegh explained away his failure to find gold or El Dorado in language that recalled a questing knight. Thomas James, at royal command, sought to maintain belief in the North-West Passage; Thomas Coryat wrote to entertain his readers. Ambassadorial reports, histories of colonized locations, sailing directions, and tour guides were just some of the diverse forms of direct or reported travel literature of the period. These texts also contributed to other literature including drama (McInnis 2013), poetry, and the novel (McKeon 2002: 90–114), as well as informing the geographical information contained in maps such as Abraham Ortelius's _Theatrum Orbis Terrarum_ ( _Theatre of the World_ , 1570).

The generic confusion at the start of the period was particularly evident in works such as Ptolemy's _Geographia –_ which was rediscovered in the early modern era and first printed in 1477 – and the cosmographies of Peter Apian, Sebastian Münster, and André Thevet. They brought together geographical, navigational, and astronomical information and sometimes – as with the letters of Amerigo Vespucci – appended to Martin Waldseemüller's _Cosmographiae introductio_ ( _Introduction to Cosmography_ , 1507) – they also included travel accounts. However, their diverse, polyglot nature was not to everyone's taste. The British geographer Richard Hakluyt preferred first-hand accounts, taking inspiration from Giovanni Battista Ramusio's _Navigationi et viaggi_ ( _Voyages and Travels_ , 1550–59), the most significant Italian collection of travel narratives and related material, 'used by Geographers throughout Western Europe' (Small 2012: 47). It comprised accounts of the Portuguese, Spanish, and French voyages to Africa, Asia, and the New World, some of which had previously been kept secret (Parks 1970: I, 3). Hakluyt followed Ramusio in dividing his own collection of travel accounts, _The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation_ , into distinct geographical areas; however, he had a more nationalist agenda and in addition to first-person narratives of travel also included letters patent, sailing directions, advice to travellers, and celebratory poems. The collection was first published as a single volume in 1589 and then expanded to three volumes in 1598–1600, inaugurating an English tradition of large compilations which was continued by Samuel Purchas's five-volume _Purchas his Pilgrimes_. In France, Melchisédech Thévenot's _Relations de divers voyages curieux_ ( _Accounts of Diverse Interesting Voyages_ , 1663–72) imitated Hakluyt (Dew 2006: 39–40). Like Ramusio, though, Thévenot went beyond national boundaries and incorporated English and Dutch voyage accounts. These large-scale collections continued to be published throughout the early modern period, but sentiment about their contents changed. Awnsham and John Churchill thought 'Articles, Charters, Privileges, Letters, Relations' all 'little to the purpose of Travels and Discoveries' (Churchill 1704: I, sig.M3r) and Tobias Smollett similarly preferred 'incidents and adventures' to 'dry descriptions of bearings and distances, tides and currents, variations of the compass, leeway wind and weather, sounding, anchoring and other terms of navigation' (Smollett 1756: I, sig.A2v).

As these comments suggest, by the eighteenth century the extended travel narrative – i.e. an eyewitness account, usually framed as a journal or diary, by someone who had actually made the journey – had emerged as the central and most characteristic mode in the genre now labelled 'voyages and travels'. Throughout the period, however, there remained great diversity as to what was accepted as travel writing.

The generic template of the first-hand, eyewitness journal emerged in part from attempts to direct both _what_ travellers should write about and also _how_ they relayed their information back to the domestic audience. In the mid-sixteenth century, humanist scholars outlined the diverse _topoi_ travellers should note (Stagl 1995: 47–90). An example of this _ars apodemica_ (art of travel) literature is Albrecht Meier's _Methodus describendi regiones, urbes et arces_ ( _Method of Describing Regions, Towns and Cities_ , 1587). Its twelve sections ranged from cosmography, geography, and the political state to literature and history, and each section contained a number of subsections (Carey 2012). Some works in English, such as Giles Fletcher's _Of the Russe Common Wealth_ (1591) and Paul Rycaut's _The Present State of the Ottoman Empire_ (1668), showed their indebtedness to this method. Yet it was superseded by the empirical, inductive approach propounded by Francis Bacon and furthered in the late seventeenth century by the Royal Society, which sought to put travel writing on a more scientific footing. Robert Boyle's 'General Heads for a _Natural History of a Countrey,_ Great or Small' (1666), contained in the Society's _Philosophical Transactions_ , emphasized rational enquiry and reflected the Society's desire to establish a 'revised natural philosophy' and expand knowledge of natural history through travel accounts (Ord 2008; Carey 2012). These and other directives issued by the Royal Society sought to regulate in the first place what travellers recorded, placing emphasis on the observable and explicable in preference to hearsay or the fantastical. They also tried to regulate how observations were made and relayed to readers. Travellers were encouraged to keep journals and to make observations on the spot rather than from memory, and a plain style was encouraged, eschewing excessive rhetorical ornamentation.

These guidelines, coupled with a growing audience preference for accounts that seemed more plausible and reliable than the fantastical tales of figures like Polo and Mandeville, gave a centre of gravity to a previously heterogeneous genre. Texts such as William Dampier's hugely successful _New Voyage Round the World_ (1697) established a pattern that would evolve into the Enlightenment travelogues of the eighteenth century. Detailed notes about the external world – especially natural-historical and ethnographical information about humans, animals and plants – were presented within a text purporting to be a first-person journal. This practice underscored the eyewitness authority of the traveller, even though in reality many journals comprised manuscript material which had been adapted and written up for publication. It also framed the traveller's observations with a narrative that made the volume more readable, allowing the writer to introduce occasional moments of drama or adventure whilst simultaneously fashioning a plain-speaking persona that further heightened his apparent trustworthiness and authority. The focus remained, however, very much on the external world; not until the latter part of the eighteenth century would travel writing begin to explore in any detail the inner world of the traveller.

**Long-distance voyages of trade, discovery, and colonization**

The earliest long-distance trading voyages of the early modern period were those of the Portuguese down the coast of Africa and round to Asia. Beginning in the fifteenth century, these voyages were recorded in chronicles and redacted in histories such as Joāo de Barros's _Décadas de Ásia_ ( _Decades of Asia_ , 1552–1615). Later, the exploits of Vasco da Gama, who in 1498 became the first European to sail directly to India, were celebrated in Luís Vaz de Camões's epic poem _Os Lusíadas_ ( _The Lusiads_ , 1572), which looked back longingly at that period of Portuguese success. Da Gama's voyage combined both exploration and trade, while his return to Calicut in 1502 marked the start of a brutal exercise in imperialism. Camões – who had himself been to India – wrote at a time when Portuguese influence was waning partly because of the repeated disasters that befell their carracks. Between 1550 and 1650, about 130 carracks failed to return and the frequency of writing about them led to an identifiable 'shipwreck narrative' genre. Accounts such as _Viagem & naufragio da nao sam Paulo_ ( _The Voyage and Shipwreck of the Great Ship São Paulo_ , 1565) were direct and moving accounts of disaster that were often critical of human greed and read the outcome in terms of divine justice (Boxer 1959). Shipwrecks, of course, were not a uniquely Portuguese phenomenon, but in England such narratives adopted a more providential tone (Harris 1999) and influenced fictional travel writing such as Daniel Defoe's enormously popular _The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe_ (1719).

Portuguese dominance in Asia was challenged in the seventeenth century by the French, Dutch, and English. The English East India Company was established in 1600 and the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC (Dutch East India Company) in 1602. Both produced enormous amounts of literature, although much remained in manuscript. Published accounts, such as those contained in _Purchas his Pilgrimes_ or Isaak Commelin's _Begin ende Voortgangh van de Vereenighde Nederlandtsche Geoctroyeerde Oost-Indische Compagnie_ ( _Origin and Development of the United Dutch Chartered East India Company_ , 1645), focused on the navigation and conditions of the voyages, the availability of commodities, rivalries with other European nations, and trading exchanges with non-Europeans. Relatively little attention was paid to ethnographic information about indigenous populations or to the natural history of the regions. As European countries extended their involvement in India and the East Indies, so their activities became increasingly colonial, as revealed by works such as Clement Downing's _A Compendious History of the Indian Wars_ (1737). It incorporated narratives not only of voyages but also of wars with indigenous populations and colonial rivals. Further east, in Japan and China, Europeans were much less powerful. Consequently, accounts stemmed from those permitted to travel in those regions. Engelbert Kaempfer, a German physician, who stayed in Japan for three years at the end of the seventeenth century provided a detailed description of that country, while the writings of the Jesuits in China formed the basis of Jean Baptiste du Halde's _Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l'Empire de la Chine_ ( _Geographical, Historical, Chronological, Political and Physical Description of the Empire of China_ , 1735). These accounts provided Europeans with some of the best information available on these countries and were quickly translated into other languages.

Another form of travel literature that moved quickly between European languages was accounts of circumnavigations. Narratives such as Antonio Pigafetta's 1525 relation of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition (1519–22) and William Cornelison Schouten's _Journal ofte Beschryvinghe van de wonderlicke reyse_ ( _Journal or Description of the Wonderful Journey_ , 1618) disclosed new sailing routes and provided invaluable information about the Pacific Ocean and its islands. Accounts of English circumnavigations such as those by Sir Francis Drake, Woodes Rogers, and George Anson celebrated the wealth they obtained by plunder from Spanish shipping as much as their navigational achievements. Indeed, many of these circumnavigations combined both exploration and piracy and there was a strong link between the two. William Dampier, for example, was a privateer like Woodes Rogers, and his _New Voyage Round the World_ (1697) recounted his experiences in this role, as well as relaying a wealth of natural-historical data. The fullest account of contemporary buccaneering, however, was Alexandre Exquemelin's _De Americaensche Zee-Rovers_ ( _The American Buccaneers_ , 1678), which was translated into both French and English and displayed significant anti-Spanish sentiment.

The success of the circumnavigators who sailed around the Southern capes contrasted sharply with the experience of many English and Dutch voyagers sent in search of a North-East or North-West passage to China. These heroic failures produced compelling and harrowing tales of endurance. George Best described how Martin Frobisher's third expedition (1578) spent terrifying days and nights avoiding icebergs and enduring snowstorms in July and August. Gerrit de Veer's _Waerachtige Beschryvinghe van Drie Seylagien_ . . . _van Catthay ende China_ ( _A True Description of Three Voyages . . . towards Cathay and China_ , 1598) narrated William Barents's appalling experience of an Arctic winter. Later voyage accounts such as Friedrich Martens's _Spitzbergische und Grönländishce Reisebeschreibung im jahr 1671_ ( _Description of a Journey to Spitzbergen and Greenland in the year 1671_ , 1675) and Henry Ellis's _A Voyage to Hudson Bay, in the Year 1746–47_ (1748) provided a more scientific approach to Arctic voyage accounts, supplying better navigational information and descriptions of the Inuit and the local fauna.

The search for the North-West Passage was one motive driving Europeans to North America, but the predominant reason for the westward enterprise was colonization. Beginning with the Spanish in the early sixteenth century, European nations increasingly established control in the Americas. Their efforts were motivated by a number of factors reflected in the surviving literature. The Conquistadors sought land and wealth but Las Casas (a Jesuit) deplored their violent methods. Although they sought to justify their actions in writings such as Bernal Díaz's _Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nova España_ ( _The True History of the Conquest of New Spain_ , 1568), the warlike nature of their activities dominates many of these narratives, in contrast with works such as José de Acosta's _Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias_ ( _The Natural and Moral History of the Indies_ , 1590), which provided detailed accounts of the customs and habits of the indigenous populations, as well as of the region's flora, fauna, and geography. Jean de Léry's _Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil_ ( _History of a Voyage made to the Land of Brazil_ , 1578), Thomas Harriot's _A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia_ (1588) and John Lawson's _A New Voyage to Carolina; Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of that Country_ (1709) provided similar information for those regions, while simultaneously seeking to justify and promote colonization. Other colonial writing, however, might be thought of as a deterrent to European settlement: René de Laudonnière's _L'histoire notable de la Floride_ ( _Notable History of Florida_ , 1586) and Captain John Smith's _The Generall Historie of Virginia_ (1624) both made plain the hardship of the physical environment, the unpreparedness of the colonists, and the dangers of rival European nations and indigenous populations.

Contained in Smith's _Historie_ is an account of his capture by Indians and subsequent release after Pocahontas's intervention. This constitutes an early example of the captivity narrative – an offshoot or subgenre of travel writing which in America subsequently became a genre in its own right. Focusing on the 'tribulations and the spiritual and physical dangers' that captives encountered (Matar 2005: 63), these narratives usually emphasized religious endurance. They often concluded, as in Mary Rowlandson's _The Sovereignty and Goodness of God_ (1682), by thanking God for deliverance and promising to show increased gratitude for the blessings of daily life.

The writing of long-distance travel in the early modern period generally emphasized the external environment over the traveller's personal thoughts and feelings, although the author's motivation for travel of course shaped the content of the text. Merchants noted commodities, colonists considered the opportunities for settlement and the bellicosity or otherwise of indigenous populations, and explorers prioritized climatic, geographical, and navigational information, though all, to some extent, overlapped in their interests. By contrast, the authors of European and Mediterranean voyage accounts, though they had some motives for travel in common with those who went further afield, often had a different set of agendas and moved in a very different environment.

**Near-Eastern, European, and home travels**

As a number of recent scholars have highlighted (Matar 2005; Vitkus 2003), the experience of European travellers on the continent and in the Near East was very different from that in the Far East and the Americas. Although many travellers expressed considerable ambivalence, if not outright hostility, about the foreign cultures they visited, they were unable to dismiss as 'savage' the civilization and organization of rival European nations. Islamic countries such as Turkey, Persia, and Morocco, although more alien to Christian European eyes, similarly generated awe and respect as much as suspicion and anxiety. As Richard Knolles marvelled:

If you consider the beginning, progresse, and perpetuall felicities of this the Othoman Empire, there is in this world nothing more admirable or strange; if the greatnesse and lustre thereof, nothing more magnificent or glorious; if the power and strength thereof, nothing more dreadful or dangerous.

(Knolles 1603: sig.A4v)

Admiration was combined with fascination at the religious practices, dress, and behaviour of Muslim peoples. Even Francis Knight's _Relation of Seaven Yeares Slaverie under the Turkes_ (1640) showed an interest in cultural practices (Matar 2005: 63) although another captive John Rawlins, perhaps understandably, wanted to be free from what he described as 'Turkish slavery and inhuman abuses' (Vitkus 2001: 105). As these examples suggest, travelling in the Muslim world and in the Mediterranean could be a dangerous business, due in no small measure to a thriving culture of piracy in this period, especially around the Barbary Coast of North Africa. These pirates included many Christians who had 'turn'd Turk' (Sandys 1615: sig.F2r) and who, depending on their nationality and actions, could be viewed as renegades, outlaws, or heroes (Jowitt 2007).

Sensationalistic and often highly providentialist captivity narratives were thus a popular component of Mediterranean as well as New World travel writing. Yet the best writing on the region, such as George Sandys' _A Relation of a Journey begun Anno Domini 1610_ (1615), provided detailed and more measured descriptions of the peoples, cultures, and regions. Later, Joseph Tournefort meticulously recounted his observations in his _Relation d'un voyage du Levant_ ( _Relation of a Voyage to the Levant_ , 1717) and incorporated numerous illustrations. This was a feature also found in another detailed work, Richard Pococke's _Description of the East, and some other Countries_ (1743–45) and these texts demonstrate the increasingly scientific approach to travel writing of the region.

After the Reformation, pilgrimage declined significantly. However, it did not disappear altogether and accounts of such journeys were popular if infrequent. Henry Timberlake's _A True and Strange Discourse of the Travailes of Two English Pilgrimes_ (1603), for example, was reissued as late as 1738, while Joseph Pitts' account of his pilgrimage to Mecca – _A True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mohammetans_ (1704) – went through three editions by 1731. Pilgrimage practices were adapted to Protestant sensibilities (O'Donnell 2009) or secularized (Tiffany 2006), whilst in France discourses of pilgrimage remained of 'enduring relevance [. . .] to Renaissance culture' (Williams 1998: 251). Texts such as John Bunyan's immensely popular allegory _The Pilgrim's Progress_ (1678) demonstrated the continued interest in the motif in England, though pilgrimage faded as a motivation for actual journeys.

By contrast, ambassadorial activity flourished. As well as guides on diplomacy such as Abraham de Wicquefort's _L'ambassadeur et ses fonctions_ ( _The Ambassador and his Functions_ , 1680), various accounts of diplomatic missions were published, along with ambassadorial correspondence. In England, the nature of these texts varied significantly. _Sir Thomas Smithes Voiage and Entertainment in Rushia_ (1605) recounted the ambassador's eventful visit to the Tsar, with an emphasis on the 'strange and Novell' (Smith 1605: sig.A2r) as well as on ambassadorial etiquette. By contrast, the posthumously published _Original Letters of His Excellency Sir Richard Fanshaw, during his Embassies in Spain and Portugal_ (1702) focused on Fanshaw's successful negotiation of King Charles II's marriage to the Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza. However, not all ambassadorial reports were well received. Robert Molesworth's _An Account of Denmark, as it was in the Year 1692_ (1694) provided a detailed description of the country in the best _ars apodemica_ manner, but also reflected critically on the transition from elected to absolute monarchy. Not surprisingly, the Danish king complained.

In the Preface to his work, Molesworth delineated the benefits of travel and noted how an extended stay abroad could make a gentleman useful to his country. In doing so, he referred to what became known as the Grand Tour. In this educational and cultural experience young men travelled through Western Europe to visit classical and cultural sites, improve their languages and gain 'mature judgment of the interests of states, and manners of people [. . .] and Gentile [ _sic_ ] and courteous behaviour' (Lassels 1670: no sig). Although Richard Lassels's _Voyage of Italy_ (1670) is often regarded as initiating the Grand Tour, recent scholarship has shown that it was well established by 1630, with diaries and letters demonstrating the learning and careful self-fashioning that were undertaken (Chaney and Wilks 2014). Nor was this trans-European travel merely a case of northern Europeans heading south. Continental travellers, such as Samuel Sorbiere toured England providing detailed observations on attitudes, science, and religion while writers such as Jean-Bernard Le Blanc in his _Lettres d'un François_ ( _Letters of a Frenchman_ , 1745) adopted a more comparative approach and discussed the government and politics of both England and France.

The increasingly recreational nature of European travel paralleled the development of domestic travel for leisure purposes. William Camden's _Britannia_ (1586) provided detailed descriptions of places of interest, while the dramatist Ben Jonson and poet John Taylor undertook walking tours to Scotland, the latter recording his in _The Pennyles Pilgrimage_ (1618). Not all accounts reached print: Celia Fiennes's journal of her travels throughout England gave detailed information about noble houses, churches, and spas as well as on industrial activity but remained unpublished until the nineteenth century. By contrast, Daniel Defoe's _A Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain_ [ _._ . .] _giving a Particular Account of whatever is Curious and Worth Observation_ (1724–27) provided comprehensive details of trade and commercial issues, as well as cultural and historic sites such as cathedrals and ancient buildings, and went through many editions. Such narratives were a prelude to the walking tours and guidebooks that emerged in the Romantic era.

As the example of Fiennes suggests, accounts of travel by women in this period generally appear in unpublished forms like letters and diaries. In 1739, however, Elizabeth Justice's _Voyage to Russia_ became the first _published_ female-authored travelogue. Between 1716 and 1718, moreover, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu provided a detailed (and subsequently acclaimed) account of Turkish life in the famous letters she sent home from Istanbul, where she had accompanied her husband on his ambassadorial posting. However, Montagu's letters would not be published in a single volume until 1763, the year after her death.

**Conclusion**

Travel literature in the period 1450–1750 was enormously diverse in content, style, and genre and covered many types of journey to a constantly expanding range of places. Originally generically indeterminate, travel writing slowly adopted a more consistent form and style, and a more empirical and scientific approach inspired by the Royal Society and the Enlightenment. Even as it did so, a range of sub-genres continued, including letter writing; shipwreck, piracy and captivity narratives; chorographic descriptions of places; and fictional narratives. Travel writing of the period mostly focused on reporting information about the external world and did not much concern itself with exploring or conveying the traveller's personal thoughts and feelings. Writing by Europeans in this period frequently displays condescending attitudes to indigenous populations and a competitive and nationalistic approach to those who could not be conquered. Yet the best travel writers reveal a complex and careful engagement with the 'other' they encountered, describing the cultural practices, customs, and habits of unfamiliar peoples in an even-handed way. They also achieve an effective synthesis of narrative and description, combining an account of the events of the journey with perceptive depictions of peoples, places, and things. That travel literature was successful is evident from its frequent publication and diverse forms. Yet it did not just serve the wanderlust of armchair travellers. Read to support investment and participation in trading and colonial activities, to bolster diplomatic negotiations, and for ethnographic and scientific study, early modern travel writing provided 'profit and pleasure' for many different readers, and was itself a major stimulus and aid to greater mobility and greater engagement with the wider world.

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Shaftesbury, Earl of (1710) _Soliloquy: or Advice to an Author_ , London.

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Western Travel Writing, 1750–1950

_Barbara Korte_

For most of the period covered in this chapter, travel writing was a prestigious, prolific and highly popular genre in Europe, being a mainstay of the rapidly expanding print market. Translations between English, French and German were frequent, with major texts generating transnational attention and influence (Martin and Pickford 2012). The proliferation and popularity of the genre reflects the intense change that Western societies were undergoing from the mid-eighteenth century onwards under the impact of political, economic and technological revolutions. Travel writing was consequently enmeshed in the intellectual, emotional and aesthetic currents of its times, and travel also increasingly appeared as a thematic and structural element in literary works of this era.

The sheer volume and variety of travel writing since around 1760 should not be understated. However, there are two major contexts in which travel and its narration were centrally entwined: the rise of the West to global dominance, and the spread of Western modernity, both these processes being essentially linked. Ideologically, they are based in the Enlightenment's philosophical debate about the status of humanity and the nature of society and civilization (which also started the revolutions in America and France), as well as its production of an allegedly 'universal' but essentially Western knowledge that is embodied in the monumental French _Encyclopédie_ (1751–72) and similar projects in other European countries. The progress of Western civilization had practical manifestations in technological invention, agricultural reform, industrialization and urbanization. All these processes had significant impact on the history of travel, just as they served the worldwide advancement of financial, mercantile and industrial capitalism. This capitalism, in turn, helped to democratize but also to commoditize travel as it generated the means and leisure time which enabled ever greater numbers of people to set out on a journey. If, as Dean MacCannell claims, the tourist is 'one of the best models available for modern-man-in general' and sightseeing can be seen as 'a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity' (1976: 1, 13), this post-industrial development was already prefigured in the late eighteenth century and notably the Romantic period, when 'the figure of the "tourist" becomes entangled with debates about modernity, and with anxieties about the apparently deleterious effects of the modernizing forces at work in British society (and subsequently, in the world)' (Thompson 2007: 41).

The centrality of travel and cultural encounters in the intellectual life of this period is reflected in the work of one of its most influential thinkers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who also represents the gradual transition from Enlightened to Romantic ideas and ideals. Rousseau's two _Discourses_ , and especially the second on the origins of inequality and the idea of 'natural man' (1755), are impregnated with their author's reading about voyages of exploration. Rousseau's novel of education, _Émile_ (1762), incorporates in its final book a critical discussion of the benefit of travel for personal development, and it reflects Rousseau's awareness of a world already covered by a dense network of global transport and trade: 'There is now a hundred times more contact between Europe and Asia than there formerly was between Gaul and Spain. Europe alone used to be more diverse than the whole world is today' (Rousseau 1979: 452). With his acknowledgement of the importance of travel and travel writing for an understanding of the world and civilization on the one hand, and for the individual self on the other, Rousseau maps the two key themes addressed in the following sections: first, the travel writing arising from scientific exploration, and second, the rise of modern tourism, from the Grand Tour onwards.

**Encyclopaedism to imperialism**

Voyages and travels were a constitutive part of the Enlightenment's project of collecting and cataloguing knowledge about the wider world, and they played an essential role in promoting the period's new science-based understanding of mankind and human society. Travel created opportunities for a testing of European civilization against non-European societies in 'old' and 'new' parts of the world. Much knowledge about foreign countries and their people was accumulated during missionary and diplomatic travel, especially in the East, and it was popularized through widely noted accounts such as John Barrow's _Travels in China_ (1804). The subtitle of its original edition announced the book's attempt 'to appreciate the rank that this extraordinary empire may be considered to hold in the scale of civilized nations' (Barrow 1804). However, it is the big maritime and landward expeditions sponsored by governments and scientific institutions with which exploration writing of the later eighteenth century is most prominently associated. These overseas ventures revived a European concern with more 'natural', 'primitive' societies and the figure of the 'noble savage', which had engaged philosophical reflection ever since early contact with the Americas. In the eighteenth century, Native Americans still served as a mirror for Western civilization, but exploration entered a new phase with Bougainville's and Cook's voyages to the Pacific during the 1760s and 1770s. These expeditions brought Europe news of yet undiscovered peoples and fresh material for comparative analysis.

The new type of scientific exploration profited from improved instruments for precise measurement, and it was regularized by precise instructions for observation and the collection of specimens by specialists in all branches of contemporary science. Such instructions also related to the written and visual documentation of these travels, following a practice that had been implemented in Britain by the Royal Society. Scientific travel yielded specialized publications for the expert as well as personal narratives for the general reader, but even the latter included long informative sections and often maps, tables and statistics. With the exception of an internally fractured Germany that had no colonial and major overseas commercial interests – and whose explorers therefore joined expeditions sponsored by other nations, such as Georg Forster or Carsten Niebuhr, or financed themselves – many European countries promoted exploration far into the nineteenth century; the voyage of the _Beagle_ , which Charles Darwin accompanied as a naturalist (1831–36), and John Franklin's last venture into the Arctic (1845–48) are well-known examples of continued maritime exploration. The geographic, botanical and ethnographic information gathered during scientific travels served the national interests of their sponsors, but these travels also had a remarkably cosmopolitan dimension as far as participation was concerned. Georg Forster and his father Johann Reinhold, who is named as the translator of Louis Antoine de Bougainville's _Voyage autour du monde_ ( _A Voyage Round the World_ , 1771) into English, accompanied James Cook during his second voyage in the Pacific (1772–75), and the German Romantic writer Adelbert von Chamisso acted as naturalist for the _Rurik_ 's voyage of 1815–18, sponsored by the St Petersburg Academy. Scientific travellers thus took part in a 'global system of intellectual production' whose publications 'flooded bookstores and widely read journals' (Liebersohn 2006: 8, 12).

The Pacific voyages of Bougainville and Cook were perceived as epoch-making and became media events of their day. Their narratives presented Tahiti as a fascinating, sophisticated society on the opposite side of the globe, while other Pacific societies were perceived to exemplify humanity in a more brutal state. The most influential account of Cook's voyages was written by Georg Forster, first in English and then in German ( _A Voyage Round the World_ , 1777; _Reise um die Welt_ , 1778–80). Narratives of Pacific exploration provided pleasurable instruction for their general readers, but they also engaged philosophers because they could both confirm and challenge ideas about the perfectibility of man and civil progress. Taking up Rousseau's critique of civilization, Diderot in 1772 wrote a Supplement to Bougainville's _Voyage autour du monde_ which, like the texts published by the explorers themselves, expressed doubt about European advancement and emphasized the cost of European contact for more natural societies now infected with disease and moral corruption.

Scientific travel, then, was far from ideologically neutral or even innocent. None of the great maritime expeditions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were exclusively driven by scholarly curiosity. The knowledge they produced about routes, resources, peoples and languages served the agenda of European commercial and political expansion. Such entanglements are particularly obvious in narratives of the period's great landward expeditions: Samuel Hearne and Alexander Mackenzie in North America, Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland in Latin America and Mungo Park in Africa, where he had been sent by the African Association (founded in 1788), which had hopes that European trade could be extended from the coastal regions further into the continent. Park's _Travels into the Interior of Africa_ (1799; French and German translations in 1800) included observations on human trafficking within Africa and how it played into the hands of the European slave trade at a time when British wealth in particular still depended on slave labour in the West Indies. Park's text sympathizes with the misery of captured slaves but does not voice the abolitionist sentiment that was often inspired by contemporary reports about the slave ship journeys across the Atlantic. The infamous 'middle passage' was described both by reformed traders and the victims themselves, for instance as part of _The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano_ (1789). Such texts are another reminder of how conflicted and contradictory relationships to non-Europeans were in a culture that took pride in its Enlightened principles. Europe idealized Tahitians but sustained African slavery, whilst writing about the non-European 'other' could be used both to criticize Europe and to corroborate its supremacy.

The very procedures recommended for scientific observation and analysis were apt to support supremacist intentions, most specifically where they led to new ideas about race. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, it had become common to classify the natural observations and specimens obtained through travel according to the taxonomical system outlined in Carl Linnaeus's _Systema Naturae_ ( _The System of Nature_ , 1735). Originally devised for botanical classification, the Linnaean system launched a 'global classificatory project' (Pratt 1992: 27). As Mary Louise Pratt writes: 'One by one the planet's life forms were to be drawn out of the tangled threads of their life surroundings and rewoven into European-based patterns of global unity and order' (1992: 31). Such taxonomy helped to construct an awareness of differences within humanity, and it could be used to substantiate narratives in which such differences were interpreted as different stages of human development. The seemingly natural progression from primitive to civilized societies was an ideology suitable for legitimizing the domination of the former by the latter, and it developed into one of the master narratives of European empire building. From the 1850s, this narrative was bolstered further with a new scientific theory of race (see Young 1995: 66–116).

European colonialism in Asia and Africa intensified during the second half of the nineteenth century. From the 1880s, Africa, the supposedly dark continent, was aggressively annexed by the European powers, which divided the continent amongst themselves during the Berlin West African Conference in 1884. The huge body of travel writing during the heyday of Empire reflects the ongoing role that the accumulation of geographic and anthropological knowledge played in the imperial project. Even its most personal and adventurous narratives are fraught with comprehensive descriptions of people, manners and customs as well as maps and statistics. At the same time, they reveal the 'imperial eyes' (Pratt 1992) with which many travellers perceived lands and people as available for European domination and possession. Of course, imperial travellers in Africa (and elsewhere) must be distinguished according to the agendas of their travels as well as their individual backgrounds and temperaments, but most accounts by missionaries and explorers helped to disseminate a perception of Africans as a less advanced part of humanity in need of Christianity, Civilization and Commerce. David Livingstone's _Missionary Travels_ (1857) became a European-wide bestseller, and the travel books of charismatic explorers such as Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley were also widely read. Stanley's _In Darkest Africa_ (1890) was one of the most successful travel books of the period and recorded an expedition sponsored by King Leopold II of Belgium, one of Europe's most notoriously reckless imperialists. The popularity of such books is explained not only by their support of a dominant ideology, but also by the manner in which they constructed a heroic masculinity. In both respects, they entered a close relationship with contemporary imperial adventure fiction such as Henry Rider Haggard's _King Solomon's Mines_ (1886), in which travels and quests were a prominent theme. However, just as turn-of-the-century writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad produced literature aware of the anxieties and uncertainties of imperialism, contemporary travel writing also articulated such ambivalences and conflicts, and some authors, like Robert Cunninghame Graham in _Mogreb-El-Acksa_ (1898), pronounced their anti-colonial sentiments overtly.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw an emergent women's movement and an increasing number of women who ventured beyond the European continent as tourists and, sometimes, as explorers. Even though these women faced a restrictive gender order and gendered exclusion in their home societies, their travel writing is not necessarily more sympathetic towards the non-European other and demonstrates equally divergent and ambivalent attitudes as that of men. Isabella Bird's account of China in _The Yangtze Valley and Beyond_ (1899), for instance, reveals her sense of European superiority, but Mary Kingsley, in _Travels in West Africa_ (1897), constructed herself as a traveller critical of missionary interference, who was open to African life and on friendly terms with her African porters. In their texts, Bird and Kingsley had to be concerned about their reputation and thus were unable to fully emulate the heroic self-fashioning of a Burton or Stanley. But they did not suppress the perils they underwent and emphasized their proficiency as collectors of data and specimens for male-dominated scientific institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society. Like the mid-nineteenth-century Austrian globetrotter Ida Pfeiffer, they took obvious satisfaction from their mobility and the crossing of gender gaps between private and public life, and they paved the way for later adventurers and explorers such as Isabelle Eberhardt, Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark and Alexandra David Néel, who crossed gender boundaries with even greater confidence.

The long popularity and transnational success of exploration writing indicates the deep entanglement of Europe and the wider world since the Enlightenment. It is unsurprising, therefore, that its patterns were replicated in narratives about travel closer to home through which Europeans aimed to explore their own societies during a period when technological innovation and new political ideals destabilized old orders and regimes. Dr Samuel Johnson, an avid reader of exploration narratives, visited the _Western Islands of Scotland_ (1775) in quest of a culture not yet obliterated by progressive modernity. In Germany, Friedrich Nicolai was a politically conservative representative of the Enlightenment, but his encyclopaedic _Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1871_ ( _Description of a Journey Through Germany and Switzerland_ ), published between 1783 and 1796, was widely read because it demonstrated how strongly divided Germany still was in political as well as cultural terms. Arthur Young was one of many travellers drawn to France during the years around the French Revolution. He had travelled across France before the upheaval in order to assess its economic situation, and the preface to _Travels in France_ (1792) is aware of the historical relevance of his observations:

The clouds that [. . .] have indicated a change in the political sky of the French hemisphere, and which have since gathered to so singular a storm, have rendered it yet more interesting, to know what France was previously to any change.

(Young 1792: iv)

The young United States were visited and depicted as a social experiment and an increasingly important destination for emigrants far into the nineteenth century, by French Romantics (Chateaubriand, _Voyage en Amérique_ [ _Voyage to America_ ], 1827) as well as English Victorians such as Charles Dickens ( _American Notes_ , 1842) and Anthony Trollope ( _North America_ , 1862). England, the vanguard of modern capitalism, was often travelled with an eye on its economic situation, its modernity arousing admiration but also radical critique: William Cobbett's _Rural Rides_ (1830) derive from fact-finding journeys during the 1820s and assess the change brought to England's rural south and its impoverished population by the agricultural and industrial revolutions. A generation later, Friedrich Engels alerted readers on both sides of the Channel to _The Condition of the Working Class in England_ (1845).

Much of this social exploration blends in with other contemporary strands in travel writing. Dr Johnson's journey north hints at the Romantic sentiment with which Scotland's landscapes and Celtic heritage were beginning to be appreciated, and Romanticism also encouraged a subjectivity which even scientific travel writing took up. Georg Forster, for instance, emphasized in the German version of his _Voyage Round the World_ that all writing about travel is necessarily determined by the individual traveller's sensitivity and style of thought (see Forster 1965: 13). It was in writing about domestic and continental tourism, however, that the subjective turn and the adoption of a new, subjectivist aesthetics expressed itself most clearly.

**Grand Tour to modern tourism**

In the English language, the word 'tourist' began to be used in the 1780s, and 'tourism' became a common expression in the 1810s. The _Oxford English Dictionary's_ etymology thus localizes both words in the Romantic era, and it is in this era that travel writing became significantly more literary. Travel and travel narratives inspired Romantic poets, and many Romantic writers produced travel books themselves. More generally, mobility in various forms – from pleasurable walking tours to misadventurous voyaging and restless quests (see Thompson 2007) – is a central theme in Romantic literature as well as the self-fashioning of Romantic writers and their personas. Travel provided writers with opportunities to explore the world, the boundaries of their selves and their creativity, and it afforded them possibilities for escaping from crowded cities or even European modernity at large. The beginnings of tourism, however, lay in a much more restrictive form of travel.

The eighteenth-century institution of the Grand Tour (Black 1985; Redford 1996) had its origins in an early-modern aristocratic practice: A young man's socialization was finished with protracted exposure to other European countries and their manners, languages, history and arts, which would prepare him for his later public roles. Italy and France were the most important destinations, but the typical Tour could also include Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. More unofficially, the Tour afforded pleasures and sexual freedoms that fuelled a lively debate concerning the usefulness of extensive and expensive absence from home. In a manner comparable to the instructions for scientific voyages, guidebooks and manuals were meant to ensure a conduct of travel that would profit the traveller as well as his country. The last of these manuals, Leopold Count Berchtold's _Essay to Direct and Extend the Inquiries of Patriotic Travellers_ (1789, German and French editions in 1791 and 1797 respectively) presented an intimidating system of more than 2,000 categories for observation. Those who followed such instructions when writing about the Tour were bound to produce uniform accounts. By Berchtold's time, however, tourism had already begun to evolve in less regimented forms that were also less socially exclusive than the classical Grand Tour. The industrial and agricultural revolutions created new bourgeois elites with money and time for travel, and better infrastructures made travel more comfortable and more affordable. As Carl Thompson writes: 'A touring class, one might say, gave way to the touring classes, and this shift in the demographics of recreational travel is reflected in a [. . .] proliferation of different itineraries, objects of interest, and styles of travel' (2007: 33).

Amongst intellectuals, the continental tour was re-scripted as a _Bildungsreise_ during which a young man would not only accumulate knowledge, manners and competences, but also educate and cultivate his entire personality. The tour turned inwards, and its narratives began to focus on the traveller's subjectivity and how his intellect, sentiments and aesthetic sensibility were affected and developed through travel. Goethe's famous tour of Italy between 1786 and 1788 followed a conventional outward itinerary, but the narrative of _Italienische Reise_ ( _Italian Journey_ , 1816–18) presents it as a transformative event for Goethe's personality and his understanding of art. It is in this sense that conventional and other forms of tourism now also entered the plots of European novels, and notably the _Bildungsroman_ , for which Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_ novels (1795 and 1829) are prototypical. It was an earlier English novel, however, that had a decisive impact on travel writing itself and on how it could artistically respond to the new cultural valorization of sensibility, sensation and feeling that emerged in the 1760s. Laurence Sterne's _A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy_ (1768) was widely remarked for its radically subjective first-person narrator who hardly makes progress in space but explores every nuance of his sensations and emotional reactions to the people he meets. Displaying his individualism, he declares himself a new type of traveller whose 'travels and observations will be altogether of a different cast from any of my forerunners' (Sterne 1928: 15–16). He self-confidently subverts the methodical travel and travel writing of the Enlightenment and narrates his observations and moods with great idiosyncrasy, permitting himself many gaps, digressions and an abrupt beginning and end. Much travel writing of the Romantic era, for instance by Stendhal or Heinrich Heine, follows Sterne with similarly capricious modes of narration, a high degree of fictionalization or the inclusion of poetry.

The travellers in Sterne's footsteps included a significant number of women. The German novelist Sophie La Roche, for instance, published 'sentimental' journals of her journeys through France, Switzerland and England during the 1780s. The example of La Roche demonstrates how the demography of continental travel was expanded not only in terms of class, but also gender. Some of the new female travellers signalled their subjectivity just as confidently as men. During the journey she describes in _A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark_ (1796), Mary Wollstonecraft departed from traditional itineraries of European travel, and she proclaimed in her 'Advertisement' to the book that she 'could not avoid being continually the first person' (Wollstonecraft 1796: n.p.), even though her text was also intended as an enquiry into the state of Scandinavian societies. Wollstonecraft thus anticipated Chateaubriand, the founder of Romanticism in French literature, who declared in the Preface to his _Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem_ ( _Journey from Paris to Jerusalem_ , 1811) that he was 'continually speaking of himself' and asked his readers to regard his book as 'memoirs' rather than 'a book of travels' in the footsteps of Mungo Park, Humboldt and others (Chateaubriand 1812: x–xi).

The shift towards subjectivity is striking in a travelogue that outwardly still follows the conventional route of the Grand Tour but really offers 'a solipsistic autobiographical enterprise, which subordinates the external world to a troubled consciousness' (Redford 1996: 105). William Beckford's _Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents_ (1783 but then suppressed) already declares its focus on an inward geography in its title. Beckford presents himself as dreaming about more distant lands, while he seemingly performs the tour's classical programme. This subversive desire culminates in the book's chapter on Venice, whose traditional contacts with the Ottoman Empire seem to locate it at the limits of European civilization. In Beckford's imagination and description, Venice therefore becomes a projection site for orientalist fantasies and a place of entry into the unconscious dimensions of the traveller's self. Byron's _Childe Harold_ (1812–18), a cult text of European Romanticism, unfolds another alternative Tour based on Byron's own 'pilgrimage' to Greece through Europe's orientalized East and here, too, the desire to escape from Western civilization is a conspicuous theme. Even where it was actually experienced, the East of Romantic travel and travel literature was always also a construct: the vision of a non-modern and exotic other to the West that can be traced in travel writing far into the nineteenth century (e.g. Alexander Kinglake's _Eothen_ , 1844, and Gérard de Nerval's _Voyage en Orient_ [ _Journey to the Orient_ ], 1851) and beyond. Ironically, travellers who thus sought to escape Western modernity also helped to spread its forces, not only over the globe but also at home, where the Romantic enchantment with pristine landscapes and rural people produced another kind of tourism that increasingly threatened what it sought.

Picturesque tourism, a kind of travelling for aesthetic appreciation, emerged during the 1760s and 1770s. The taste for such travel was popularized in Britain by William Gilpin's richly illustrated guidebooks and _Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape_ (1792). Gilpin proposed that the newly discovered beauties of 'wild' native landscapes such as the Lake District could please tourists with the same qualities that a painting would also present, and he thus helped to institute a way of seeing that anticipates the picture postcards and snapshots of modern tourism. The special impact of picturesque travel in Britain was owed not only to aesthetic fashion, however. It can also be explained by political circumstances because domestic tourism was stimulated when the Napoleonic Wars restricted the scope of travel on the continent, especially for British tourists who found it difficult to even cross the Channel. Nevertheless, before the wars were over, the continent was also travelled with picturesque eyes. Ann Radcliffe, whose Gothic romances abound with descriptions of scenes both beautiful and sublime, was one of many English travellers attracted by the Rhine Valley around 1800, as recounted in _A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794_ (1795). With its sublime beauties, medieval ruins and legends, the Rhine allowed travellers to lose themselves in dreams and historical fantasies. It consequently became one of Europe's literary landscapes, a favourite destination for Romantic travellers and the inspiration for many poems (e.g. by Brentano and Heine) as well as for classics of travel writing such as Victor Hugo's _Le Rhin_ ( _The Rhine_ , 1842).

Picturesque tourism is an obvious forerunner of 'modern' recreational tourism. As the Napoleonic Wars finally ended the tradition of the Grand Tour, the new forms of domestic and continental tourism began to establish themselves in forms still familiar today. New infrastructures and the transport revolution of the nineteenth century made travel increasingly affordable, comfortable, faster and safer, and hence even more practicable for women. From the 1820s the channel could be crossed by steamboats, and rail networks developed across Western Europe (Schivelbusch 1986). Increased social mobility corresponded with increasing mobility in space, and the continental tour that had begun as a rite of passage for a small elite, often taking months or years, was now democratized into a limited period of middle-class leisure.

Modern tourism continued and adapted elements of earlier travel, but it also developed features that appeared to threaten the individualism that Romantic travel had emphasized. The production of guidebooks that directed tourists to must-see sights developed into a flourishing branch of the print market and turned Baedeker, Murray and Joanne into household names of the nineteenth century. Increasingly, middle-class travellers on vacation travelled in groups and bought travel as a pre-fabricated, industrialized commodity. Thomas Cook popularized the custom-made package tour, and in 1856 offered his first 'Great Circular Tour of the Continent' for those whom their work or business afforded the means and leisure to travel. Paradoxically, this tourism sometimes began to resemble work, as travellers hurried from sight to sight in order to travel as profitably and effectively as possible within the few weeks of leisure at their disposal.

It was not long before such tourism aroused critique and resistance that sometimes amounted to outright 'anti-tourism' (Buzard 1993: 7). Critique could be humorously ironic as in Anthony Trollope's _Travelling Sketches_ (1866), which target the fashion of tourism among the bourgeois, or Mark Twain's _Innocents Abroad_ (1869), which sprang from its author's experience as a participant in Thomas Cook's first excursion to Europe and the Holy Land for Americans. Twain's book satirizes practices both of tourism and touristic writing, for instance where it refuses to describe sights that seem over-familiar and also already over-described. Other travel writers advertised that their tours had taken them to destinations yet uncorrupted by the tourist industry, as announced in the title of Amelia Edwards's _Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys_ (1873). Yet others took up alternative practices of travel and walked instead of boarding ships and trains. Pedestrianism as a form of pleasurable and recreational travel had already seen an earlier vogue. Rousseau's _Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire_ ( _Reveries of a Solitary Walker_ , 1782) provided philosophical underpinnings for a Romantic cult of walking tours, whose purposes were not always only aesthetic. They were also often a reaction against the invasion of natural and rural environments by industrialism and urbanization, and some Romantic-era foot travel was undertaken as a liberal political statement of sympathy with the common people and in order to observe their situation, not from a coach but from the less privileged and more close-up perspective of the road (see Brenner 1990: 200–201; Jarvis 1997; Thompson 2007). In the later nineteenth century, and as a countermovement to organized tourism for the many, foot travel was one of the distinctly anti-modern and non-mechanical forms of mobility that became fashionable in intellectual circles and that predate the slow-travel movement of the twenty-first century. Robert Louis Stevenson, for instance, walked through the Cevennes ( _Travels with a Donkey_ , 1879), and canoed the waterways of Belgium and Northern France ( _An Inland Voyage_ , 1878). Both these tours can also be seen as part of a new cult of the natural that emerged around 1900 in reaction to the estrangement caused by modern industrialism.

It has been claimed that the spread of industrialized tourism during the second half of the nineteenth century generated a dilemma for travel writers. All the sights seemed already to have been seen, not only during actual travel but also because the world was increasingly turned into a spectacle, reproduced in museums and panoramas, colonial exhibitions and ethnographic shows, and above all through print illustrations and photography. However, literary travellers appear to have always found their way out of this dilemma: by travelling differently, by dramatising themselves as interesting or even eccentric tourists, or by putting emphasis on their personal experiences. Many presented themselves as non-tourists and 'true' travellers capable of appreciating the authenticity of other cultures, thus helping to build a distinction between popular 'tourism' and elite 'travel' which James Buzard reads as a 'binary opposition fundamental to and characteristic of modern culture' (1993: 18). Contempt for the 'mere' tourist's allegedly superficial and indiscriminate consumption of sights survived as a trope of literary travel books in the twentieth century. Edith Wharton, for instance, hailed the motor car as a means of individual transport that would 'restore the romance of travel' and free her and other real travellers 'from all the compulsions and contacts of the railway, the bondage of fixed hours and the beaten track' (1908: 1). Evelyn Waugh, who already crossed the Channel by plane, expressed his disdain for tourism in his travel book _Labels_ (1930), but had to admit that his own journeying could not really escape tourism. The borderline between tourism and travel is fuzzy, and, as Dean MacCannell claims, even modern mass tourists desire a 'deeper involvement with society and culture to some degree; it is a basic component of their motivation to travel' (1976: 10).

**After 1900**

The democratization and touristification of travel continued in the course of the twentieth century, while other forms of travel became obsolete. Travel writing in general began to lose the critical prestige and popularity it had enjoyed between 1750 and 1900. Several factors appear to have contributed to such developments. Scientific specialization and the fact that Western expansionism had reached its limits created the impression that the time for adventurous exploration was _passé._ The two world wars, although they brought other forms of mobility with them, proved significant caesuras for travelling and accelerated the unravelling of the European empires. The heroic Antarctic expeditions of Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton in the years leading up to and during the First World War seemed anachronistic even when they were undertaken.

However, the early 1900s and especially the inter-war years saw a notable revival of literary travel writing in different forms. Much of this writing articulates the frustration with Western modernity and the exoticist and primitivist desires that had driven its authors abroad, even if these desires were not always fulfilled. In Germany, Waldemar Bonsels's _Indienfahrt_ ( _An Indian Journey_ ), published after some delay in 1916, became one of the most popular travel books of its time. The devastating, mechanized war of 1914–18 increased longings amongst the intellectual elites for escape from modernity and its homogenizing hold over the world (Fussell 1980). Travel books in the 1920s as diverse as D. H. Lawrence's _Sea and Sardinia_ (1921) and _Mornings in Mexico_ (1927), or T. E. Lawrence's _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ (1926), question European progress and suggest the vanity of its attempts to maintain a supremacy that was increasingly contested. Critique of civilization, coupled with profound anxieties about imperialism, also marked writing about African travel, from André Gide's _Voyage en Congo_ ( _Travels in the Congo_ , 1927), which was dedicated to Joseph Conrad, to Graham Greene's _Journey without Maps_ (1936). Samuel Hynes has observed that travel became the 'basic trope' for a whole generation of 1930s British writers 'in search of some reality not visible at home' (Hynes 1976: 288). The restlessness and uprootedness expressed in their travel books is mirrored in their poetry and fiction and seems to epitomize a main characteristic of the modern condition. In Greene's _Journey_ , modernity also manifests itself in another aspect, as the book presents not only another exploration of Africa as Europe's other, but also a Freud-inspired psychological inspection of the darkness of the author's self and his memories.

However, just as the Romantic era produced both self-oriented and socially interested travel writing, the 1920s and 1930s also brought forth a form of travel writing that was documentary and politically engaged. The 1930s in particular were a heyday of literary reportage, and the genre was used in conjunction with travel to observe and weigh the impact of the time's great contesting ideologies: capitalism, communism and fascism. The United States and the Soviet Union were inspected during numerous travels of Western writers and journalists; George Orwell was one of many writers who participated in and reported about the Spanish Civil War ( _Homage to Catalonia_ , 1938), and, like J. B. Priestley ( _English Journey_ , 1934), he also used travel to observe the social conflict in British inter-war society ( _The Road to Wigan Pier_ , 1937).

Literary experimentation is also a feature of some travelogues in the inter-war years. Robert Byron's _The Road to Oxiana_ (1937) narrates the author's travels in Persia and Afghanistan in a distinctly modernist style, using short, fragmented diary units and a collage of different subgenres and styles that prevents the construction of a unified point of view despite the strong subjectivism of Byron's impressions. For Paul Fussell, the account constitutes the ' _Ulysses_ or _The Waste Land_ of modern travel books' (Fussell 1980: 108). The poets W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice also found collage ideal for writing their _Letter from Iceland_ (1937), which includes such diverse material as press cuttings, poetry and photography (see Youngs 2004).

The variety of travel writing during the inter-war years of the twentieth century proves the power of the genre to constantly renew itself. After 1945, however, even literary travel writing flagged as the jet age seemed to shrink the world even further and to reduce travel to mere transport from place to place. Post-war travel writing also had to compete with television, which created a new mediascape in which pictures and narratives about the wider world were brought into everybody's home. In _Tristes Tropiques_ (1955), the ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss foretold the end of travel in the face of advanced globalization, and in _Mani_ (1958), his travel book about Greece, Patrick Leigh Fermor bemoaned the uniformity of the post-war world epitomized in the Coca-Cola bottle. US-led consumerism, it seemed, had replaced overt imperialism as a new form of Western supremacy.

**Select bibliography**

Barrow, J. (1804) _Travels in China_ , London: Cadell and Davies.

Black, J. (1985) _The British and the Grand Tour_ , London: Croom Helm.

Brenner, P.J. (1990) _Der Reisebericht in der deutschen Literatur_ , Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Buzard, J. (1993) _The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to 'Culture' 1800–1918_ , Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Chateaubriand, F.R. de (1812) _Travels in Greece, Palestine, Egypt and Barbary: During the Years 1806 and 1807_ , trans. F. Shoberl, London: Colburn.

Forster, G. (1965) _Reise um die Welt_ , Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

Fussell, P. (1980) _Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hynes, S. (1976) _The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s_ , London: Bodley Head.

Jarvis, R. (1997) _Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel_ , Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Liebersohn, H. (2006) _The Traveler's World: Europe to the Pacific_ , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

MacCannell, D. (1976) _The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class_ , London: Macmillan.

Martin, A.E. and Pickford, S. (2012) _Travel Narratives in Translation, 1750–1830: Nationalism, Ideology, Gender_ , London: Routledge.

Pratt, M.L. (1992) _Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation_ , London: Routledge.

Redford, B. (1996) _Venice and the Grand Tour_ , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Rousseau, J.-J. (1979) _Emile: Or on Education_ , trans. A. Bloom, New York: Basic Books.

Schivelbusch, W. (1986) _The Railroad Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century_ , Hamburg and New York: Berg.

Sterne, L. (1928) _A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thompson, C. (2007) _The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination_ , Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Thompson, C. (2011) _Travel Writing_ , London: Routledge.

Thompson, C.W. (2012) _French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wharton, E. (1908) _A Motor-Flight Through France_ , London: Macmillan.

Wollstonecraft, M. (1796) _Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark_ , London: Johnson.

Young, A. (1792) _Travels, during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789 [. . .] of the Kingdom of France_ , Bury St Edmunds: Richardson.

Young, R.C. (1995) _Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race_ , London: Routledge.

Youngs, T. (2004) 'Auden's Travel Writings', in S. Smith (ed.), _The Cambridge Companion to Auden_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Youngs, T. (2013) _The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

African Travel Writing

_Aedín Ní Loingsigh_

Between January and March 1956, the Paris-based literary periodical _La Nouvelle Revue Française_ ( _NRF_ ) published three brief texts that were presented as the _Journal de route_ ( _Travel Journal_ ) of Damouré Zika ( _c_. 1923–2009). The monthly installments, written unselfconsciously in non-standard French, loosely describe what Zika presents as different filming 'missions' undertaken in Niger, Togo and the then Gold Coast (now Ghana) with the celebrated ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch. Already one of Rouch's close friends, the Nigerian Zika would go on to be recognized as a key creative collaborator in the influential _cinéma-vérité_ praxis developed by the Frenchman. Indeed, the first installment of Zika's travel diary is preceded by a brief Rouch-penned introduction. It comes as no surprise, then, that most critical commentary on Zika is confined to critical studies of Rouch's cinematic œuvre, where discussion tends to highlight the Nigerian's acting and technical roles.

In 2007, the French publisher Mille et une nuits published _Journal de route_ as a single edition. It unites the _NRF_ texts and Rouch's foreword with three other pieces by Zika and a largely biographical Afterword by its editor, Éric Dussert (hereafter all references will be to this edition and translated by me). Yet despite the wider availability of _Journal de route_ , and despite also extensive posthumous acknowledgment in the press of his invaluable cultural contribution, Zika has never garnered a reputation as a writer. French readers do not seem to have been enchanted by Zika's text in the way their contemporaries across the channel were by the 'young English' (Thomas 1952: 7) of Nigerian Amos Tutuola's _The Palm-Wine Drinkard_ (1952), the outlandish text with which the residual orality and travel-related structure of _Journal de route_ surely deserve comparison. Here, however, I wish to present _Journal de route_ as a text exemplary in several different regards of sub-Saharan Africa's seemingly underdeveloped tradition of non-fictional travel writing. To some extent, I foreground Zika's text in this way simply because it is one of only a few published works that appear to satisfy the criteria for inclusion within the genre of travel writing, at least when that form is understood as a non-fictional prose account of a journey actually undertaken by the author. At the same time, however, _Journal de route_ can also serve to bring into focus some of the reasons for this apparently meagre corpus of African travel writing, and the scholarly practices that lead to African accounts of travel being sidelined or ignored in Western literary histories. For while the title _Journal de route_ clearly identifies the text as travel writing, and much of its content and structure seems to conform to this generic positioning, Zika's writing also possesses a complexity and hybridity of voice and form that requires us to interrogate how and why we assign some texts to this genre and exclude others. A key critical value of _Journal de route_ , accordingly, is the way in which it draws attention to what Mary Louise Pratt terms the 'critical mimesis' of much contemporary travel writing scholarship, whereby a disproportionate emphasis on Western texts reproduces 'the normativity of the primary corpus' (2012: 122). In this way, Pratt suggests, recent attempts to contest Western travel writing's colonialist legacy and its reductive understanding of otherness are often undermined by the fact that critics return repeatedly to the same narrow canon of accounts and to an underlying assumption that travel is principally constituted through 'the sequential centripetal-centrifugal movement that sends the metropolitan subject forth to know the world and brings him and sometimes her back to tell about it' (ibid.: 122). This can produce a self-referential deadlock that ignores the ways alternative traditions of travel and travel writing challenge prevailing understandings of the form.

For these reasons, then, the present chapter begins, ends and in the intervening sections returns repeatedly to discussion of Zika's _Journal de route_. At the same time, the first section of this chapter explores the historical reasons for the apparent paucity of non-fictional travel writing from sub-Saharan Africa, whilst also mapping some of the key accounts that do exist. This seam is developed in the second section through a focus on the ways in which Rouch's introduction to _Journal de voyage_ highlights certain challenges faced by the mid-twentieth-century emergence of non-fictional African travel writing. The concluding section then examines the ways in which _Journal de route_ surmounts these obstacles and confidently asserts its own formal identity.

**Invisible travellers**

_Other Routes_ (2005), a seminal anthology of African and Asian travel writing edited by Tabish Khair and others, has conclusively demonstrated the vital input of an African tradition of travel and its textualization to understandings of both these practices. However, although the volume carefully accounts for relevant pre-1900 examples, its survey concludes at the end of the nineteenth century on the basis that 'twentieth-century travel accounts by Asians and Africans can be obtained from ordinary public libraries' (Khair 2005: 15). This is undoubtedly true of V. S. Naipaul, Salmon Rushdie and Vikram Seth, the late twentieth-century anglophone Asian writers to whom Khair alludes. However, the failure of _Other Routes_ adequately to account for the first half of the twentieth century, usually cited as the point of insertion into literature by colonized African subjects, appears to suggest that there are no examples of non-fictional travel writing by Africans from this era. To adapt Hegel's infamous comment, must we deduce from this that Africa is a continent with no modern indigenous history of travel writing?

The French literary historian Roland Lebel certainly thought so. The picture he paints in his 1928 survey of French-language colonial literature makes little room for African practices and narratives of travel. Indeed, his brief discussion of the absence of suitable texts points to the privileging of a particular critical perspective on the identity of the traveller and on travel writing's generic ontology – a perspective that has arguably not yet been supplanted by more recent scholarly developments. Lebel writes:

Quite understandably travel writing is represented by a very small number of texts written by natives. The exploration of the interior is not their responsibility; moreover, they do not yet travel as tourists in the way that we do. Thus, in principle, one finds no report, no travelogue, no memories or impressions of travel by native, French-speaking authors.

(Lebel 1928: 159; my translation)

Informing this view of the non-existence of a French-language tradition of travel writing, of course, is the idea that if Africans travelled at all – and this mobility is rarely acknowledged by colonial-era writing on the continent – it is not a practice productive of the non-fictional forms of travel writing mentioned. In other words, what Lebel's comments underscore is that the process of determining the generic identity of travel writing is inextricably bound up with privileged European figures and practices of travel. Clearly, there can be no room here for the colonized African who is almost certain to have insufficient material means to devote time to the privileged recreational movement of the early twentieth-century European traveller, and who consequently cannot recreate what Michael Cronin refers to as the formal 'horizontal paradigm' of so much Western travel writing; that is to say, our 'more conventional understanding of travel as a linear progression from place to place' (2000: 19). Lebel's assumptions about exploration suggest that the investigation and documenting of geographical expanse is, once again, the preserve of Europeans rather than of 'travelled-over' Africans.

Needless to say, the facts are not so simple. In terms of travel practices, Lebel fails to remind the reader that European exploration of Africa's interior was dependent on the mobilization of auxiliary African personnel who often knew where they were going, or at least how to navigate their way. His comment is thus complicit in reinforcing the mythical image of the colonial travelogue's European explorer (solitary, heroic, male) and obscuring the vital legacy of Africa's indigenous navigational skills as well as the historical diversity of its travel practices. In terms of literary production, Lebel's French-centred view of African colonial literature forecloses discussion of alternative linguistic traditions. For example, slave narratives – which often feature accounts of both voluntary and coerced travel – are not mentioned, since there are no examples in the francophone tradition, although there are many in the anglophone tradition. His monolingual view also means that the multilingual reality of travel in Africa is downplayed. More significantly, the need to promote translation strategies in order to draw a more complete continent-wide picture of travel and travel writing is completely ignored.

Ultimately, however, it is his restricted understanding of travel writing's generic identity that blinds Lebel to the role travel plays in the francophone African tradition he claims to know. Had he been more open to the ways in which African men in the early twentieth century were engaging in intercontinental travel, for example, he might have recognized that students, many of whom had already moved for their schooling from rural to urban locations within West Africa were, by the 1920s, beginning to make the journey to France in order to pursue their studies. They were also experiencing the specific type of travel encounter that would soon shape the seminal texts of Negritude and underpin such key fictional works of francophone African journeys as Ferdinand Oyono's _Road to Europe_ (1960) and Cheikh Hamidou Kane's _Ambiguous Adventure_ (1961). Lebel cannot find 'memories and impressions' of travel in African writing, but if he had been more attuned to the diverse ways these can be filtered and textualized, he might have conceded the relevance of the journalistic writing of Senegalese political activist Lamine Senghor, which recount Senghor's encounters with the heady international climate of 1920s 'black' Paris. This, in turn, might have encouraged Lebel to explore the complex reasons explaining the French capital as a point of convergence for so much African-originating travel during the decade when he published his history of colonial literature. Senghor, for example, was one of 140,000 West Africans who travelled to Europe to fight for the French army in the First World War, an experience recorded by his compatriot, Bakary Diallo, in his memoir _Force-Bonté_ ( _Strength-Kindness_ , 1926). This book was published two years prior to Lebel's refusal to acknowledge African practices of travel or their expression in forms that conflict with his exclusive model of travel writing.

This tendency to read and recognize travel writing, then and now, according to a dominant Western model often goes hand-in-hand with a sidelining of non-textual forms that similarly counter perceptions of an invisible or non-existent culture of travel. Diallo's text may well be one of precious few written records of the ordeal of the Great War from an African perspective, but it is not the only account, as Joe Lunn's (1999) work on oral history has demonstrated. Indeed, bringing to light the significance of oral narratives that have transmitted and transmuted the experience of travel from generation to generation must inform any attempt to assert the historical fact of African mobility, from what Madeleine Borgomano describes as the 'perpetual movement' (1998: 208) of pre-colonial Africa to the multiple forms of mobility and displacement triggered by colonial and postcolonial realities. In Lebel's case, however, the decoupling of _travel_ from _writing_ is inconceivable. Possessing as he does the 'literate mind' described in Walter J. Ong's seminal study of oral culture, Lebel is unable to relax travel writing's generic borders to include the 'memories and impressions' of orality. To do so would be 'psychologically threatening, for literates' sense of _control_ over language is closely tied to the visual transformation of language' – a transformation policed, Ong suggests, by dictionaries, grammar, 'and all the rest of the apparatus that makes words into something you can "look" up' (1982: 14; my emphasis). When shifted to the context of travel writing, such control is reinforced through the strict application of a regulative generic understanding that is unable or unwilling to make room for oral elaborations of travel, to consider different travelling figures or to account for the ways in which other generic norms – fictional and non-fictional, but also non-textual – can refract specific traditions and experiences of travel. As a result, Western travel writing has become entrenched not as _a_ cultural output connected to adjacent products and phenomena, but as _the_ form for expressing the experience of travel.

In this light, my anchoring of the remaining sections in a conventional understanding of travel writing must not be seen as capitulation to a presumed notion of its inviolable place within the cultures of travel. My primary aim is simply to address a critical imbalance that has to date seen the journey motif in African fiction receive far greater critical scrutiny (see Mortimer 1990), along of course with an emphasis in travel writing studies on Western travel _to_ the continent rather than African travel from and within Africa. As I will discuss, the recognition and acknowledgement of non-fictional forms of African travel writing arguably requires the development of alternative reading practices and/or strategies of promotion. These will need to be aware of the blind spots of Lebel's approach but must also be conscious of the complex introduction into established literary fields of the earliest examples of twentieth-century African travel writing.

**African travel writing introduced**

In many respects _Journal de route_ 's appropriation of so many of the conventions of non-fictional travel writing positions it within a rarely commented upon body of work by a select group of authors from sub-Saharan Africa. As the editors of _Other Routes_ remind us, this tradition dates back at least to the _Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano_ (1789), the first-hand account of a former slave's extensive travels. Like so many textualizations of African travel, slave narratives are presented by Khair et al. (2005) as travel accounts hidden behind alternative generic categorizations. In a similar 'recovery' method, Alasdair Pettinger also evokes the need to bypass set generic boundaries when establishing a history of African travel writing. For him, non-fictional textualizations of African travel are to be found 'scattered across genres [such as] autobiographies, novels, poems, official reports' (2001: 74). Included amongst the examples his method identifies are a 1922 typescript by South African political activist Sol Plaatje describing a trip to North America; sections of _The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah_ (1957) describing the Ghanaian President's experiences in England; and rare female accounts of international travel including Angolan-born Eva de Carvalho Chipenda's memoir _The Visitor: An African Woman's Story of Travel and Discovery_ (1996). Thinking about African travel writing from this broader generic perspective is also what enables Rebecca Jones (2013) to highlight a significant trend of first-person narrative travel writing published in various Yoruba and English-language Lagosian newspapers in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Ultimately, however, Zika's _Journal de Voyage_ belongs to an even more select group of African texts that wear the generic label of travel writing in a more self-confident manner. One of the earliest instances of this more generically straightforward travel writing is Ham Mukasa's _Uganda's Katakiro in England_ (1904), an account originally written in Luganda of a Ugandan dignitary's visit to Great Britain for Edward VII's coronation. However, it was during the era of decolonization that this form of travel writing really began to flourish, with the publication of works such as Tété-Michel Kpomassie's _An African in Greenland_ (1981), the cult classic originally published in French in 1977 that describes travel undertaken from 1958 to 1966; the Nigerian J. P. Clark's _America, Their America_ (1964); and francophone Ivorian Bernard Dadié's three accounts of journeys to Paris, New York and Rome in the 1950s and 1960s, _Un Negre á Paris_ ( _An African in Paris_ , 1959), _Patron de New York_ (1964; English translation, _One Way: Bernard Dadié Observes America_ , 1994) and _La Ville où nul ne meurte_ ( _The City Where No One Dies_ , 1968). The belated appropriation of this genre by African writers is not coincidental. Rather, this assertion of a travelling African subject position reflected a context in which Africa prepared to take its place in the world with a literary confidence to match its wider political and economic aspirations. As late as 1974, V. Y. Mudimbe's _Carnets d'Amérique_ ( _American Notebooks_ ) continued to evince elements of the self-assurance and authority traditionally associated with the travelogue form. However, the potential for a new African mobility and its textualization was now overshadowed by the increasingly corrupt political conditions from which many of these travellers originated, and by a growing dependence on the support and financial generosity of Western hosts. As a result, the mid-1970s seem to witness a stalling of the sense of possibility offered by the broadening lens of this travel writing development.

Despite the growing confidence of the narrative voice in this mid-twentieth-century collection of texts, all of them remind us in one way or another that African access to travel writing – and the travelling practices traditionally endorsed by the genre – was not uncomplicated and frequently required some form of backing or support by metropolitan insiders. At times, this simply meant material assistance. This was the case, for example, with the above-mentioned texts describing US-bound travel, which are the result of sponsored travel for educational and/or political reasons. Even Kpomassie's Greenland journey, which was self-financed to a significant degree, was dependent at moments during its eight-year duration on the practical and financial assistance of European mentors. It must be stressed, too, that if Zika travels 'expansively' throughout West Africa, his ability to cross borders is not a form of leisure activity but is carried out in the employ of a more materially privileged European. Indeed, this link between travel and labour is a recurring feature of African fictional and non-fictional textualizations of travel, and its foregrounding reminds us of the way in which travel's material reality is often elided in Western narratives. Worryingly, too, it emerges that the issue of financial dependence can compromise the African traveller's ability to provide a full and honest account of his border crossings, a fact controversially illustrated by Clark's _America, Their America_ , where the author's unsparingly critical view of the United States resulted in a sponsored period of study at Princeton being cut short in 1963.

It is the original paratextual apparatus of Zika's _Journal de route_ , however, that points to a different but equally significant form of 'sponsorship' for the African writer aiming to negotiate the borders of genre and establish him/herself as a travel writer. According to Éric Dussert, Jean Rouch's first wife, Jane, initially typed up Zika's manuscript and secured its publication with the _Nouvelle Revue Française_. Whatever the case, the appearance of the first installment of the Nigerian's travelogue in 1956 alongside a piece by Nathalie Sarraute unquestionably conferred a cachet on the text; it denoted serious potential if not the arrival of a new writing talent within the literary establishment. Yet _Journal de Route_ 's framing by the prestigious periodical also suggests that an initial institutionalized selection process guaranteed this manuscript's successful introduction into French literary culture. Although it is unclear who added the footnotes in the original text that translate and explain certain terms from Zika's native language, the notion that they were required at all must be seen as part of the text's presentation to a metropolitan readership. Rouch's presence in the form of his allographic Introduction further reminds us that Zika's travelogue is governed by yet another layer of patronage that, if not necessarily divesting _Journal de route_ of its rhetorical authority, calls into question the full extent of its subject position's independence. By the same token, reading Rouch's preamble as part of a more widespread framing practice by metropolitan intellectuals of mid-century African writing suggests that the ethnographic filmmaker's motivations were not so much to introduce Zika into the literary scene but rather to announce himself as actively shaping – or 'controlling' as Ong might see it – a new literary and cultural direction.

On the one hand, then, Rouch's positive embrace of Zika's cultural difference arguably forms part of what Richard Watts (2005) sees as the epistemic break instigated by Sartre's better-known preface to the 1948 _Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache_ ( _Anthology of New Black and Malagasy Poetry_ ). Indeed, the refusal to mould or colonize the text that this position suggests is clear when Rouch's preface is compared with the stark colonial asymmetry of the relationship between Ham Makusa's 1904 account of the travels of _Uganda's Katikiro in England_ and its 'Introduction' by Harry H. Johnston. The latter is used by the British colonial administrator to 'set right the Negro author of this book' on a number of points (Mukasa 1904: xii). At the same time, however, Rouch's apparent radicalism, like that of Sartre six years earlier, is attenuated somewhat by a discursive position that is more accurately described as being 'caught between colonial and postcolonial epistemes' (Watts 2005: 87). For even if Rouch's mediation of the text avoids the condescending attitude of colonial texts, or the more obviously ambiguous position of Sartre as described by Watts, it must unavoidably 'retain the small degree of critical authority necessary to write the preface' (Watts 2005: 90). This, then, highlights Rouch's insider knowledge and suggests that African travel writing cannot yet stand independently as a guide to places travelled because its signifying practices themselves require the reader to be guided by a Western interpretation.

In his preface, Rouch does not explicitly draw attention to the other interpretative frame relevant to Zika's text: genre and its uses. However, a small number of striking metatextual interpellations of _Journal de route_ 's generic form suggest that Zika has been made aware of the formal codes evoked by the title of his travel narrative and is demonstrating his ability to recognize and reproduce them. In one instance, for example, Zika's humorous tone cannot quite hide his exasperation with Rouch and another member of Rouch's entourage when the two Europeans 'disappear' without explanation as their African assistants deal with a punctured tyre. Addressing what may be either or both of the culprits directly through the travelogue, Zika demands, 'Well then, give us the reason for your absence to improve the famous diary _you're always looking for_ ' (2007: 35; my emphasis). It should be noted also that Rouch taught Zika to read and write French and this may well support what can already be inferred from the text's self-reflexive moments: that Rouch actively encouraged his African friend and assistant to try out this textual form, and to write according to a Western template for travel writing.

My aim in raising this point – that must remain at the level of conjecture for now – is resolutely not to dismiss the value of Zika's text or to suggest that demonstration of his mastery of travel writing codes is evidence of a deferential gesture. Zika clearly knew his own mind, and he is quite willing in _Journal de route_ to express dissatisfaction about inequalities between Africans and Europeans in terms of travel and working arrangements, offering a critique that becomes unambiguously manifest when he voices his disapproval of the master–servant relationship of a particular English professor with his African 'boy' (Zika 2007: 34). There can be no suggestion either of any domineering role for Rouch in the conception of _Journal de route_. The pair's friendship is confirmed by Zika above and was repeated by him throughout his life; the diary writing encouraged by Rouch can be read simply as an exercise to support language acquisition. Even without corroboration, it is also possible to see how a 'commissioned' travelogue in this context might form part of what Diane Scheineman describes as the French filmmaker's project of 'shared anthropology' that 'may be said to represent Rouch's attempt [. . .] to replace his monologic view of authority with more dispersed voices of authority' (2014: 185).

In the final analysis, however, the question of texts commissioned and written to form transcends any conditions that might explain Zika's decision to write his travelogue or evoke the complex and rightly lauded polyphony of Rouch's work. Instead, I see this issue as returning us to African travel writing's historic invisibility by underscoring the tradition's complex reliance on a system of patronage and raising the question of whether there were other manuscripts that did not survive the process leading to publication. The notion of writing to form also raises another potential obstacle for African (and diasporic) travel writing, as it appears to re-emerge slowly in a contemporary context from the hiatus that, as mentioned above, began in the early 1970s. For if non-fiction travel texts by Africans are to avoid being read and promoted in a reductive manner, they must ensure that they do not go down the path of reproducing an aesthetic code that constitutes its own form of anthropological project. In other words, they must avoid writing to expectation and merely transforming the immobile travellee into a reified travelling representative of a 'same but different' form of otherness.

**African travel writing on its own terms**

In Africa as elsewhere, electronic genres are unquestionably transforming travel writing. The 'Invisible Borders' project (http://invisible-borders.com), to take one successful example, demonstrates how a new generation of African-born photographers, visual artists and writers can collaborate to produce previously unimaginable accounts of travel across the continent. For those with internet access, blogging and micro-blogging also look set to give voice to a whole range of African travellers whose experiences might otherwise have remained beneath critical radars. In South Africa, for example, Mzansi Girl (www.mzansigirl.com) blogs largely, but not exclusively, on domestic travel. Readers are also invited to interact with her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, where, as her blog explains, she aims to 'curate great African-related content'.

In addition to this digital output, examples of printed accounts of inter- and intra-continental travel by African and diasporic authors attest to a continued desire to engage with and develop travel writing traditions. At times, the results appear more conventional in terms of form. This is the case for example with Noo Saro-Wiwa's _Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria_ (2011), a description of her journey back to the Nigeria where she was born and where her political activist father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, was executed. It is also true of the growing body of work by South African Sihle Khumalo, whose intra-continental travelogues – _Dark Continent: My Black Arse_ (2007), _Heart of Africa_ (2010), _Almost Sleeping My Way to Timbuktu_ (2013) – imply a desire to provide an ironic African perspective on some of the more iconic journeys of nineteenth-century European writing on Africa. However, Carli Coetzee warns against limiting the reading of such texts according to one set of formal conventions and thereby ignoring the ways in which they can 'can activate other intertextual fields of reference' (2013: 68). 'Travel writing', she reminds us, 'is not just one thing' (ibid.: 75). Consequently, just as Saro-Wiwa's account might be said to be as much about exorcising grief as it is about travelling, Coetzee shows how Khumalo's 'travel writing' brings to the surface important elements of self-help manuals.

Such continued 'scattering across genres' of travel-related writing is equally evident in the fictional output of the new generation of African novelists described as 'Afropolitan'. Regardless of whether this contested label denotes a privileged elite, less affluent immigrants or global citizens with diverse connections to Africa, the outlook it describes is unmistakably that of the traveller. As with texts from the 1950s and 1960s, novels such as Alain Mabanckou's _Black Bazaar_ (2012 [2009]), Teju Cole's _Open City_ (2012) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's _Americanah_ (2013), for example, suggest a renewed sense of Africa's place in the world and a desire to use the experience of travel and mobility to shape new forms of writing.

My comments above on the conventionality of much of the new wave of non-fictional African travel writing might suggest that we still await a distinctively African adaptation of the form, one that addresses and overturns the genre's strong associations with the colonial past. It would be wrong, however, to look to the future alone for an African travel writing that asserts itself on its own terms and demands a critical space that is respectful of its practices. Rather, the time is ripe to consider the significance of Zika's _Journal de route_. On the one hand, the conditions of this text's existence point to a more complex history for African travel writing than is generally acknowledged. On the other, Zika's distinctive play with form is a reminder that wider understandings of travel writing's generic identity, and its ongoing evolutions, need systematically to be counterbalanced with critical recognition of the alternative and enabling routes it has taken in the past.

As noted earlier, in certain key respects, not least its title, _Journal de route_ introduces itself as a suitable text for inclusion within a strictly defined understanding of travel writing. References to reasonably accurate dates (that can be cross-referenced with Rouch's filmography) emphasize that the text is a factual account of the author's engagement with real places. The travelogue's sense of progress over time is complemented by a sense of movement across space thanks to subheadings that list the villages and cities of defined itineraries. There is ample evidence, too, of the author's reactions to landscape, society and culture as filtered through his own cultural perspective, and, at times, prejudices; examples include the less than flattering portrait of Syrians and Zika's statement that 'nothing works in the Gold Coast' (2007: 32). Finally, there is the self-reflexive embedding of form used to draw the reader's attention to Zika's efforts to fulfill generic expectation or to apologize when this fails to materialize. Typical of this is the moment when, having recounted a story full of innuendo about an unscrupulous _marabout_ , Zika personifies his travelogue and explains: 'The travelogue is unkind, it tells even the worst secrets. Travelogue apologizes to readers for this passage' (2007: 53).

The above example underscores the inimitable way in which the text flags up its conformity in travel writing terms as it simultaneously pushes the boundaries and allows 'unsuitable' content to infiltrate. Tellingly, however, Zika, as travel writer, absolves himself of this infringement and suggests that it is the inherent flexibility of genre that permits these developments. At other times, however, this generic noncompliance happens in a less knowing way. A brief entry towards the end illustrates this. Entitled 'The Visit to the Top of the Mountain' (Zika 2007: 55), it suggests the reader is to be treated to a variation of the promontory descriptions of much colonial and postcolonial western travel writing. Mary Louise Pratt has identified these 'master-of-all-I-survey' moments as a specific 'interaction between aesthetics and ideology' (Pratt 1992: 205) that gives meaning to journeys, and, in a colonial context, underlines the European's intellectual authority to interpret and the political desire to master. Transposed to a postcolonial context, Pratt sees the traveller 'as still up there, commanding the view, assigning it value, oblivious to limitations on their perceptual capacities' (ibid.: 220). In _Journal de route_ , the unnamed mountain and the stone construction atop it are presented as a site that 'has to be seen' (Zika 2007: 55), although there is no indication of who has ascribed it this value. Zika goes on to describe an arduous trek where the party of travellers must deal with dense, overhanging trees, biting ants and a less than competent local guide. The sense of tense expectation in the short passage is both palpable and recognizable as the reader awaits the traveller's 'discovery'. Zika, however, confounding all expectation, abruptly informs us of a return to the travellers' base before they set off once more. The final comment on the expedition – 'at last, there's the top of the mountain' (ibid.: 55) – gives no indication of whether the summit has been reached physically or just perceived.

Moments such as this, where there is a notable mismatch between content and _Journal de route_ 's apparent desire to conform to travel writing's generic norms, become noticeably more frequent in the final section of the text. Subtitles that earlier had underlined spatial progress through references to places visited no longer fulfill this function. Thus, one subheading referring to a neighbourhood in Lomé in fact describes a moment of anger and frustration for Jane Rouch before segueing into an imaginary conversation where the narrator questions her about possible reasons for this. In the following episode, this develops into a presentation of a friend and fellow member of the travelling party, Illo Gaoudel, who has just been suggested as a possible cause of Madame Rouch's anger. His habit of 'entering into people's private lives' (ibid.: 41) then becomes an excuse to reproduce a letter written by Gaoudel accusing Zika of fathering an illegitimate daughter and requesting him to forward material support. Zika's response, also reproduced, provides dates that prove this is impossible and concludes by sending best wishes to the young woman 'who gives birth after a month. I congratulate her. In a year's time I wish her twenty-four instead of twelve girls' (ibid.: 43).

These kinds of textual practices, as well as the inclusion of a small poem to a mouse, the insertion of subheadings that read like proverbs, and the uplifting final entry where Zika imagines his family's joyous reaction to his imminent return home, are a significant part of what makes _Journal de route_ so distinctive. It would be wrong, however, to see the text's progressive shift towards them as a definitive move away from the generic identity of its title. Although there is no room here to do full justice to this travel journal's modes of expression, even a restricted focus reveals that what we are dealing with is a specific type of generic hybridity resulting from the place the text occupies between orality and literature. This, then, allows the easy wit of _Journal de route_ , its repetitions, proverbs, knowing performance of genre and even its redundancies to be identified as emerging from an oral culture where 'experience is intellectualized mnemonically' (Ong 1982: 36).

More than anything, _Journal de route_ exudes a sense of its travelling author's self-confidence and gently mischievous character. The result, I believe, is not the type of latent tension often said to characterize the postcolonial African writing subject (see Mbembe 2001; Syrotinski 2002) but a more unusual example of negotiation that enables Zika to bridge and merge very different formal traditions without denying the value of one or the other. An unexpected reversal underpinning _Journal de voyage_ may explain this congruence. As Zika begins his journey, and his language betrays the 'errors' of its 'youth', his text reveals an explicit preoccupation with demonstrating knowledge of the generic rules being used to support an introduction to writing. As the journey progresses, his language could be said to mature towards a type of linguistic conformity. With this development, however, comes an approach to writing that no longer seems to need the support of clear rules of genre. In conclusion, I would like to suggest that this confident use of genre as a guide or support for playful experimentation rather than a form of straitjacketing is the lesson to be learned for travel writers, travellers and critics seeking to find their own way.

**Select bibliography**

Borgomano, M. (1998) 'Le Voyage "à l'africaine" et ses transformations selon _Amkoullel, l'enfant peul_ ', in R. Fonkoua (ed.), _Les Discours de Voyages: Afrique—Antilles_ , Paris: Karthala.

Coetzee, C. (2013) 'Sihle Khumalo, Cape to Cairo, and Questions of Intertextuality: How to Write about Africa, How to Read about Africa', _Research in African Literatures_ 44(2): 62–75.

Cronin, M. (2000) _Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation_ , Cork: Cork University Press.

Jones, R. (2013) 'The Benefits of Travel: Travel Writing in the Lagos Newspapers 1912–1931', _Journal of History and Cultures_ 2: 39–56.

Khair, T. (2005) 'Introduction', in T. Khair, M. Leer, J.D. Edwards and H. Ziadeh (eds), _Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing_ , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Lebel, R. (1928) _Études de la littérature coloniale_ , Paris: J. Peyronnet

Lunn, J. (1999) _Memories of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War_ , Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Mbembe, A. (2001) 'African Modes of Self-Writing', _Identity, Culture and Politics_ 2(1): 1–39.

Mortimer, M. (1990) _Journeys through the French African Novel_ , Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Mukasa, H. (1904) _Uganda's Katikiro in England_ , London: Hutchinson.

Ong, W.J. (1982) _Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World_ , London and New York: Methuen.

Pettinger, A. (2001) 'Africans Abroad', _The Journal of African Travel Writing_ 8(9): 74–76.

Pratt, M.L (1992) _Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation_ , London and New York: Routledge.

Pratt, M.L (2012) 'Modernity, Mobility and Ex-Coloniality', 2002, in T. Youngs and C. Forsdick (eds), _Travel Writing: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies_ , 4 vols, London and New York: Routledge.

Scheineman, D. (2014) 'The "Dialogic Imagination" of Jean Rouch: Covert Conversations in _Les Maîtres fous_ ', 1998, in B.K. Grant and J. Sloniowski (eds), _Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video_ , Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.

Syrotinski, M. (2002) _Singular Performances: Reinscribing the Subject in Francophone African Writing_ , Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Thomas, D. (1952) 'Blithe Spirits: _The Palm-Wine Drinkard_ by Amos Tutuola', _Observer_ , 6 July, p. 6.

Watts, R. (2005) _Packaging Postcoloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World_ , Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Zika, D. (2007) _Journal de route_ , 1956, Paris: Mille et une nuits.

Travel Writing Now, 1950 to the Present Day

_Carl Thompson_

In 1945 Evelyn Waugh wrote that he did 'not expect to see many travel books in the near future' (1946: 9). Thirty-five years later, for the critic Paul Fussell, Waugh's prediction had indeed come to pass, and Fussell accordingly offered his study of 1930s British travel writing as a 'threnody', a mournful lament for a genre supposedly dying out because 'travel is hardly possible any more' (1980: 37). As so often in the history of this highly adaptable form, however, this was a death knell tolled prematurely. Even as Fussell was writing _Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars_ (1980), there were new stirrings in a genre that had fallen somewhat into abeyance in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. In the late 1970s a wave of new travelogues – most notably, Paul Theroux's _The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train through Asia_ (1975) and _The Old Patagonian Express_ (1979), Peter Matthiesen's _The Snow Leopard_ (1975), Bruce Chatwin's _In Patagonia_ (1977) and Robyn Davidson's _Tracks_ (1980) – achieved both commercial success and critical acclaim, thereby helping to revitalize the form. In 1979, the British magazine _Granta_ was launched, with travel writing one of its specialities; it inspired in turn the French magazine _Gulliver_ , launched in 1990, which contributed significantly to a growing interest in the form in the francophone world (see Forsdick 2005). By the end of the 1980s, accordingly, any post-war dip in travel writing's fortunes had been amply redressed, and the genre has flourished ever since, at least in terms of general popularity and volume of production.

In recent decades, then, travel writing has retained the popularity and pervasive presence in Western culture that it has enjoyed since at least the early eighteenth century. Yet at the same time, when considering the _longue durée_ of the genre's evolution in the West, the last forty years or so have arguably seen a profound transformation of the form. Certainly the larger geopolitical context in which travel writing is fashioned and consumed has altered significantly, in ways which seem to represent a radical break with the circumstances of its production and reception in earlier centuries. From the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries, travel writing was intimately associated with, and often directly underwritten by, European and later US expansionism and the drive to empire. Ours, however, is ostensibly a _postcolonial_ era, although there is of course considerable debate about how far the networks of power and privilege forged in the colonial period still operate in our modern, globalized world. It is furthermore – and partly as a consequence of the diminishment of imperial power – a _postmodern_ era, which has witnessed the questioning of many traditional assumptions about knowledge, authority and cultural value. These two developments in tandem have shaken the intellectual and moral certainties that underpinned much Western travel writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 1980s resurgence of travel writing was consequently accompanied by what Colin Thubron termed 'a new unease' in the form (1988: xi), an unease which has often expressed itself in a heightened self-reflexivity and greater concern with the ethical implications of travel and travel writing. Yet this has been by no means the only way in which travel writing has responded to the local and global transformations outlined above. In other cases, authors have simply attempted to turn back the clock, ignoring present-day complexities to re-assert old, colonial-era taxonomies of travel, traveller and place – although they frequently cling to these stereotypes in an exaggerated, fetishized fashion that betrays an uneasy awareness of their anachronism.

Another important development has been an increasing number of travel writers from what are often labelled 'postcolonial' backgrounds. This is a problematic usage, since arguably all societies and all travellers are now postcolonial to some degree, but it has come to denote specifically travellers from formerly colonized nations or from expatriate, 'immigrant' communities hailing from former colonies. Figures such as V.S. Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Pico Iyer and Caryl Phillips have made a significant contribution to the reinvention and/or reinvigoration of travel writing in recent decades, although even among so-called postcolonial writers it has proven to be a form that can be handled in very different ways, and deployed to strikingly divergent ends. Women travellers have also become a more conspicuous presence in the genre since the 1980s, with authors such as Robyn Davidson and Sara Wheeler challenging the limiting and dismissive attitudes traditionally attached to women's travel and travel writing, and earning in the process a critical recognition largely denied to their nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century predecessors. The 1980s also saw the publication of Edmund White's groundbreaking _States of Desire: Travels in Gay America_ (1981), which inaugurated a small but growing tradition of openly gay and lesbian travel writing. And one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful travel writers of the last half-century is the transgendered Jan Morris, who began her career in the 1950s as James Morris before undergoing gender reassignment surgery in the 1970s: a metaphorical 'journey' recounted in the memoir _Conundrum_ (1974), though admittedly seldom apparent in Morris's actual travel writing, which is very self-effacing in its style.

As this will suggest, travel writing today probably accommodates a greater range of voices and divergent perspectives than at any point in its history. The genre also continues to encompass, as it has always done, a great variety of styles, modes and forms, spanning a full spectrum of 'low-', 'middle-' and 'high-brow' publications and embracing (sometimes within a single text) comedy, tragedy and pathos, farce, introspection and reportage – although as we shall see, it is also possible to overstate the generic plurality of modern travel writing. This last qualification notwithstanding, however, the diversity and proliferation of travel writing since the late twentieth century makes it hard to fashion any all-encompassing narrative of the genre's recent development. Nor is it possible to determine the genre's overall tendency and influence in our supposedly post-imperial age. Western travel writing from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries undoubtedly worked extensively – although not universally – to promote the global dominance of Europe and its settler off-shoots around the world; it remains a matter of debate whether the genre has cast off this historic role, or whether it still contributes principally to imperialist nostalgia and an ethnocentricism that helps maintain global inequalities. As yet, we lack the historical distance required to pass definitive judgement on this and many other aspects of travel writing's recent development. In what follows, accordingly, I begin by tracing some broad generic parameters and key contextual factors which undoubtedly underpin and inform most recent travelogues. The latter part of the chapter then offers a series of intersecting micro-narratives which outline various strands of the genre whilst also indicating some of the most noteworthy authors and publications.

**From 'voyages and travels' to 'travel writing'**

By the mid-twentieth century, the older generic label 'voyages and travels' had given way to the term we principally use today, 'travel writing'. The precise chronology and cause of this transition requires further research, but the name-change undoubtedly coincides with a significant attenuation of the form's traditional range and function. The travelogues produced and consumed as 'voyages and travels' were for many centuries a key medium for the acquisition and dissemination of information about the wider world. Although they could be read for entertainment, and although some accounts might be deemed inadequate or inconsequential, the overarching assumption was that travel writing was a form through which one might make important contributions to multiple fields of scholarly enquiry and contemporary debate, such as geography, ethnography, natural history, foreign policy and political economy. The late eighteenth century saw the emergence of more literary travelogues, where the reader's attention was meant to be held by the traveller's distinctive style and sensibility rather than by any factual information they conveyed. These grew to be a more prolific and prominent strand of 'voyages and travels' in the nineteenth century, but it was arguably not until the early twentieth century that they became its dominant mode. As the university system expanded and many disciplines grew increasingly institutionalized, the more specialized travel reports generated by professional academic researchers no longer fell under the rubric of 'voyages and travels'; indeed, many scholarly and scientific travellers began to define their reports in stark contradistinction to what was now dubbed mere 'travel writing', a form increasingly regarded as a repository of interesting anecdotes and subjective impressions rather than reliable knowledge.

These scholarly texts arising from travel – natural historical field reports, for example, or the ethnographic treatise – can of course be classed as travel writing under an expanded definition of the genre. But for the period under consideration here, the term 'travel writing' has generally denoted two main forms: on the one hand, the guidebook; on the other, the entertaining or 'literary' travel book. The former is a highly objectivist form in which the writer's personality is erased to foreground the practical information needed by travellers; the latter in contrast usually foregrounds and showcases the writer's distinctive sensibility. In some cases, as in the comparatively self-effacing travelogues of Jan Morris and Bruce Chatwin, this is achieved largely through a signature style and perspective; much more common, however, are travelogues offering personal adventures and what Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan describe as 'the self [. . .] writ large in its alien surroundings' (1997: 12). In its literary branch, then, travel writing has become a more overtly autobiographical form than it was in earlier eras; indeed, a commonplace of the genre is now the recounting of a process of personal transformation, an inner journey that ostensibly runs alongside the literal journey described in the text. Although often described as a Romantic trope, such accounts of growth and maturation are actually very rare in Romantic-era travel writing; arguably it was only through the influence of early twentieth-century travel writers like Graham Greene that this tendency became more pronounced. By the late twentieth century, however, such 'inner journeys' were a staple feature of the genre. As well as heightening the reader's interest in and sympathy for the author, their function is to lend a satisfying aesthetic shape to the text; what might otherwise simply be a serial, sequential progression from place to place can be plotted as a developmental narrative, culminating in a climactic episode of revelation and new understanding which generates a pleasing sense of closure. This pattern is now so well established as a generic expectation that arguably it frames and informs many travel accounts which do not follow this convention; thus we now tend to read the inconclusive endings of postmodern travel writers like Chatwin and W.G. Sebald as a deliberate resistance to the closure and resolution often found elsewhere in the form.

Discounting guidebooks, then, contemporary travel writing is a form at once more subjectivized and more aestheticized than its generic precursors. Although taken by some writers in the direction of investigative journalism and reportage, and pushed by others towards the erudite, scholarly essay, the strong generic norm and pressure is for all findings and observations to be mediated through extensive narration of the travelling self, which personalizes and supposedly makes more interesting and accessible the information being presented. That information, equally, is usually offered in a non-specialist idiom which may be understood by a popular audience – allowing on the one hand genuine experts in many fields to reach a wider readership, but conversely also enabling many decidedly non-expert travellers to offer idiosyncratic, poorly researched pronouncements with a misleading air of authority. Modern travel writing has in this way an engagingly amateur, even democratic aspect, yet the lack of analytical and methodological rigour strongly associated with the form largely disqualifies it from serious consideration by academic professionals in most disciplines. As a result, travel writing is now a genre firmly categorized as recreational reading.

If this narrows the genre with regard to its capacity to make meaningful contributions to knowledge and debate, in other regards it has arguably made modern travel writing a more complex, protean and multivalent form, one that in comparison to earlier eras is poised far more ambiguously – and for some commentators, far more problematically – between fact and fiction, reportage and literature. Readers and critics have of course always complained that fictions and outright lies may be woven into travel writing's ostensibly factual representation of the wider world. Historically, however, this was a debate straightforwardly premised on the assumption that truthfulness and fidelity to actual events was key, and that fabrications and misrepresentations were to be denounced whenever detected. With the rise of a more aestheticized mode of travel writing, however, this debate shifts from just whether an account is truthful to how far, and in what circumstances, does truthfulness really matter in texts chiefly intended to give pleasure and diversion? Is a degree of invention and exaggeration permissible, even desirable, if it makes an account more entertaining or evocative or powerful for the reader? Yet even as modern travel writing in this way shades into and merges with the novel, to become a more purely literary artefact, it cannot wholly escape a sense that truthfulness and factual accuracy remains an important criterion. After all, travelogues usually depict real people and real places, and most modern travel writers still insist they are giving us broadly accurate accounts, true at least to their own experience and perceptions even if artistic licence is sometimes used. Most significantly, the impressions proffered of people and places can undoubtedly influence readers' perceptions of the world, shaping attitudes and actions and thus having real-life consequences.

The result is a genre that deeply divides critical opinion even as it remains enduringly popular. For detractors, the generic norms of modern travel writing make it a troubling form, in which prejudicial and partial views are routinely passed off as authoritative statements about the world. Simplistic, under-researched analysis is encouraged and legitimated through the genre's requirement to be accessible, and a reprehensible self-absorption is regularly demonstrated, as the form's autobiographical imperatives reduce the rest of the world to the role of supporting cast in a traveller's personal drama and development. These are undoubtedly accusations that can be fairly lodged against many weaker examples of the form – perhaps even against the bulk of what today is positioned and marketed as travel writing. Yet there are important counter-arguments as well. The popularization and wider dissemination of ideas and information is in itself not necessarily a bad thing; simplifying and personalizing their material may sometimes be the compromise travel writers must make to introduce otherwise marginalized voices and important new perspectives to a wider audience, creating works which will hopefully pique interest and encourage further, deeper enquiries. The readers of travel writing are also probably more sophisticated than some hostile critics have suggested, and so well equipped to recognize and assess by different criteria the form's various modern modes and sub-genres. Many readers will instinctively feel, for example, that factual inaccuracy and extensive focus on the authorial self is more problematic in investigative travel writing that reports episodes of human suffering, but less so in comic travelogues like Bill Bryson's _The Lost Continent_ (1989) or in highly literary travelogues like Sebald's _Die Ringe des Saturn_ ( _The Rings of Saturn_ , 1995). Most importantly, perhaps, many writers have used modern travel writing's new dispensation, and its greater freedom to oscillate between fact and fiction, to create documents which mingle elements of memoir and reportage, philosophy and history, cultural analysis and lyricism, in striking and powerful ways. Dea Birkett and Sara Wheeler have coined the term the 'New Travel Writing' for the more ambitious and often generically hybrid works which have emerged as travel writers 'become more literary and less literal'; it remains to be seen whether this new label will stick, but they are surely right to suggest that recent travel writing at its very best is 'among the richest literature around' (Birkett and Wheeler 1998: ix).

**Key contexts I: the Cold War and decolonization**

As noted earlier, travel writing seems to have undergone a dip in popularity and critical prestige in the 1950s and 1960s, having previously experienced something of a Golden Age in the 1930s. The post-war decades nevertheless saw extensive publication in the genre, and launched the careers of several highly esteemed travel writers whose output spanned the rest of the twentieth century. These included, in the British tradition, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Eric Newby, Norman Lewis, Colin Thubron, Jan Morris, and, from Ireland, Dervla Murphy. Wilfrid Thesiger's two acclaimed travel books _Arabian Sands_ and _The Marsh Arabs_ appeared in 1959 and 1964 respectively, while V. S. Naipaul's first travelogue, _The Middle Passage_ , was published in 1962. With the exception of Peter Matthiesen, whose first travel book appeared in 1961, the USA produced fewer career travel writers in these post-war decades, but notable travel writing was produced by John Steinbeck, Mary McCarthy and Richard Wright, among others. Travel was also a significant theme in the work of Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, and in writers influenced by the Beat aesthetic such as Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Paul Bowles and Robert Pirsig (see Paes de Barros 2009). In France, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss offered in _Triste Tropiques_ ( _Sad Tropics_ , 1955) a memoir of extensive travelling that was simultaneously a tirade against travel and travel writing, and in 1963 the Swiss travel writer Nicolas Bouvier began his influential career with _L'Usage du monde_ ( _The Way of the World_ ).

The world through which these writers travelled was in some regards very different from that described by their 1930s predecessors. Erstwhile allies in the struggle against Nazi Germany, the communist nations of the Soviet bloc and the capitalist democracies of Western Europe and the USA were now locked into the antagonism of the Cold War. This was a confrontation and clash of ideologies which greatly limited travel between the so-called 'West' and 'East', yet which led nevertheless to some noteworthy accounts of journeys across the Iron Curtain; for example, Laurens van der Post's _Journey into Russia_ (1964), Inge Morath and Arthur Miller's _In Russia_ (1969), and later Thubron's _Among the Russians_ (1983). Accounts were also produced by travellers journeying from East to West; a sample can be found in Wendy Bracewell's _Orientations: An Anthology of East European Travel Writing in Europe_ (2009), a seminal collection which will hopefully spur further investigation of a little-known and under-researched branch of recent travel writing (see also Bracewell and Drace-Francis 2008). Cold War anxieties can also be found in many travelogues not directly concerned with comparisons between communism and capitalism; the threat of nuclear conflict, for example, emerges as a theme in Steinbeck's 1962 account of a journey around America, _Travels with Charley_ , and is also cited by Chatwin in _In Patagonia_ as one factor in his childhood fantasies of escaping to South America.

Cold War antagonisms also had some bearing on the second major geopolitical development of the immediate post-war decades. The Second World War greatly sapped the military and economic strength of the European imperial powers, whilst simultaneously giving impetus to liberation movements throughout their overseas dominions. An extended period of decolonization therefore followed the war, inaugurated by Britain's granting of independence to India in 1947, and at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s. This saw the establishment of newly independent nation-states across much of south Asia, Africa, the West Indies and Oceania (the nations of Central and South America having earlier cast off Spanish and Portuguese rule in the nineteenth century). According to the terminology widely adopted in the 1950s, this swathe of new states, along with the former colonies of Latin America, now constituted the 'Third World', in contradistinction to the First and Second Worlds of the capitalist West and communist East.

The emergence of the Third World seemed initially to herald a new world order, in which power, privilege and wealth would be distributed very differently from the days of empire. In practice, however, the transformation was far less radical. While some nations flourished after independence, many former colonies experienced stalling or only partial development and remain to this day trapped in poverty and instability. The reasons for this are complex and the subject of much heated and highly politicized debate. Yet whatever explanation one accepts, it is clear that for much of the period under consideration here many of the global inequalities of the imperial era have remained in place; only in the twenty-first century have Brazil, India and especially China developed economies to rival those of the EU and USA. This imbalance of wealth, and the further imbalances it generates in terms of mobility, leisure and access to cultural production, has ensured that travel writing since 1950 has remained overwhelmingly a genre produced by and for 'First-World' Westerners, notwithstanding the increasing prominence of 'postcolonial' travel writers in recent decades. And a significant proportion of that travel writing has been descriptive of journeys undertaken _from_ the developed _to_ the developing world, as comparatively affluent Western travellers visit and report back on poorer regions that in many cases were once controlled and colonized by Western empires.

This is a flow of observations and information that largely replicates the circuits of travel and travel writing established during the era of Western imperialism. Whether it replicates the _function_ of Western travel writing in the colonial period, however, is a hotly contested issue in recent commentary on the form. For hostile critics such as Debbie Lisle (2006), the genre still principally works as it always did under empire, to frame and depict the wider world for the convenience, reassurance and titillation of its mostly Western readership. To this end, Lisle suggests, the less developed nations of the 'Third World' or 'Global South' are routinely characterized as at best comically backward and shambolic, and at worst desperately impoverished and mired in violence, warfare and corruption, the perennial victims of an unending sequence of natural and man-made disasters. Thus for Lisle the collective tendency of the form is to foster a sense of the superiority of Western society. Traveller and reader come to regard themselves as positioned at the forefront of modernity and progress, the representatives of a more advanced and enlightened culture; this complacent, self-congratulatory stance in turn helps to justify and legitimate the prosperity and ongoing global dominance of the West. In this way the extensive decolonization of the post-war era has arguably led to travel writing which is not so much postcolonial as _neo-colonial_ in its attitudes and influence, providing an alibi for the inequalities of wealth and well-being inherent in the modern world order.

Lisle's argument is in many regards overstated. She recognizes that some travel writers have sought to contest and counter this general tendency in the form, but gives comparatively little space to exploring their work; she is moreover often insensitive to the ironizing strategies by which many travel writers since the 1980s have sought to subvert colonial legacies. Yet she is undoubtedly right to focus attention on the broad patterns and overall influence of the genre, and on the wider ideological work performed by extensive negative imagery of former colonies and developing nations. Obviously, given the recent history of some of those nations, reporting suffering, criminality and bureaucratic ineptitude has sometimes been both a practical necessity and moral obligation (as perhaps Lisle does not adequately acknowledge). Yet one can also often sense alternative agendas at work as travel writers seek out these scenarios and circulate accounts of them. In the immediate aftermath of decolonization, for example, a lament for empire and embitterment over the loss of power and privilege produced in some Western travelogues a rather punitive, hostile 'othering' of former colonies, even though there was as yet no evidence of stalling development and mismanagement. And even when writers are sympathetic and optimistic about independence, the travel writing of the 1950s and 1960s sometimes reveals the persistence of essentialist stereotypes and ethnic categorizations rooted in the spurious 'race science' of the imperial era.

By the 1980s, when travel writing underwent its apparent renaissance in the West, overt racism was unacceptable in print and race science was thoroughly discredited. Almost all Western travellers from this period onwards evince what Lisle dubs a 'cosmopolitan vision', ostensibly committed to 'equality, tolerance and respect for difference' (2006: 10) and seeking through travel writing to foster a sense of 'global community [. . .] based on shared understandings, norms and sensibilities' (2006: 4). Yet as Lisle and other critics have noted (see especially Sugnet 1991; Holland and Huggan 1997), this apparently cosmopolitan attitude can often mask, or at least inadvertently assist, a neo-colonial agenda. Many travel writers are still prone to sweeping generalizations and scathing denunciations based on only limited personal experience and on background research that is very partial (in both senses of the word). This is the accusation often levelled at the work of Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul, whose travelogues frequently seem to excoriate developing nations for their failure to conform to Western standards. Elsewhere, many travel writers appear to actively seek out the bleakest scenarios, and to some extent manufacture them in their writing, to heighten the newsworthiness or humanitarianism of their accounts. Others trade in unexamined stereotypes simply to lend 'local colour' to their travelogues, seeking by this means to transform their journeys into exotic adventures reminiscent of the novels of Graham Greene or Joseph Conrad. All too often there is little meaningful analysis of the political and economic causes of hardship and disorganization, and there is especially, as many critics have noted, a recurrent tendency in the form to overlook the developed world's past and present complicity in many of the developing world's problems. Elided from many travel accounts, and so conveniently obscured for readers, are the ongoing legacies of colonial injustice and mismanagement, the destabilizing interventions of the Cold War era – when antagonism between the capitalist West and communist East was played out by proxy in much of Africa, south Asia and South America – and the crippling effects of ongoing trade arrangements and debt obligations which greatly favour the USA and EU. Instead, many travel writers routinely naturalize the plight of developing nations, often presenting their problems as somehow endemic to the region, the seemingly inevitable result of 'age-old' tribal animosities and primitive customs and superstitions.

This is the 'charge-sheet', as it were, often levelled against contemporary travel writing. Yet as always with this diverse and protean genre, there are counter-arguments and examples which confound these charges. Even the genre's most trenchant critics suggest that recent travelogues do not invariably work in this way, with the best accounts offering more nuanced depictions which acknowledge the rich, complex histories of developing regions and the diverse causes of their present predicaments. Alternatively, there have been texts where a more popularist, even 'adventure-story' depiction has served a useful purpose in bringing an important story to a wider Western readership. Examples of both these more praiseworthy tendencies in the genre will accordingly be given in the final sections of this chapter.

**Key contexts II: globalization and tourism**

As well as shifting patterns of geopolitical and economic power, travel writing in recent decades has had to negotiate an increasingly globalized world. 'Globalization' is not a new phenomenon, although the term itself became widely used only in the 1990s. The integration of world markets, major advances in global communication systems and an upsurge in cross-cultural exchange and what Mary Louise Pratt has dubbed 'planetary consciousness' (Pratt 1992: 15, 29–30) were important features of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at once enabling and being driven by the emergent European empires of this period. Yet the last half-century has undoubtedly witnessed an increasing rate and also heightened perception of global interconnectedness, with the escalation of air travel, the invention of the internet and proliferating forms of telecommunication just three of the developments seemingly shrinking the world and diminishing cultural difference. Linked to this, the same period has seen a dramatic increase in international tourism, which now constitutes one of the largest industries in the world economy.

Globalization has unsettled, or at least complicated, the traditional binarisms of 'home' and 'abroad', 'them' and 'us', that we tend to assume are fundamental to travel writing. On the one hand, for most travellers today 'home' is no longer a clearly bounded locality from which they depart to encounter the wider world; rather, a range of global connections, commodities and influences are everywhere apparent even in our supposedly 'local' environments. This sense of 'glocality', as it is sometimes dubbed, is further heightened by the fact that many travellers now hail from multicultural societies, making it harder to assume any singular, shared cultural identity at home. Conversely, travellers now frequently encounter an 'abroad' that does not match conventional expectations of foreignness and exotic difference. Journeying as his title puts it _Into the Heart of Borneo_ (1984), Redmond O'Hanlon discovers there young tribespeople who want to learn to disco-dance; similarly, when Michael Palin visits the Inuit in Alaska he is surprised to meet fans of _Monty Python_ eager to acquire his autograph.

O'Hanlon and Palin extract a gentle comedy from this confounding of exotic expectations, using it in part to deflate the aura of heroism and machismo often associated with travels in the destinations they visit. Surveying recent travel writing more widely, however, one encounters a spectrum of responses to globalization. A more traditional and simplistic strand of the genre simply ignores the phenomenon, or remains oblivious to it, as traveller and reader are taken to some idyllic destination seemingly untouched by the modern world. Like the many travelogues that depict former colonies and other Third World nations as dangerous and barely civilized, travel writing in this romanticizing vein at one level reassures readers that the distinctions between 'them' and 'us' remain strongly demarcated, even in a decolonized, increasingly hybridized world. However, difference is here usually inflected positively rather than negatively, with travel writing of this type often incorporating the Romantic trope of escape from modernity enabling a renovation of the self; notable (and bestselling) examples include Peter Mayle's _A Year in Provence_ (1989) and Elizabeth Gilbert's _Eat Pray Love_ (2006). Alternatively, in a closely aligned strand of the genre, travel writers position their accounts as form of 'salvage ethnography', claiming to record a traditional, pre-modern way of life on the verge of being swept away; here again a common trope is that of personal transformation through contact with the primitive.

As these examples suggest, many travel writers depict globalization as a negative and tragic phenomenon, productive of an irreversible loss of cultural diversity and so leading to the homogenization and banalization of the world. However, these laments over globalization's baleful effects can vary greatly in their political valence and ideological implication. Some writers have offered searing and insightful critiques of the dubious transformations and 'Coca-colonization' wrought on local communities as Western modernity is diffused (or imposed) by the tourist industry or through the operations of large, profit-driven businesses. In other writers, however, the celebration of exotic customs and primitive, pre-modern lifestyles is bound up with what Johannes Fabian has termed a 'denial of coevalness' (1983: 31, 37–70). Refusing to acknowledge the contemporaneity and modernity of the cultures they visit, these travellers offer simplified portraits which fix and trap their 'travellees' in an idealized past, turning them into museum pieces and over-emphasizing their exoticism to suit the traveller's own fantasies of escape and renewal. This idealizing tendency, which is also fundamental to the tourism industry, may obscure or downplay the hardships and challenges actually faced today by communities and environments. This is the charge often levelled, for example, at the volume most strongly associated with the 1980s resurgence of travel writing, Chatwin's _The Songlines_ (1987), where an innovative, fragmentary structure is used to deliver what is essentially a romanticized, mystical depiction of Australian Aborigine culture. In some cases, moreover, by denying the impact of globalization and modernization travel writers paradoxically promote the very transformations they profess to deplore, as their idyllic depiction stimulates greater touristic interest in a destination.

Other travelogues acknowledge, even foreground, globalization, but regard the phenomenon in a more positive or at least comedic fashion. In some cases, as in the examples of O'Hanlon and Palin, these acknowledgements work to undercut any grand pretensions on the part of the traveller whilst simultaneously gesturing towards a common humanity and shared global culture linking author, reader and 'travellee'. Alternatively, travelogues like Pico Iyer's _Video Nights in Kathmandu_ (1988) and Richard Poplak's _The Sheik's Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World_ (2009) make globalization their central theme and often revel in the cultural cross-fertilization and hybridization of recent years. Travelogues in this vein frequently emphasize the extent to which non-Western cultures absorb Western influences not passively but on their own terms, whilst also making their own contributions to Western and global culture. Attention shifts away from the identification of supposedly clear differences between cultures assumed to be bounded, separate and discrete (this being, perhaps, travel writing's traditional focus and function), to address instead how multidirectional processes of exchange, translation and transculturation increasingly characterize and connect all cultures. The exploration of this interconnectedness is often infused by a postmodern sensibility which sees pop culture as just as worthy of celebration as high art or traditional cultural forms; simultaneously, travel writing of this type usually works to interrogate the notions of cultural 'authenticity' which underpin more conventional offerings in the genre, and which are of course fundamental to the tourist industry's marketing of many destinations.

In its comic as in its tragic inflections, contemporary travel writing's response to globalization can have a complex and ambiguous valence. In some travelogues, recognition of a more interconnected, modernized world can help to dismantle stereotypes and anachronisms; other accounts, however, arguably do little more than foster a specious sense of cross-cultural unity and harmonization, issuing platitudes which may deflect attention from the problems undoubtedly sometimes caused by globalization in its more rapacious, consumerist forms. This last accusation, however, is less relevant to another noteworthy strand of contemporary travel writing born of the accelerated globalization of our age. For some commentators, globalization has made 'proper' or 'real' travel impossible. We may of course move from place and place – indeed, heightened mobility is a conspicuous feature of modern life – yet if the global is already everywhere apparent in the local, and if cultures the world over are increasingly homogeneous, can that movement ever generate an encounter with a genuinely different society? Mindful of this charge, a growing body of work offers what superficially seems like 'anti-travel writing', as authors make a point of _not_ leaving their local environments or conspicuously _not_ seeking out foreign adventures and cultural difference. In this spirit, for example, Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop's _Los Autonautas de Cosmopista_ ( _The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute_ , 1983) describes an extended period simply travelling the main autoroute between Paris and Marseilles, Mark Lawson reflects on _The Battle for Room Service_ (1993) in places like Milton Keynes (as well as further afield), and Iain Sinclair explores the M25 motorway in _London Orbital_ (2002). Yet if these texts at one level parody the conventions of travel writing, from another perspective they simply revive and adapt the well-established tradition of home travels; and by finding much to report and meditate even in the most mundane settings, they implicitly debunk the notion that 'real' travel is somehow now impossible.

As noted, globalization has been accompanied and greatly promoted by a dramatic escalation in tourism. Whilst chiefly catering to affluent Western consumers – although increasingly also to a growing taste for recreational travel in China and other 'rising' nations – the tourist industry now accommodates almost every conceivable niche, style and sub-culture of travel, from package holidays to adventure trips and independent travellers. Similarly, the infrastructures of modern tourism extend to almost every region and environment; one may now book trips to climb Everest, or cruises to the Arctic and Antarctic. As with globalization, this proliferation of tourism has produced a range of responses in recent travel writing. Some writers seek strenuously to differentiate themselves from more touristic travellers, disparaging the alleged laziness, superficiality and herd mentality of the latter and presenting themselves as more adventurous and/or more cultivated figures. Accounts of this type generally subscribe, either explicitly or implicitly, to the longstanding distinction between the supposedly superior 'traveller' and the less admirable 'tourist' (see Buzard 1993; and also Chapter 21 of the present volume), as writers emphasize their willingness to rough it and take risks, or at least to follow an idiosyncratic, non-commercialized itinerary and agenda, in their quest for a more authentic cultural encounter. For other travel writers, however, and for many commentators on travel, this is a problematic distinction that has become especially hard to sustain in recent decades. On the one hand, the infrastructures of modern transport and tourism are to some extent now unavoidable (or alternatively, travellers must go to such lengths to avoid them that their travel takes on an air of wilful affectation); on the other, many self-styled travellers overlook their own complicity in the touristic mechanisms they disdain, as their accounts work in effect to market the apparently unspoiled settings they describe, encouraging more visitors and the further encroachment of modernity. Many contemporary travel writers therefore position themselves in the more modest role that Maxine Feifer (1985) has dubbed the 'post-tourist', acknowledging – sometimes ruefully, sometimes gleefully – the touristic dimensions of their own travel and ironically deflating any pretensions to the superior status of 'explorer' or 'traveller'.

Taken in tandem, globalization and the escalation in tourism have brought to recent travel writing a pervasive mood of belatedness. In itself this is not a new theme; nostalgia for a supposedly lost age of heroic travel, and a sense that the scope for epic expeditions and major new discoveries was rapidly diminishing, are marked features of many nineteenth-century commentaries on travel. Yet this mood has undoubtedly become more pronounced in the genre, as demonstrated by the surfeit of recent accounts which retrace the journeys of earlier travellers. Once again, however, these 'in the footsteps of' offerings exhibit considerable variety of tone and style. Some display a straightforward nostalgia for an earlier age of empire and for the clear cultural demarcations of that era (both between nationalities and between 'travellers' and 'tourists'); others explore the gap between past and present travel more critically or ironically, as we shall now see.

**Extreme and ironic adventurers**

If the longstanding distinction between travellers and tourists has become harder to maintain since 1950, another traditional category of traveller, the explorer, has largely disappeared. Wilfrid Thesiger was perhaps the last travel writer to offer the ingredients usually associated with the exploration narrative, conducting genuine geographic research in territory still unmapped by Western science and bringing back a record of a culture largely untouched by Western influences. However, a further function of the exploration narrative (arguably more important than the science it ostensibly conveyed, even in the nineteenth century) was the depiction of a heroic masculinity capable of enduring hardship and surmounting all obstacles, and this taste for conspicuously arduous adventures has not disappeared in the modern age. Indeed, the cushioned nature of modern life, and the high levels of comfort and protection offered by contemporary transport technologies, has prompted a heightened interest in travel experiences fraught with danger and discomfort. This fascination with what Claudia Bell and John Lyall (2002) term the 'accelerated sublime' takes various forms and is expressed in a range of registers. One branch takes the traveller into hostile natural environments such as mountains, deserts, the ocean or the polar ice-caps: travelogues in this vein range from celebrity-authored accounts of gimmicky stunts and carefully stage-managed dangers to more substantial works like Jon Krakaeur's _Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster_ (1997), which offers thoughtful meditations on why some travellers are driven to take such risks. Another branch takes travellers and readers into perilous human environments such as slums and war zones, in a form of adventurous travel which often shades into what is now dubbed 'dark tourism', the deliberate seeking out of sites of atrocity and suffering. Some travelogues of this type amount to little more than sensationalist and exploitative voyeurism; others such as Philip Gourevitch's _We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda_ (1998) offer more sensitive and insightful analysis, thereby functioning as a form of witness and memorialization.

Such overtly adventurous, risk-taking travels were once the preserve of male travel writers. Women travellers in earlier eras of course often faced dangers and discomforts: Mary Kingsley is an obvious example. But contemporary norms of femininity usually required them to play down any such dangers in print, and more generally to keep to the safe touristic itineraries then deemed appropriate for women. In recent decades, however, a significant portion of women's travel writing has dedicated itself to confronting and overturning these traditional limitations. Leading the way in this regard was _Tracks_ , Robyn Davidson's account of an epic, 1,700-mile solo trek across the Australian Outback, which won the first Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1980. Numerous women have followed Davidson in offering powerful accounts of endurance and survival in a variety of perilous predicaments: examples include Rosa Jordan's _Dangerous Places: Travels on the Edge_ (1997) and Kira Salak's _Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea_ (2001), in which the author often displays an almost pathological desire to put herself at risk. Like their male counterparts, women travel writers adopting this extreme adventure mode are sometimes insightful, sometimes shallow and sensationalistic; yet even the weaker offerings in this vein have a subtly different inflection when written by women, by virtue of their confounding of conventional gender expectations.

If some women have imitated men in their extreme adventuring, others have adopted an ironic perspective on such feats of stamina and survival, casting themselves self-deprecatingly as more modest and cautious travellers whilst simultaneously probing the gender expectations and anxieties which have historically often made travel a test of manliness. Davidson stands somewhat in this tradition, insisting in _Tracks_ that she undertook her desert trek to demonstrate that superhuman strength and heroism are not required to make remarkable journeys; so too does Sara Wheeler in _Terra Incognita_ (1996), an account of visiting Antarctica which interrogates the masculinism traditionally associated with polar travel. Such self-ironizing is also frequently performed by male writers, and represents one of contemporary travel writing's most characteristic modes. Born in part from the sense of belatedness discussed above, the deliberate staging of the author's inadequacy as an intrepid traveller is now fundamental to a flourishing tradition of comic travel writing, as practised by figures as varied as Eric Newby, Redmond O'Hanlon, P. J. O'Rourke and Bill Bryson. With their emphasis on moments of bathos, farce and failure, travelogues of this type from one perspective undercut and subvert the epic quests and macho personae often associated with travel in earlier eras. In other regards, however, they can have a complex and ambiguous valence; as Holland and Huggan suggest, comedic self-ironizing may also function as a 'strategy of self-protection' (1997: 44), enabling travellers to evade any deeper consideration of how they and their culture may have impacted negatively upon the destinations they visit.

**Nature travels and tribal voices**

Another important framing context for travel writing since the 1980s has been the growing public awareness, and increasing scientific corroboration, of the environmental crisis currently facing the planet due to global warming, widespread pollution and excessive consumption of resources. Travel writing is in some regards a problematic genre for environmentally-minded critics, insofar as it arguably encourages further travel and tourism, with all their concomitant environmental impacts (see Kerridge 1999). Yet travelogues can be an important medium for the investigation of ecological disaster and mismanagement, or alternatively – in a strand of the genre that may also be considered a branch of nature or place writing – for generating a more sophisticated and respectful understanding of specific regions, habitats and ecosystems. George Monbiot's three travelogues – _Poisoned Arrows: An Investigative Journey through Indonesia_ (1989), _Amazon Watershed_ (1991), and _No Man's Land: An Investigative Journey through Kenya and Tanzania_ (1995) – may be positioned at the reportage end of this spectrum, while Matthiesen's _The Snow Leopard_ and Barry Lopez' _Arctic Dreams_ (1986) both offer a more lyrical fusion of science and spirituality in their reflections on the relationship between man and nature. A related development has been an interest in 'slow' or 'deep' travel. Here constant movement is eschewed in favour of extended residence, even settlement, thereby enabling a more comprehensive investigation of a locality's natural and human history: a striking example is William Least Heat-Moon's _PrairyErth_ (1991) (see Hulme 2009).

In many of these works, concern for local environments is closely bound up with concern and respect for the communities who have traditionally been custodians of those environments. Weaker offerings in this vein will often perpetuate many of the dubious, romanticizing stereotypes outlined above; they may also offer by way of ecological insight little more than a vague New Age mysticism which is easily taken in by the eco-branding now used extensively in the tourist industry. At its best, however, recent travel writing has done an important job in conveying the present-day predicaments of many indigenous and tribal communities around the world. It must of course always be acknowledged that the majority of these accounts give us Western travellers speaking _for_ the communities they depict, rather than those communities speaking for themselves. Even when travellers go to great lengths to create 'polyphonic' texts incorporating local voices and testimonies, the latter material is ultimately orchestrated by author and publisher, who maintain editorial control over what appears in the final publication. Yet if all such representations of the Other are to some degree _mis_ representations and so problematic, not representing them is in some circumstances equally culpable, at least until such time as these communities have full access to Western modes of cultural production. Norman Lewis's _The Missionaries_ (1988), for example, played a crucial role in highlighting the mistreatment of Amazonian indigenous peoples at the hands of US missionaries, and led to the establishment of the charity Survival International. Works such as Monbiot's _No Man's Land_ , Lopez's _Arctic Dreams_ , Hugh Brody's _Maps and Dreams_ (1981) and – in a more populist vein – Daniel Everitt's _Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes_ (2008) have continued this tradition, making an honourable attempt to offer sympathetic, nuanced and often politically engaged portrayals of modern tribal communities.

**New cultural histories and mobile memoirs**

If for Birkett and Wheeler the best recent work in the genre deserves to be labelled the 'New Travel Writing', for Graham Huggan, in his contribution to the present volume, many recent travelogues should be considered a branch of the 'New Cultural History'. Taking this term from the historian Peter Burke (2008), Huggan has in mind accounts which move beyond dated paradigms such as the adventure story or exotic idyll, to offer instead a rich and often multi-layered blend of personal experience, extensive historical research, and deft cultural analysis. An example is Peter Robb's _Midnight in Sicily_ (1996) in which Robb's residence and extensive travels in Italy frame on the one hand a thorough investigation of Mafia involvement in contemporary Italian politics and on the other a wide-ranging history of Sicily and its art, literature and food. Like many travelogues of this type, Robb's account is erudite and highly intertextual, quoting extensively from a broad range of sources to create a compelling 'thick description' of another culture. In some authors this can amount to merely a parade of pseudo-scholarship. With Robb as with many other recent practitioners, however, travel writing's status as a popular, non-academic genre seemingly allows writers to escape the divisions and limitations of conventional disciplinary enquiries, bringing multiple perspectives into dialogue and thereby creating a more complex and complete portrait of peoples and places.

Partly because of this breadth of focus, many of the best recent travel accounts are texts which sit awkwardly and ambiguously within the travel writing genre as conventionally conceived. Thus Amitav Ghosh's account of conducting anthropological fieldwork in Egypt in the 1980s, _In an Antique Land_ (1992), is subtitled _History in the Guise of a Traveller's Tale_ – a fair description, since much of the volume is concerned not with Ghosh's own travels but with the reconstruction of the lives of a twelfth-century Jewish merchant and his Indian slave, whose stories are used by Ghosh to illustrate the sophisticated, cosmopolitan culture that flourished around the Indian Ocean prior to European incursion into the region. Similarly hard to categorize are works such as Sebald's _Rings of Saturn_ and _Vertigo_ (1990), Daphne Marlatt's _Ghost Works_ (1993), Joanna Kavenna's _The Ice Museum_ (2005), Iain Sinclair's many psychogeographical explorations of London, and the varied publications of figures like Jonathan Raban, Geoff Dyer and Jenny Diski. If some authors like Ghosh push travel writing strongly in the direction of historiography (William Dalrymple, for example), others offer what is in effect a mode of sociology and contemporary political economy; in this spirit, for example, a flourishing sub-genre of contemporary travel writing, by authors such as Sinclair, Sam Miller, Amitava Kumar, Suketu Mehta and Ziauddin Sardar, explores the conditions of life and the international flows of capital and culture in global megacities like London, New York, Bombay and Kuala Lumpur (see Huggan 2009: 36–51; Edwards and Graulund 2012: 122–163, 167–179). And from Australia has come an emerging school of 'ficto-criticism', best represented by Stephen Muecke's _No Road (Bitumen All the Way)_ (1997), in which storytelling and anecdotes of travel are combined with scholarly reflections on contemporary cultural theory; however, this is a branch of contemporary travel writing that has so far chiefly found an academic rather than a popular audience.

Other recent works extend and refigure modern travel writing's close relationship with memoir and autobiography. As we have seen, the dominant tendency in the genre is for implicitly triumphalist texts which conclude with a consolidated sense of self, as travellers seemingly overcome and learn from the vicissitudes of travel. In Sebald's travel writing, however, or in texts like Marlatt's _Ghost Works_ , the themes of identity, memory and travel intersect in a fashion which is at once more ambitious than conventional offerings in the genre, yet also subtly subversive of the form's usual autobiographical tendencies. This strand of contemporary travel writing often emphasizes the uncanny spectrality of our globalized, postmodern condition, as increasing homogenization and 'glocality' generate a sense that everything has been seen before, and that 'home' is now simultaneously everywhere yet nowhere. It also frequently broods on sites of loss and trauma, both individual and collective; the Holocaust, for example, recurs as a theme, and many of these texts thus participate, albeit in a highly sophisticated fashion, in the growing taste for 'dark tourism' remarked upon earlier. These preoccupations often combine to produce highly self-reflexive travelogues which at their best fuse introspection with broader cultural diagnosis. Typically presenting decentred, fractured subjectivities, they simultaneously meditate on the causes of that fragmentation and alienation; and if this heightened interest in the genre's autobiographical potential has reinvigorated travel writing, so too has travel writing arguably reinvigorated memoir, moving the latter form towards a richer account of the interplay of history and geography, roots and routes, in the constitution of modern selfhood and identity.

**Postcolonial travellers**

Even in the age of empire, travel writing was never exclusively the preserve of white, Western travellers; as several chapters in this volume discuss, many significant accounts have been produced over the centuries by travellers of non-European ethnicity and culture. Yet as Holland and Huggan note, the genre has undoubtedly become more conspicuously 'multicultural' (1997: 22) in recent decades, with travel writers from non-Western nations, or alternatively from minority ethnic communities in the West, publishing in greater numbers and to greater critical acclaim than in earlier eras. If it is now customary in travel writing studies to group these writers together as 'postcolonial travellers', it is equally customary to note that this collective label is highly problematic, most notably because it assumes a commonality of history and outlook in travellers from very different backgrounds. Yet the label is perhaps justified, and serves some purpose, insofar as many of these writers, whatever their heritage, undoubtedly share a sense of writing back against the dominant traditions of the genre. As the African American travel writer Colleen McElroy notes, 'accounts of great travels never included black people, so I had no role models' (1997: iv). Like many 'postcolonial' travellers, therefore, McElroy seeks through her travel writing to reclaim a genre often strongly associated with racism and imperialism, and to make a space in that genre for voices and perspectives that have historically been marginalized or suppressed.

Postcolonial travel writers have pursued this project in diverse ways. Some have used various forms of 'reverse' or 'counter-travelling' (Holland and Huggan 1997: 21) to satirize and critique the itineraries and assumptions more commonly associated with travel writing. Thus Jamaica Kincaid's _In a Small Place_ (1988) offers a local's perspective on the seemingly idyllic island of Antigua, and incorporates some scathing discussion of how foreign tourists appear to native Antiguans. Caryl Phillips's _The European Tribe_ (1987) similarly reverses the standard trajectories of Western travel writing by having a black man of Caribbean/African descent visit the mostly white populations of Europe, in a version of the traditional Grand Tour which reveals that the tribalism routinely ascribed to other cultures by European travellers is alive and well in the supposed centre of civilization. Other 'postcolonial' travelogues such as Vikram Seth's _From Heaven's Lake_ (1983) and Ghosh's _In an Antique Land_ recount itineraries which do not begin and end in the West, as has been so often the case in the genre, but instead map connections and cultural exchanges between different regions of the developing world; and as we have seen in Ghosh's case, these alternative circuits of travel sometimes yield rich and complex histories which have been neglected (or deliberately ignored) in the West.

Other postcolonial travel writing is more conventional in terms of both form and itinerary, yet usually offers perspectives which are subtly revisionary of the genre's conservative, mainstream tendencies. As Barbara Korte notes, 'the postcolonial condition arouses in many travellers a strong political interest and a special sensitivity to the mechanisms of power' (2000: 165). The ongoing legacies of colonialism and neo-colonialism are often explicitly thematized, and there is frequently a professed desire to overturn or nuance simplistic stereotypes of race and culture. Produced in many cases by travellers who possess what is now sometimes termed a 'hyphenated' identity – for example, African American, Black British, or British Asian – postcolonial travelogues are also often highly alert to past and present instances of cross-cultural exchange, hybridization and transculturation, thereby countering the genre's traditional emphasis on establishing the demarcations between cultures. A striking example in this regard is the work of Pico Iyer, which reflects repeatedly on the common modern condition of being, as the title of his most famous volume puts it, a 'Global Soul', forever moving between different cultures yet never fully at home anywhere, at once rootless and cosmopolitan.

These affinities of theme and focus, however, do not preclude considerable variations of style, tone and political outlook. Nor are travelogues by postcolonial travellers necessarily exempt from the accusations often levelled against the genre, as outlined earlier. Most of the accounts we now classify as postcolonial travelogues still involve comparatively affluent travellers, often now based in the 'First World', visiting the poorer regions of the developing world and passing judgement on them. Even when their authors hail from other regions, the great majority of these accounts are produced in the West and so implicitly framed for a Western readership through the subtle shaping pressure applied by editors and publishers. Unsurprisingly, then, some have attracted criticism for seemingly replicating many of the problematic assumptions and tropes of Western travel writing more generally; thus Naipaul has been castigated for his scathing, unsympathetic portrayal of modern India in his trilogy of travelogues, _An Area of Darkness_ (1964), _India: A Wounded Civilization_ (1977) and _India: A Million Mutinies Now_ (1999), while Iyer has been rebuked for a failure to acknowledge the privilege and wealth underwriting his cosmopolitan mobility, for his unwitting complicity with the modernizing forces he professes to disdain and for an exoticizing tendency in his depiction of other cultures (Holland and Huggan 1997: 165–166; Lisle 2006: 116–120). For all these reasons, the proliferation of accounts by postcolonial travel writers does not necessarily represent such a radical transformation of the genre as one might assume. Yet it is undoubtedly a development which has greatly enriched recent travel writing, and broadened significantly the perspectives offered by the form.

The critical debate about the role and influence of modern travel writing is unlikely to abate or be resolved. What can be said with more certainty, however, is that the genre continues to enjoy great popularity and to develop new forms and sub-genres which in turn attract new audiences and practitioners: the online travel blog, for example, and even, as Tim Youngs has highlighted, the graphic travelogue, modelled on the graphic novel (2013: 187). And whilst the genre is now firmly positioned, in almost all its modes, as a form of recreational reading, travel writing remains arguably one of 'the most socially important of all literary genres' (Youngs 2013: 1), exercising a significant influence on reader perceptions of both the wider world and themselves. Travel writing's often complex relationship with power and privilege, and in the West with the ongoing legacies of colonialism, must of course always be interrogated. Yet at its best the genre can work to widen our sympathies, curiosity and, indeed, knowledge, whilst also functioning, as Holland and Huggan put it, as a 'useful vehicle of cultural self-perception' and critique (1997: xiii, 48).

**Select bibliography**

Bell, C. and Lyall, J. (2002) _The Accelerated Sublime: Landscape, Tourism, and Identity_ , Westport, CT: Praeger.

Birkett, D. and Wheeler, S. (eds) (1998) _Amazonian: The Penguin Book of Women's New Travel Writing_ , Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Bracewell, W. and Drace-Francis, A. (eds) (2008) _Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe_ , Budapest: Central European University Press.

Burke, P. (2008) _What Is Cultural History?_ , 2004, Cambridge: Polity.

Buzard, J. (1993) _The Beaten Track: European TourisBum, Literature and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918_ ,Oxford: Clarendon.

Edwards, J.D. and Graulund, R. (eds) (2011) _Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Edwards, J.D. and Graulund, R. (2012) _Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing_ , Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Fabian, J. (1983) _Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object_ , New York: Columbia University Press.

Feifer, M. (1985) _Going Places: The Ways of the Tourist from Imperial Rome to the Present Day_ , London: Macmillan.

Forsdick, C. (2005) _Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fussell, P. (1980) _Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Holland, P. and Huggan, G. (1998) _Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing_ , Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Huggan, G. (2001) _The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins_ , New York and London: Routledge.

Huggan, G. (2009) _Extreme Pursuits: Travel/Writing in an Age of Globalization_ , Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Hulme, P. (2009) 'Deep Maps: Travelling on the Spot', in J. Kuehn and P. Smethurst (eds), _Travel Writing, Form and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility_ , New York and London: Routledge.

Kerridge, R. (1999) 'Ecologies of Desire: Travel Writing and Nature Writing as Travelogue', in S. Clark (ed.), _Travel and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit_ , London: Zed Books.

Korte, B. (2000) _English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Kuehn, J. and Smethurst, P. (eds) (2009) _Travel Writing, Form and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility_ , New York and London: Routledge.

Lisle, D. (2006) _The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McElroy, C.J. (1997) _A Long Way from St. Louie_ , Minneapolis: Coffee House Press.

Paes des Barros, D. (2009) 'Driving That Highway to Consciousness: Late Twentieth-Century American Travel Literature', in A. Bendixen and J. Hamera (eds), _The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pratt, M.L. (1992) _Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation_ , New York: Routledge.

Sugnet, C. (1991) 'Vile Bodies, Vile Places: Travelling with _Granta_ ', _Transition_ 51: 70–85.

Thubron, C. (1988) 'Introduction', in P. Marsden-Smedley (ed.), _Views from Abroad: The Spectator Book of Travel Writing_ , London: Grafton.

Waugh, E. (1946) _When the Going Was Good_ , London: Duckworth.

Youngs, T. (2013) _The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Part III

STYLES, MODES, THEMES

Pilgrims

_Laura Nenzi_

A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken for religious purposes, to attain closer proximity with the gods (or God) and invite their/His blessings by visiting sites of special sacred significance. A practice common to all religious traditions, and in many cultures historically one of the few modes of travel permissible for women, pilgrimage can be undertaken to fulfill a requirement of one's faith (as with the _hajj_ of Islam) or for purely personal reasons; it can be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, an excuse for an outing or, if combined with apostolic work, a lifestyle, as in the case of itinerant religious figures. Pilgrimage has inspired the production of a large body of literature, from the pilgrims' own accounts to guides written for them and poems, plays and fictional stories about them. It has also provided an important frame of reference for many other types of travel and travel writing, with secular travellers often adopting metaphorically the persona of pilgrim so as to bring an air of sanctity and spirituality to their chosen journey or quest.

While the sites, protocols and demands of religious travel vary greatly across time and space, scholars have identified certain recurring features of sacred journeys the world over. Most notably, anthropologist Victor Turner has hypothesized that a threshold ( _limen_ ) separates the religious experience from the mundane. In the spaces of this 'liminality', situated outside or on the margins of the everyday, one may encounter hardship and discomfort, such suffering often being willingly embraced by the pilgrim as a means of shriving his or her sins or, in other cases, of building character, akin to a rite of passage into adulthood (Nenzi and Shinno 2002: 456). Yet this removal from the everyday also engenders a sense of camaraderie ( _communitas_ ) among its participants, who are thus frequently inspired to envision and create 'alternative social arrangements' (Turner 1974: 47, 14). The secular and the sacred, according to this model, stand in neat opposition; one is the norm, the other entails 'another order of things' (Turner 1973: 193, 214).

Other scholars have similarly remarked upon the exceptionality of the religious journey. Aryeh Graboïs (1989) reminds us that the _peregrinus_ stood in contrast to the social order of the Roman world; in the medieval Christian tradition, pilgrims were also 'others'. Both Nancy Frey (2004) and Winston Davis (1983, 1984) have identified cases of camaraderie among religious travellers who completed the _camino_ to Santiago de Compostela in Spain or joined in the mass pilgrimages of Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868). Others have argued for the unique place of pilgrimage among other types of travel by examining its distinct vocabulary (Graburn 2004) or the peculiar shapes of its routes (Iwahana 1987).

Not everyone agrees with such a neat separation of sacred and secular. Ellen Badone and Sharon Roseman, for example, warn that such a distinction 'obscure[s] more than [it] illuminate[s]' (Badone and Roseman 2004: 2), while Barbara Nimri Aziz (1987) questions the notion of a one-size-fits-all archetype and suggests that we focus on individual experiences. Lastly, Thomas Idinopulos casts doubt on the romanticized notion of _communitas_ by arguing that pilgrims always remain attached to their original political, ethnic, national and/or cultural identities. Not only are Turner's dichotomies too narrow, but the kind of harmonious fellowship he envisions 'rarely if ever took place' (Idinopulos 1996: 14).

This chapter makes a case for compromise: it acknowledges the presence of a _limen_ but blurs its contours. Evidence suggests that for most pilgrims the line between the spiritual and the everyday has been dotted and porous rather than solid and watertight. Before being a pilgrim, the traveller was a member of a community, and the web of social relations from which pilgrims originated and to which they would eventually return often remained paramount in their thoughts even as they moved in and out of sacred spaces.

**Twelfth- and fifteenth-century European pilgrims to the Holy Land**

In the early twelfth century, the Russian abbot Daniel visited the Holy Land. In his account (1106–8) Daniel acknowledges the transformative potential of religious travel, yet he does not lose his attachment to the community he has left behind. Daniel opens his narrative by professing his unworthiness as a sinner. His condition, however, exists only in the space of the ordinary; by electing to go on a pilgrimage, Daniel will enter an extraordinary space where he will be 'made worthy' (Wilkinson et al. 1988: 166). The cleansing of sins results from the crossing of the threshold between ordinary and extraordinary.

At the same time, the divine and the domestic coexist harmoniously in Daniel's narrative. Consider the following excerpt, describing his visit to the Holy Sepulchre:

enriched by the grace of God and bearing in my hand the gift of the holy place [. . .] I returned to my cell full of joy. And God and the holy tomb are my witnesses that in all the holy places I did not forget the names of the Princes of Rus' and the princesses and their children, and the bishops, abbots and great lords and my spiritual children and all Christian people [. . .] And I thank the good God that he permitted me, unworthy as I am, to inscribe the name[s] of the Russian princes [. . .] And their names are Mikhail Svyatopolk, Vasilie Vladimer, David Svyatoslavich, Mikhail Oleg Pankratie Svyatoslavich, Gleb of Minsk [. . .] I celebrated fifty masses for the Russian princes and all Christians, and forty masses for the dead. May all who read this work in faith and love receive the blessing of God and the holy tomb of the Lord and all the holy places and may they receive a reward from God no less than that of those who have visited these holy places.

(Wilkinson et al. 1988: 171)

Even in the presence of God's grace, enveloped in joy, Daniel does not forget the ties that bind. He looks back, reconnects, even names names. For Daniel, everyone – on both sides of the threshold – shall equally partake in God's blessings. Similarly, twelfth-century pilgrim John Phocas of Crete articulated the need to share the blessings of sacred travel in poignant allegorical terms. The grace one acquires in the Holy Land is like food, he said; failing to share it is thus tantamount to gluttony – a deadly sin (Wilkinson et al. 1988: 315).

Pilgrimage records of the fifteenth century show identical concerns. Santo Brasca (1444–1522), who travelled in 1480, offers a compelling example of the ongoing dialogue between pilgrims and home-based peers. Brasca _travelled_ for personal reasons but _wrote_ for the collective good. His _Viaggio in Terrasanta_ ( _Journey to the Holy Land_ , 1489) combines the day-by-day chronicle of the trip – miles travelled, sites visited – with practical advice 'for anyone who wishes to undertake this holiest of journeys' (Brasca 1966: 128).

The work opens with a dedication to Brasca's friend and mentor, Antonio Landriani. Not only does Brasca inform Landriani that, whenever he visited a site during his pilgrimage, he never failed to pray for him, he also explains that, in sharing his discoveries, he hopes that Landriani will feel included and rewarded just as if he had visited those sites in person. Later, on Mount Calvary, he intones a long, rhyme-laced oration in which he first begs for forgiveness for a host of sins, then makes an appeal on behalf of friends and relatives:

Subiungendo ti prego, Signor Dio, | As well I beg You, Holy Lord and God,
---|---
_Per quela pia matre c'ha producto_ | For the sake of the good mother who begot
_Te, Iesu, nobel fructo,_ | That noble fruit, You, Jesus, would you not
_Ch'ancor perdoni al mio patre antico,_ | Forgive again my father, my old father,
_Perdoni a mia matre, a ciascuno amico,_ | Forgive each of my friends, forgive my mother,
_A frategli, a cognate et a parente_ | My brothers, brothers-in-law, and the others,
_Ch'altro più bel presente_ | For should You ever want to grant this wish
_Se tu lo fai, a lor portar non posso._ | I could not bring them home a greater gift.
. . .  |
Et al tuo servo Gabriel Pagliaro | To Gabriel Pagliaro, who is your servant,
_Dà sanità, ch'io te lo ricommando_ | Give health and also give it to his peers.
_Qua suso lachrimando_ | I recommend him unto You while standing
_Per lui, et per tuti li suoi compagni._ | And shedding, as it were, for them my tears.

(Brasca 1966: 147–8)

In marrying the personal with the collective Brasca dissolves the _limen_ , presenting the sacred as a gift for all to enjoy.

The concerns of pilgrims like Brasca included the mundane as much as they did the sacred. Beyond imagining a spiritual communion with his peers, Brasca also imparted practical advice to all other devoted people who wished to follow in his footsteps. His diary offers tangible tips on every step of the process, from how much money one should carry (200 Venetian ducats at least) to which prayers one should intone at each site; from a reminder to pack enough clothes (lice was a problem) to general safety precautions. When he indulges in ethnographic representations, Brasca even treats his readers to subtle if perhaps unintended moments of humour noting, for example, of the Palestinian population: 'They live under strange laws: they do not drink wine in public, but do so in private, and if they can get their hands on it, they drink way more than we do' (Brasca 1966: 70). His is a readable and engaging text that captures the readers' attention and takes them along on the journey.

Evidence suggests that the intended recipients listened and learned. By Brasca's time it had become common practice for pilgrims to carry the diaries of those who had preceded them; Brasca himself travelled with a copy of Gabriele Capodilista's diary from his 1458 pilgrimage, which had been published some time before 1475. Entire segments of Brasca's narrative are in fact lifted almost verbatim from Capodilista's account (Brasca 1966: 285–6), a text that had similarly been conceived as a platform to connect pilgrims and home-based peers. Like Brasca, Capodilista begins by addressing specific recipients: the abbess and the nuns of the convent of San Bernardino in Padua. As was the case with Brasca, the motivations behind Capodilista's pilgrimage were strictly personal, but the compilation of the narrative was not; as he explains, he wished to share his experience with the nuns, whose life of contemplation prevented them from travelling to the Holy Land in person. His hope, he adds, is that 'we can _all together_ enjoy the eternal and celestial city of Jerusalem in perpetuity' (Capodilista 1966: 164–5; italics mine).

In the diaries of European pilgrims to the Holy Land, information directed at future visitors came in four forms: the strictly quantifiable and dry (to the left of A you will find B; X is ten leagues from Y); the pseudo-erudite and pedantic (this is where such-and-such miracle occurred); the pragmatic and endearingly human (bring cheese and sausages, advises Brasca); and the unabashedly folkloristic if not straight-out fantastic (elephants! sirens!), the latter being of dubious practical usefulness yet undoubtedly enthralling for readers. Degrees of utility and accuracy aside, these tales of mile-markers and miracles, of meals and marketplaces, all indicate a mindset that did not draw a line between ordinary and extra-normative but expressed in fact a desire to remain connected and to communicate.

Several scholars perceive a shift in pilgrimage narratives, over the course of the Middle Ages, toward the inclusion of more folkloristic and ethnographic detail. This has been attributed to various historical factors. Aryeh Graboïs (1989) ascribes the transition to the 1187 fall of Jerusalem, to the development of 'package tours' that turned pilgrimages into exotic voyages, and to a late medieval appreciation for inquisitiveness and experimentation ( _curiositas_ ). Thomas Renna (1996) credits the shift to the late medieval emphasis on sensorial encounters with the divine, the desire to detect God's presence in the natural environment and a growing interest in the active life. Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis has argued that the interest for ethnographic representation in Felix Fabri's _Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae_ ( _Wanderings in the Holy Land_ , _c_. 1484–8) stemmed from 'a nascent Renaissance humanism' (Petsalis-Diomidis 2003: 85). Likewise, Linda Davidson and David Gitlitz also see a rising 'Renaissance curiosity with the world' behind the fact that pilgrimage diaries of the Judeo-Christian tradition became increasingly 'less of Paul than of Baedeker' (2008: 16–17). Without denying the impact of the aforementioned historical factors, the presence of similar concerns in the narratives of twelfth- and fifteenth-century pilgrims impels us to integrate the large-scale with the small and to acknowledge that group identity and community membership also inspired the dialogues between pilgrims and home-based peers.

**Nineteenth-century Japanese pilgrims to Ise**

Like twelfth- and fifteenth-century accounts of journeys to the sacred sites of Christianity, diaries of nineteenth-century Japanese pilgrims to Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines offer us a window into the open mind of the religious traveller. The first example used here is the 1848 diary of a pilgrimage to Ise Shrine titled _Ise sanguˉ kondate dōchuˉki_ ( _Travel Account and Menus of a Pilgrimage to Ise_ , reprinted in Tanigawa 1972). Of the author we know next to nothing, not even the name, though comments in the text hint at his membership in the Shidonoura confraternity, a religious organization of individuals involved in the sugar business. They were based in the province of Sanuki, on the southern island of Shikoku. About twenty of them, men and women, partook in the two-month pilgrimage.

While the reference to 'menus' in the title may raise some eyebrows, there is no question that the author conceived of his journey as a pilgrimage, for he speaks repeatedly of 'going on a sacred journey' ( _sankei_ , _sanpai_ , _mōderu_ ) and of 'worshipping' ( _hai o itasu, reihai_ , _hairei_ ). Moreover, he often observes the requirements of religious travel and abstains from eating meat. The line between sacred and secular, however, is one our author is happy to blur. First, as immersed in a time apart as he may have been, he in fact pays close attention to the gyrations of the actual calendar, even commenting on the recent transition from the Kaei to the Kōka eras. Second, as the title suggests, his is the story of a gastronomic adventure as much as it is a pilgrimage. Half pilgrimage narrative, half Michelin guide, _Travel Account and Menus of a Pilgrimage to Ise_ includes elaborate assessments of flavours, condiments, dressings, and of the utensils used to serve the food.

What are we to make of this document? There is no denying that the author's remarks sometimes leave the reader baffled: of the Outer Shrine of Ise, for example, he simply says 'we paid a quick visit' (Tanigawa 1972: 606), not unlike those Renaissance travellers in Europe who wrote of religious sites 'with not one inspirational word, not one hint of faith intensified' (Davidson and Gitlitz 2008: 27). However, rather than dismissing _Travel Account and Menus of a Pilgrimage to Ise_ as the diary of a flawed pilgrim, we should consider issues of group identity and obligations toward home-based peers, for the author's membership in a confraternity arguably offers an interpretive key to understanding his narrative choices.

Travel, religious or otherwise, requires funds as well as time away from one's occupation. For many, this was not an option. In early modern Japan religious confraternities funded the pilgrimages of select representatives who then shared with the entire home-based group the karmic or spiritual rewards they had accrued. Those sent on these 'pilgrimages by proxy' were responsible for managing the funds, for acquiring the benefits of the gods, and for bringing them home, usually in the form of amulets and charms. Not only does our author abide by these protocols, he also ups the ante, involving his home-based peers in more ways than one.

First, he provides evidence that he and his travel companions purchased numerous amulets in Ise (Tanigawa 1972: 607). Second, his detailed narrative enables the confraternity members who had not travelled to participate in the key moments of the journey as if they had been there themselves. The text is peppered with visually compelling descriptions of the bowls and trays in which the food was served, the sacred dance the group sponsored in Ise and the purification ceremony that preceded it, the interior décor of halls and restaurants, the colors of the vests worn by the entertainers, even the lyrics they intoned. As with the pilgrims to the Holy Land, our author also included practical information that could be of use to future travellers. Lastly, he kept meticulous track of how the funds were managed: prices for food and lodging, access fees to various sites, incidentals, tips and donations are very much in the mind, and in the narrative, of our anonymous pilgrim. It appears indeed as if his diary doubled as an expense report for those who had sponsored the pilgrimage.

My second example is something of an anomaly. _Ise sanguˉ dōchuˉki_ ( _Travel Account of a Pilgrimage to Ise_ , reprinted in Tanigawa 1972) is the narrative of a journey to Ise Shrine undertaken in 1850. The author, who only identifies himself as Yamatoya, came from Aizu domain, in northern Japan, and was almost certainly involved in timber retail. Eleven people travelled together on the sixty-six-day trip, and while there is no explicit indication that they were members of a confraternity, that was likely the case.

Several elements in _Travel Account of a Pilgrimage to Ise_ set it apart from the pilgrimage narratives discussed thus far. We do not know, for example, whether this diary was ever published. Moreover, there is no sign here of the chattiness we found in _Travel Account and Menus of a Pilgrimage to Ise_ and in the diaries of the European travellers. No specific person is addressed at the beginning or at the end, there are no direct appeals to home-based peers (although several mentions are made of trips to the amulet office of this or that temple), nor are there any ruminations on the transformative power of religious travel. However, I introduce this text not despite, but because of the author's cut-and-dry style.

Yamatoya is a man of business at home and he is a man of business on pilgrimage. He writes his narrative as he would itemize the transactions on his accounting book, making it into a roster of distances travelled, money spent, places visited, and things seen. Personal feelings find no room in his ledger. We see here a man whose line of thinking did not switch toward 'another order of things' once he embarked on a pilgrimage; rather, this is a man who kept things in order on the road as he did at home.

Yamatoya is on a religious journey and often calls it as such ( _sanguˉ_ , _sankei_ ). In Ise his party sees a religious guide who provides them with amulets and a meal, the minutiae of which do not interest our author, who simply calls it 'a treat' (Tanigawa 1972: 504). In short, both his actions and his vocabulary categorize Yamatoya as a pilgrim. The religious context, however, does not prevent Yamatoya from staying true to his merchant self. He calculates and measures, noting of the pass on Mount Yagi that it is 'fifty _chō_ going up, thirty-eight going down' (1 _chō_ = 109 metres). Elsewhere he records the length, width and weight of the bell at Chion'in in Kyoto (Tanigawa 1972: 505, 509) and estimates the wealth of several towns. For Yamatoya the threshold may exist but it matters little; what adds up at home must add up on the road.

As with European pilgrimage narratives, various historical explanations have been offered to account for the blurring of the line between sacred and secular in the Japanese experience. Ian Reader and George Tanabe have compellingly argued that the differentiation between 'religion as doctrine' and 'religion as practice' is untenable. Religion, they remind us, comprises not only theological abstractions but also 'mundane practicalities' (Reader and Tanabe 1998: 13, 6). Along the same line, Duncan Williams (2005) has divested the image of Tokugawa-period Zen Buddhism from the clichés of meditation and esoteric sutras to show that most temples were in fact concerned with the bottom line and with providing practical services to the villagers.

In broader terms, Mary Elizabeth Berry speaks of a commitment to 'watchfulness' and a penchant for cataloguing, ordering, and itemizing as the defining features of the seventeenth-century shift from medieval to early modern culture in Japan (Berry 2006: 13–15). By the time our Ise pilgrims took to the road two centuries later, the ordinary person's desire to watch and inform had grown deep roots. This brings us back to Yamatoya, for as often as he speaks of 'pilgrimage' he also speaks of _kenbutsu_ , 'sightseeing' or, literally, 'observing things'.

**The gender variable**

Historically, most societies have tended to restrict women's mobility. However, in many cases pilgrimage has offered a loophole, as exceptions were made when travel was undertaken for religious purposes (see Mahallati 2011 for the Islamic tradition; Nenzi 2008 for early modern Japan). The availability of pilgrimage diaries composed by women enables us to examine the dynamics of their engagement with the sacred from yet another angle. As with the case of male pilgrims, women's narratives also show that the sacred-versus-secular dichotomy falls short, though it does so in different ways.

Let us begin with Christians in the Holy Land. Kristine Utterback (1996) has argued that when St Birgitta of Sweden (1303–73; travelled in 1371) and Margery Kempe ( _c_. 1373– after 1438; travelled in 1413) visited Jerusalem, they did so not to break with the familiar but to validate visions that they had experienced at home. Both women, in other words, envisioned a line of continuity between the sacred and the everyday.

Neither St Birgitta nor Kempe, of course, can be taken as representatives of the way in which _all_ Christian women experienced pilgrimage – a point Utterback is keen to emphasize. Moreover, unlike the cases examined thus far, neither woman produced a pilgrimage narrative: the texts associated with them are devotional literature relating their visionary experiences, and the account of Kempe's visions, it should further be noted, was in fact penned by a man. The point remains, however, that in creating a seamless transition between vision and reality, these women did not see a break between the sacred and the ordinary.

In general terms the devotional journeys of medieval European women existed at the intersection of two conflicting ideals: the notion that women should be immobile and confined on one side and the expectation that they demonstrate piousness on the other (Craig 2009). Some sites even objected to the presence of female pilgrims (Sumption 1975: 261–63). This ambiguity and the tensions it engendered defined the pilgrimages and pilgrimage narratives of women vis-à-vis those of men. As socially designated caregivers, while on site women tended to pray on behalf of others more often than men. Moreover their narratives presented pilgrimages as spiritually enriching precisely to offset the negative view associated with mobile female bodies. Such was the case with Margery Kempe, whose account sought to portray her as orthodox, not transgressive (Morrison 2000: 7). Women's pilgrimages and pilgrimage narratives were therefore double acts of negotiation: they reconciled ordinary and extraordinary spaces while also remaining mindful of, and trying to appease, the critical voices within their communities.

For female pilgrims in early modern Japan achieving a complete detachment from normativity was complicated by gender-based restrictions that followed them as they moved through sacred landscapes. Most notable among these was the precept of _nyonin kinsei_ ('off limits to women') that limited their access to sacred spaces on the grounds that the female body was polluted (Shinto) and/or karmically inferior (Buddhism). Nishimura Misu experienced just such a problem. In 1860 she travelled along the pilgrimage circuit of the Western Provinces. On the one hand, she acknowledged (in poetic form) the potential for sacred space to take the visitor into another temporal dimension:

Keidai ni | Inside the [temple] precincts
---|---
_ireba wakaranu_ | who knows
_hinaga kana_ | how long the day is?

(Nishimura 1986: 325)

On the other hand, having been denied full access to a sacred site near Mount Shosha, Misu lamented her gender and wrote 'There is no [creature] more pitiful than a woman' (Nishimura 1986: 325). Travel, religious or otherwise, fostered the imaginary and temporary recreation of one's identity (Nenzi 2008), but being locked out of certain holy sites on the grounds of gender brought women back to the reality of a society in which gendered differences mattered greatly. Certain boundaries remained in place on both sides of the _limen_.

**Conclusion**

Because most of the texts examined here were composed after the fact, the authors' interest in ethnographic detail, the flavours of food and the cost of things is meaningful. Not just a spur-of-the-moment observation, one that could have been edited out at a later stage, their taking notice of mundane things becomes part and parcel of a comprehensive narrative project, indicating a holistic approach to the experience. Ongoing conversations with home-based peers and pragmatic preoccupations suggest that pilgrimage did not involve the complete removal from the structures of everyday life.

To the argument that the religious journey temporarily lifted the pilgrim from everyday preoccupations and placed him or her within 'another order of things' the travellers examined here respond with concerns for, and attachment to, home. Such concerns are articulated not at the expense of the religious experience but as inseparable facets thereof. Even when travellers declared themselves to be on 'pilgrimage' (often including this term in the title of their narratives), travellers did not feel disconnected from their roots. As a label, 'pilgrimage' nuanced and explained their experiences but did not monopolize them.

The reverence and cultural prestige traditionally attached to pilgrimage have led many travellers to attach this title to quests that are entirely non-religious. Pierre Loti's visit to the temples of Angkor as narrated in _An Angkor Pilgrim_ (1912) was motivated by exoticism rather than piousness (Petsalis-Diomidis 2003: 96–104). In Japan, Watsuji Tetsurō undertook his 1918 'pilgrimage' to the temples of Nara not to commune with the gods but 'to enjoy the power of ancient art, to cleanse my mind, and enrich it' (Watsuji 2012: 10); his diary reads like a museum catalogue rather than a traditional pilgrimage narrative. Pilgrimage has thus come to indicate any journey that brings spiritual enrichment, contemplation, and self-reflexivity, irrespective of the presence of a deity: even study trips abroad or visits to theme parks and locales associated with iconic figures in pop culture can be labelled 'pilgrimages' (Hendry 2007; Nakamaki 2007). The destination and goals of such metaphorical pilgrims may be wholly personal, or they may be chosen to signal membership of a specific sub-culture or social group; the motif and imagery of pilgrimage have also been frequently used by those who wish to style themselves superior 'travellers', in contradistinction to mere 'tourists'.

These secular appropriations of the pilgrim persona reflect a somewhat romanticized characterization of pilgrimage as a special space and time, set apart from one's normal life. Whilst this characterization remains valid to some extent, it may also be time to de-romanticize it and pay more attention to the actions and thoughts of those who have experienced and written about actual pilgrimages. Historical records show us that pilgrims in different places and times seldom think of themselves as 'just' pilgrims or even as religious travellers; they account for all their identities, interests and idiosyncrasies in narratives whose dialogic, holistic and even metaphorical character we cannot afford to ignore.

**Select bibliography**

Aziz, B.N. (1987) 'Personal Dimensions of the Sacred Journey: What Pilgrims Say', _Religious Studies_ 23(2): 247–61.

Badone, E. and Roseman, S.R. (2004) 'Approaches to the Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism', in E. Badone and S.R. Roseman (eds), _Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism_ , Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Berry, M.E. (2006) _Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period_ , Berkeley: University of California Press.

Brasca, S. (1966) _Viaggio in Terrasanta di Santo Brasca, 1480, con l'itinerario di Gabriele Capodilista, 1458_ , Milan: Longanesi.

Capodilista, G. (1966) _Viaggio in Terrasanta di Santo Brasca, 1480, con l'itinerario di Gabriele Capodilista, 1458_ , Milan: Longanesi.

Craig, L.A. (2009) _Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages_ , Leiden: Brill.

Davidson, L.K. and Gitlitz, D.M. (2008) 'Pilgrimage Narration as a Genre', _La Corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures_ 36(2): 15–37.

Davis, W. (1983) 'Pilgrimage and World Renewal: A Study of Religion and Social Values in Tokugawa Japan', Part 1, _History of Religions_ 23(2): 97–116.

Davis, W. (1983) 'Pilgrimage and World Renewal: A Study of Religion and Social Values in Tokugawa Japan', Part 2, _History of Religions_ 23(3): 197–221.

Frey, N.L. (2004) 'Stories of the Return: Pilgrimage and Its Aftermath', in E. Badone and S.R. Roseman (eds), _Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism_ , Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Graboïs, A. (1989) 'Les pèlerins occidentaux en Terre sainte au Moyen Âge: une minorité étrangère dans sa patrie spirituelle', _Studi Medievali_ Ser. 3(30): 15–48.

Graburn, N.H.H. (2004) 'The Kyoto Tax Strike: Buddhism, Shinto, and Tourism in Japan', in E. Badone and S.R. Roseman (eds), _Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism_ , Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hendry, J. (2007) 'Old Gods, New Pilgrimages? A Whistle Stop Tour of Japanese International Theme Parks', in M.R. del Alisal, P. Ackermann and D.P. Martinez (eds), _Pilgrimages and Spiritual Quests in Japan_ , London: Routledge.

Idinopulos, T.A. (1996) 'Sacred Space and Profane Power: Victor Turner and the Perspective of Holy Land Pilgrimage', in B.F. Le Beau and M. Mor (eds), _Pilgrims and Travellers to the Holy Land_ , Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press.

Iwahana, M. (1987) 'Dōchūki ni miru Dewa sanzan sankei no tabi', _Rekishi chirigaku_ , 139: 1–14.

Mahallati, A. (2011) 'Women as Pilgrims: Memoirs of Iranian Women Travellers to Mecca', _Iranian Studies_ 44(6): 831–49.

Morrison, S.S. (2000) _Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety as Public Performance_ , London: Routledge.

Nakamaki, H. (2007) 'The "Initiation Rites" and "Pilgrimages" of Local Civil Servants in the Age of Internationalization', in M.R. del Alisal, P. Ackermann and D.P. Martinez (eds), _Pilgrimages and Spiritual Quests in Japan_ , London: Routledge.

Nenzi, L. (2008) _Excursions in Identity_ : _Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan_ , Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Nenzi, L. and Shinno, T. (2002) 'Journeys, Pilgrimages, Excursions: Religious Travels in the Early Modern Period', _Monumenta Nipponica_ 57(4): 447–71.

Nishimura, M. (1986) 'Tabi no michigusa', in Hiezu-mura (ed.), _Hiezu sonshi_ : _Rekishi to gyōji o chuˉshin toshite II_ , Hiezu: Tottori-ken.

Petsalis-Diomidis, A. (2003) 'Narratives of Transformation: Pilgrimage Patterns and Authorial Self-Presentation in Three Pilgrimage Texts', in S. Coleman and J. Elsner (eds), _Pilgrim Voices: Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage_ , New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Reader, I. and Tanabe, G.J. (1998) _Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan_ , Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Renna, T. (1996) 'Jerusalem in Late Medieval Itineraria', in B.F. Le Beau and M. Mor (eds), _Pilgrims and Travellers to the Holy Land_ , Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press.

Sumption, J. (1975) _Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion_ , Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.

Tanigawa K. (ed.) (1972) _Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryō shuˉsei_ , Vol. 20, Tokyo: San'ichi Shobō.

Turner, V. (1969) _The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure_ , Chicago: Aldine.

Turner, V. (1973) 'The Center Out There: Pilgrim's Goal', _History of Religions_ 12(3): 191–230.

Turner, V. (1974) _Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society,_ Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Utterback, K.T. (1996) 'The Vision Becomes Reality: Medieval Women Pilgrims to the Holy Land', in B.F. Le Beau and M. Mor (eds), _Pilgrims and Travellers to the Holy Land_ , Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press.

Watsuji, T. (2012) _Pilgrimages to the Ancient Temples in Nara: Koji junrei_ , Portland, ME: MerwinAsia.

Wilkinson, J., Hill, J. and Ryan, W.F. (1988) _Jerusalem Pilgrimage: 1099–1185_ , London: The Hakluyt Society.

Williams, D.R. (2005) _The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Sōtō Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan_ , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Discoverers and Explorers

_Paul Smethurst_

Robin Hanbury-Tenison suggests that explorers are different from other travellers, being 'driven by a desire to discover which transcends the urge to conquer, the pursuit of trade, the curiosity of the scientist, the zeal of the missionary, or the simple search for adventure' (Hanbury-Tenison 2005: xi). In the past, the explorer has also been fêted as a national hero in whose hands lay the destiny of his country. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries especially, as European nations competed for global dominance, iconic figures like James Cook and David Livingstone often spearheaded their countries' territorial ambitions. Individually, explorers such as these also helped build conceptions of a national identity by embodying qualities of manliness, moral fibre and self-sacrificing patriotism.

The discoveries of modern explorers could never equal those of early navigators who found new (to them) continents and global trade routes. But how they conducted themselves was often a more important measure than their geographical prowess. Whether searching for the source of the Nile, traversing vast deserts or frozen wastelands or climbing the highest peaks, the flag-waving explorers of the Empire were expected to struggle manfully in adversity. For those who died in the attempt, such as Cook, Livingstone and Robert Falcon Scott, a kind of martyrdom might follow.

Yet explorers have not gone without criticism. They were lampooned in satirical magazines such as _Punch_ in the late nineteenth century, while liberals damned their militancy in Africa. In more recent postcolonial discourse, the triumphal narratives of nineteenth-century explorers have met with wider criticism. In _Orientalism_ (1978), Edward Said suggests that rather than being 'conquerors of truth', to use Joseph Conrad's term, they contributed to the pervasive fiction of a Western mission whose destiny was to civilize the rest of the world (Conrad 1926: 3; Driver 2001: 3). After Said, critics began to examine the role of exploration narratives within a meta-discourse of European colonization (Hulme 1986; Pratt 1992; Spurr 1993). While this has been a productive line of critical enquiry, recent criticism suggests that this risks retrospectively constructing an 'essentialized model of 'colonial discourse' (Driver 2001: 8), which subordinates and transforms discourses that were actually far more contingent. To counter this, some critics propose treating published exploration narratives not merely as products of dominant colonialist cultures, but as reflections of a wider culture of exploration (Clark 1999; Leask 2002; Smethurst 2013).

Despite the tendency to lionize their independent spirit, it is important to recognize that explorers were usually actors in collaborative ventures. They relied on patrons, sponsors, collectors, publishers and governments with global interests, while the geopolitical reality of empire was necessary to their mobility. Furthermore, imaginatively and discursively they travelled and wrote in the wake of earlier discoveries and myths. It is a cliché to imagine the explorer filling in the blanks of previously unknown territories. In practice he always re-imagined these spaces through the lenses of fabulous, scientific and exotic precursors; explorers were engaged in the construction of imaginary cartographies.

It is not a blind spot to define the explorer as male. He was a highly gendered construct reflecting the patriarchal society that shaped him in the nineteenth century, when women were excluded from the military, from government and from most scientific and academic institutions. The Royal Geographical Society excluded women such as Mary Kingsley even though she made noteworthy discoveries in West Africa. Despite a long tradition of highly capable women travellers from Egeria to Freya Stark, becoming an explorer was a male privilege until the mid twentieth century; although the term was by then losing its lustre and meaning in a post-imperial era.

In _Tristes Tropiques_ (1955), Claude Lévi-Strauss proclaims, 'I hate travelling and explorers.' He launches a tirade against the exotic travel book, which he accuses of throwing a veil over the 'detritus of western civilization' washed up all over the world. Explorers, he says, peddle 'the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist' (Lévi-Strauss 1976: 1–2). Distancing his own semiotic study of primitive culture from exotic travel books, Lévi-Strauss points to a contemporary divide, and yet the conflict between scientific fieldwork and titillating accounts of discovery began much earlier. Accounts of the South Pacific by James Cook, for instance, were popular not only with scientists but also with a wider public seeking exotic traveller's tales; the strain of competing expectations is often reflected in exploration narratives.

The explorers and discoverers discussed in this chapter were rarely the first to see the land or the people they described. The significance of their discoveries lies in the lasting influence their written accounts have had on the culture from which they travelled. Notwithstanding the constant refrain of imperialism, this influence has scientific, romantic, and environmental strains that cannot be entirely painted out with a postcolonial brush.

The imperialist swagger found in accounts by European explorers from Christopher Columbus onwards stemmed partly from confidence in military and navigational technology, and in political systems efficient in coercion. Since Samuel Purchas's early collections of voyages, it has been recognized that a well-developed system of writing was also a factor. Although Stephen Greenblatt (1991) might overestimate its role in the Spanish conquest of non-literate South America, writing (including maps, charts and taxonomies) was Europe's most effective soft technology. By collecting images, information, specimens and souvenirs of foreign places and people, and controlling their representation, Europeans accumulated 'mimetic capital' (Greenblatt 1991: 6). From the late eighteenth century especially, accounts of scientific exploration formed conduits between centres of knowledge and the peripheries of the world, leading towards scientific projections on a global scale (Latour 1987).

Yet explorers have not always excelled in producing useful or truthful accounts of their encounters. They have sometimes failed to appreciate the full significance of new wonders while in their thrall, or been anxious and bewildered while trying to survive. Notwithstanding Mary Louise Pratt's notion of 'anti-conquest', as the expression of innocence when the European bourgeois subject casts his imperial eye over foreign territories, a sense of vulnerability in the explorer was often neither feigned nor rhetorical (Pratt 1992; Leask 2002: 18; Smethurst 2013: 65).

The published journals and letters of Columbus's voyages in 1492–4 probably reveal very little of the truth of first encounters with the New World. While this should not dissuade us from attempting to reconstruct that truth for the sake of the under-represented indigenous people, we can assume that the journals reveal a gloss retrospectively applied once the full weight of the discovery had been recognized. The truth they offer is of course that of the conquerors: a parable, and a repeating tale, of paradise found, conquered and lost.

**Mapping wonders: medieval and early modern discoverers**

In his journals, Columbus compares his destiny with that of Moses finding the Promised Land; admits to falsifying the log and misreading signs of land; and insists that he has rediscovered Marco Polo's fabled Cathay. In the scene depicting his arrival at the island later dubbed San Salvador, he presents a tableau in which natives welcome him as a god. As retrospective fictive constructs, such arrival scenes carry considerable symbolic weight without conveying the reality of the event. We can only imagine how Columbus and his men actually reacted to the ordeal of the journey, the joy of arriving and the disappointment of being so far, in several senses, from Polo's Cathay.

Columbus was a witness to the historical reality, but unable to appreciate it for what it was, or would become. So, like countless explorers from Herodotus to Polo before him, he invokes ancient myths and legends to make sense of the event. He alludes to the Bible and the wonders of the East, and he transcribes Polo's Cathay into a golden paradise in the West. The annotated copy of Polo's _Travels_ provided Columbus with a motive for his journey and an imaginary cartography, which was still based on the _mappae mundi_ ('maps of the world') of the Middle Ages, dominated by a figure of Paradise in the East.

Composed in 1298, Polo's was the first comprehensive record of the East to be based on eyewitness accounts, but it fails to describe the journey itself or impressions en route. In the Middle East, Polo links places with both the Bible and the letters of Alexander the Great. His audience would expect to hear of Mount Ararat, where Noah's Ark came to rest; the mountains of Gog and Magog, where Alexander drove the barbarous tribes; and the whereabouts of the legendary Christian ruler, Prester John. In retaining these wonders, Polo shows himself to be a medieval traveller, but in translating some wonders into real phenomena, he takes a step towards the modern world. For example, he transforms the huge serpents with claws and teeth found on medieval maps into the very real crocodiles of Karazan (1974: 246); and the fabled 'salamanders' that can survive fire are explained by the 'miraculous' properties of asbestos (1974: 109).

Polo constantly assesses the quantity and worth of China's natural and manufactured products, and its systems of financing, taxation and transport. Reality and wonder are brought together in the descriptions of Cathay. Even medieval Venice pales in comparison with the city of Kinsai. The name 'Kinsai', Polo says, 'signifies 'the celestial city'', and this is well justified by its 'pre-eminence to all others in the world, in point of grandeur and beauty [. . .] which might lead an inhabitant to imagine himself in paradise' (1974: 290). The loaded reference to 'paradise' merges legend with reality, as Kinsai approximates to the position of earthly paradise on Christian _mappae mundi_. There follows a detailed description of the plan of this city, with its 'twelve thousand' bridges, and its markets, with long lists of the livestock, pearls and other items for sale. If the merchant's eye is evident, so too is the male gaze when Polo describes the courtesans:

men who have tasted their charms, remain in a state of fascination [. . .] Thus intoxicated with sensual pleasures, when they return to their homes they report that they have been in Kin-sai [. . .] and pant for the time when they may be enabled to revisit paradise.

(1974: 296)

In Kinsai, Polo begins to fetishize the Orient, fuelling Western desire for all _her_ riches.

A century or so later, this was given a different twist when Amerigo Vespucci described a reoriented paradise in his _Mundus Novus_ ( _The New World_ , 1503) and _Quatuor Navigationes_ ( _Four Voyages_ , 1506–7) _._ He titillated European explorers and colonizers with salacious stories of immoderate sexuality among Native American women, as had Polo. But if the women were immodest, they provided a foil to the motif of virginal America as an unsullied land. Sir Walter Ralegh founded a colony in the land he named Virginia, and later turned his attention to South America, where the same virginal motif would re-emerge.

In his _Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana_ (1596), Ralegh describes his 1595 expedition to the Orinoco. This is a highly crafted account of an unremarkable voyage turned into English propaganda and the self-fashioning of Ralegh as the archetypal Renaissance explorer. The Spanish had already navigated the Amazon and Orinoco in search of Manoa or 'El Dorado', the fabled city of gold. Ralegh claimed to have located the fabled city in less than a month, returning with samples of ore as evidence. But his accounts are based mainly on hearsay, and his obsession with locating El Dorado diverted him from actual gold mines. His reports of Manoa were perhaps intended to distract readers from the meagreness of his actual discoveries (Greenblatt 1991: vii–xviii), but the larger effect is to register the infectiousness of the gold fever to which Ralegh had succumbed.

As with Columbus's journals, there is more gold to be found in Ralegh's narrative than in reality. The glittering rhetoric is usually attributed to Ralegh's attempt to regain favour with Queen Elizabeth I. An accomplished literary figure, he fashions himself as a self- sacrificing patriot in selfless pursuit of glory for Queen and Country. Whether he endured greater hardship on the expedition itself, or in the onerous task of devising his narrative is a moot point (Lorimer 2006: xvii), but Ralegh's efforts in both did not persuade Elizabeth to fund a second voyage. Despondent, Ralegh redrafted the manuscript with advice from Sir Robert Cecil and the propagandist Thomas Harriot. The resulting published text reins in much of the adventurer's swagger, as Ralegh was persuaded that the situation demanded a more sober account, and a more credible explorer. He effected a dramatic switch from self-fashioned hero to pragmatic proto-colonist. Turning his attention to commercially-minded sponsors, Ralegh deleted passages referring to Guiana as a paradise for drunkards, womanizers and tobacco smokers, and removed hyperboles such as the 'millions' of oysters growing on a mangrove branch (Lorimer 2006: xxx). This was precisely the kind of language that had led Polo to be dubbed 'Il Milione', and consequently disbelieved by his contemporaries.

When Ralegh reached Trinidad, he razed the Spanish capital San José and took captive its governor. This erasure of Spanish presence allowed him to conceive of Guiana as a country not yet possessed – a 'Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead, neuer sakt, turned, nor wrought' (Lorimer 2006: 211). With a possible allusion to the Virgin Queen, Ralegh fed nationalist propaganda by undermining Spanish power and daring to imagine an English empire overseas. To possess a land imaginatively through literary appropriation can be a prelude to colonization, and here it helped to build perceptions of English nationhood (Lorimer 2006: xx).

With its courtly intrigues, gold fever and literariness, it is easy to overlook the realism of Ralegh's narrative as it carefully delineates ethnic groups, bringing to life their customs, appearance and lineages. Rowing up the Orinoco, Ralegh writes with a degree of presence that shows more interest than most in how indigenous people interact with their environment. He shows some of that scientific curiosity that would drive modern explorers.

**Conquerors of truth: scientific explorers of the Enlightenment era**

By the late seventeenth century, a new kind of exploration was emerging, focused more on scientific investigation and data collection. Enlightenment science was promoted in England by the Royal Society, which issued its famous 'Directions for Sea-Men' in 1665–6. Influenced by the early seventeenth-century philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, this stipulated phenomena to be observed, data to be recorded and specimens to be returned; it also dictated the language and style for journals of voyages, which were to focus on the plain truth of observation.

Explorers were slow to adapt to this empirical method, however. While James Cook would later follow the directions to the letter, William Dampier, who circumnavigated the world three times in the late seventeenth century, was rarely so constrained. He provided the Royal Society with useful information on the Trade Winds, but found that wonders and miracles had greater public appeal. Dampier's _New Voyage Round the World_ (1697) was immensely popular, exciting great interest in the South Sea Islands largely by describing flora, fauna and Indians as exotic curiosities. While Dampier followed some of the Society's instructions, in drawing attention to this he merely added a scientific veneer to his cabinet of curiosities. His dedication to the president of the Royal Society, which declares a Baconian preference for scientific knowledge over mere storytelling, is rather a sham.

By the eighteenth century, the Royal Society in England was sponsoring scientific expeditions with naturalists aboard who were trained in collecting and preserving specimens. Institutions in France soon followed suit, and natural history museums appeared in London and Paris to house the startling diversity of flora and fauna being returned from the southern hemisphere. Following the system of classification devised by Carl Linnaeus in _Systema Naturae_ ( _The System of Nature_ , 1735), naturalists began to piece together a map of nature based on the differentiation of species. Scientific curiosity was often overtaken by commercial interest, however, when the value of natural resources, such as tea, sugar, coffee and spices was fully appreciated. Merely transporting exotic plants and animals (dead or alive) back to Europe for use in botanic and zoological gardens and museums was highly profitable (Smethurst 2013: 9).

Cook's _Endeavour_ journal, relating his first voyage of 1768–71, exemplifies the empirical method of eighteenth-century scientific exploration. It records how naturalists are conveyed from place to place, while Cook himself completes his rigorous mapping of the South Seas. The mathematical certainties of his charts and maps were his greatest achievement, and he showed little interest either in the 'gentlemanly' pursuit of natural history, or the prospects of colonization, to which he was generally opposed. However, given the geopolitics of the late eighteenth century, Cook's voyages to the South Seas were inevitably aligned with England's imperial designs. The maps, charts and scientific data on currents, weather systems, as well as descriptions of flora, fauna and indigenous people brought back to London provided practical information for colonization, as well as revealing an imperialist mindset.

Reacting against the empiricist rigour of Enlightenment science, some explorers of the late eighteenth century began to consider Romantic empiricism as a means of looking beyond first appearances. At the same time, the nature of exploration was changing to more iterative and collaborative enterprises, with specific goals in mind (Latour 1987: 215–19). Less concerned now with first encounters, explorers had experiments to conduct and specimens to collect, as directed by European centres of knowledge. With Alexander von Humboldt, a new breed of scientific explorer emerged who combined scientific specialization with a form of German Romanticism.

Humboldt's travels began in 1799 when he arrived in Venezuela with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland. Their journey took them up and down the Orinoco, into the Amazon, across the vast central plains and jungles and over the high Andes, where Humboldt climbed Chimborazo, then considered the world's highest mountain. Over the next thirty years, he wrote _Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent_ (1805–34), followed by the unfinished _Cosmos,_ in which he describes his holistic goal as 'the recognition of the natural whole, the description of the striving of mankind to comprehend the cooperation of forces in the earth and in space' (Humboldt 1850–2: 135).

Dissatisfied with the conventional form of exploration narratives and Linnaean taxonomies, Humboldt extended his journals with visualization techniques designed to synthesize his findings. These include striking graphics and a form of romantic prose designed to rouse the reader's attention with sublime images of nature in action, as in the following extract from _Aspects of Nature_ :

after the long drought, the welcome season of the rain arrives; and then how suddenly is the scene changed! The deep blue of the hitherto perpetually cloudless sky becomes lighter; at night the dark space in the constellation of the Southern Cross is hardly distinguishable [. . .] A single cloud appears in the south, like a distant mountain, rising perpendicularly from the horizon. Gradually the increasing vapours spread like mist over the sky, and now the distant thunder ushers in the life-restoring rain. Hardly has the surface of the earth received the refreshing moisture, before the previously barren Steppe begins to exhale sweet odours, and then clothe itself with Kyllingias, the many panicules of the Paspalum, and a variety of grasses.

(Humboldt 1850: 37–8)

Panning across the region, the omniscient narrator describes natural phenomena, landscape, plants and animals as actors in a dramatic interplay of natural forces. As this extraordinary gaze is extended across the continent, humanity is dwarfed and emasculated by the superior force of nature:

In this interior of a new continent you get used to seeing man as not essential to the natural order [. . .] The earth is overloaded with vegetation [. . .] This view of a living nature where man is nothing is both odd and sad.

(Humboldt 1850: 233)

This is certainly a different world from Europe, but not necessarily a space evacuated by a European desire for new beginnings. Mary Louise Pratt charges Humboldt with displacing contemporary social realities by imagining an Edenic space ripe for colonization (1992: 111–43), yet it would be equally true to say that nature resists intrusion here with an eerie omnipotence.

Humboldt's global vision of nature distinguished him from other explorers and proved an inspiration to Darwin. He regarded nature as an all-embracing planet-wide system, organized around interactions between plants, animals and physical aspects of environment, such as climate, altitude and soil type. The most environmentally-aware explorer of his time, he strove in each of his works 'to promulgate a new ecological concept of relations between man and the natural world' (Grove 1995: 11).

Humboldt was also an inspiration to Alfred Russel Wallace, whose theory of natural selection proved immensely useful to Darwin. Although Wallace himself shot birds and mammals for specimens to fund his explorations, he was aware of the greater damage civilization could have on the wildlife of remote regions. Discovering Greater Birds-of-Paradise in the East Indonesian Aru Islands in 1857, Wallace writes of the apparent waste of this unseen 'thing of beauty.' It saddens him that successive generations of these magnificent birds have been 'living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness.' Yet he realizes that if 'civilized man' should come to the region,

[he will bring] moral, intellectual and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, [and] we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings.

(Wallace 2010: 396–7)

So the continuing theme of paradise found and lost re-emerges with a bird that Linnaeus named _Paradisaeidae_ because it was reputed to have floated down from Earthly Paradise. As the theme of paradise resonates in the late nineteenth century, it is surprising to find that it already conveys an anti-modern and ecological sentiment.

**The cult of the explorer hero**

Although the stated aim of scientific explorers and naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was to unlock the mysteries of the natural world, they were often simultaneously engaged in furthering their own and their nation's economic and strategic interests. Pratt (1992) argues that scientific exploration has often been constructed as a form of benign 'anti-conquest' in contrast to the ruthless activities of earlier conquistadors and colonizers; this, she alleges, became a rhetorical strategy that flattered Western audiences with a sense of their culture's intellectual and moral superiority. While this might in some cases have provided a veil for more determined imperialist agendas, there was in fact a wide range of motivations driving individual explorers (see Leask 2002; Smethurst 2013). And yet by the mid to late nineteenth century Pratt's thesis begins to seem more pertinent. In this period, explorers were trumpeted as heroic emissaries of Christianity, civilization and commerce, while their expeditions were more overtly directed at self-interest and at facilitating the global interests and influence of Europe and the USA. The 'buccaneering' Henry Morton Stanley was even accused of conducting exploration as warfare following his role in the 'scramble for Africa' and the 'Congo Atrocities' (Driver 2001: 131–45).

By the nineteenth century, the African interior presented the last major topos of the unknown, an affront to European geographers who had yet to map a region described in ancient times by Herodotus. The longstanding geographical puzzle of finding the source of the Nile was a particular draw for Victorian explorers. But the interior was a disappointment in many respects. In 1352–3, Ibn Battuta was able to witness the extensive Mali Empire, before its collapse in the early fifteenth century, after which Western Sudan fragmented and became impoverished. When the British explorer Mungo Park arrived in 1795, the Atlantic slave trade was still in evidence and the region was lawless. His two expeditions were sponsored by the recently formed African Association, which had scientific and commercial aims, along with vague notions of promoting civilization.

In his first journey, Park was set the task of finding the Niger River and assessing its potential for trade as an inland waterway. Since Herodotus, it had been rumoured that the Niger might flow eastwards, raising the tantalizing possibility that it joined the Nile. Park was also to look for evidence of ancient Christian civilizations and the remains of Moorish kingdoms extending to Timbuktu. Park did reach the Niger and make contact with the Fulani and Bambari leaders, but few of his goals were achieved. In his second exploration of the Niger in 1806, he ran out of luck. A heavily armed expedition of fifty or so Europeans and native bearers was gradually reduced to the last man – Park. If he did meet his end shooting his way down the Niger, this helped establish the African explorer as an adventure hero, shading him with the militancy that was to follow.

In the published account of his first expedition, _Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa_ (1799), Park also subtly helped to push the exploration narrative in the direction of adventure fiction. Although principally committed to relaying useful information about the societies and landscapes encountered in West Africa, Park's account also followed the contemporary vogue for 'sentiment' by offering a more detailed account of his personal sufferings than was usual in the exploration narrative at this date. Later explorers such as Stanley would handle the genre in an even more sensationalist way, often creating highly dramatized scenes in which the intrepid narrator fights off fever, wild beasts and savage natives. In this way, exploration narratives influenced novelists like Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, and Park's narrative may have had more impact on adventure fiction than on opening up the African interior to trade, although the two would soon become closely related. Countless young men were willing to follow Park, relishing danger in the belief that their patriotism and triumph would further civilization.

Explorers like Park and David Livingstone established the cult status of the explorer and helped spawn the masculinist genre of colonial adventure fiction. Stories of fearless white men fighting their way through dense jungle and fighting off wild animals, deadly diseases and cannibals would become a staple of the _Boy's Own Magazine_ (1855–90). At this time, 'heroic masculinity became fused in an especially potent configuration with representations of British imperial identity [. . .] A 'real' man would henceforth be defined and recognized as one who was prepared to fight [. . .] for Queen, Country and Empire' (Dawson 1994: 1).

Livingstone's reputation as a missionary and explorer was built on accounts of his extraordinary physical feats and resilience. He was mauled by a lion in 1844 and constantly battled a range of diseases and injuries until he succumbed in 1873. A man who thrived on exercise and action, Livingstone embodied the manly virtues of the Victorian explorer. As a missionary, he also embodied the moral interests espoused by philanthropic organizations such as the Aborigines Protection Society, whose stated aim was to 'assist in protecting the defenceless and promoting the advancement of uncivilized tribes' (Driver 2001: 76). As a scientific explorer, Livingstone surveyed large tracts of the continent, but he had more impact on the geographical imagination than on physical geography. Many followed his travels at home as a mental exercise rather than a cartographic one; Livingstone's writings produced an image of Africa as a field for European endeavour (Driver 2001: 82). In Livingstone, the light of the civilizing mission burnt brightly, but he was unwittingly supporting what would become the shamefully militaristic 'scramble for Africa.'

Henry Morton Stanley's reputation was built on his sensational 'discovery' of Livingstone, yet he should be remembered for his extraordinary geographical, military and political feats in Africa. As an explorer, he embodied the ideology of new imperialism, whose ultimate end was to further capitalist ventures overseas. He distanced himself from the 'gentleman' explorer through a brashness that many attributed to his background as a journalist from America. Unusually for an explorer, Stanley was roundly condemned by many of his contemporaries. At Lake Victoria in 1875, Stanley sent nearly 300 armed men, flying British and American flags, into action against unarmed local people in a revenge attack. The Royal Geographical Society and the government disassociated themselves from him for a while, but it is Stanley who has become memorialized rather than the more 'gentlemanly' and pacifist explorers like Joseph Thompson and Verney Cameron; he is the exemplar of a particular kind of explorer hero, whose place in history is assured (Driver 2001: 137).

Driver suggests that Livingstone's memorialization, following his dramatic posthumous return from Africa, achieved something close to martyrdom: 'In life, Livingstone had been an unreliable and sometimes disappointing hero; in his death, he had become something infinitely more noble' (Driver 2001: 68). The idea of the self-sacrificing explorer hero would eventually die with Scott in the frozen Antarctic on return from the South Pole in 1912. Two world wars and decolonization later changed the nature of exploration, lessening its attachment to national interests, until briefly revived by the Space Race of the 1960s. When Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon, American flags were enthusiastically waved, yet despite that 'gigantic leap for mankind', the Apollo astronauts were mostly humbled by the experience of space. As Armstrong put it, 'I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small' (quoted in Hanbury-Tenison 2005: 559). This was a far cry from the idea of the imperial explorer bestriding the globe like a modern-day Colossus.

**Conclusion**

While, in sum, the narratives of discoverers and explorers point to a dominant discourse of conquest and appropriation, individually they reveal a variety of opinions, impressions and representational modes. Greenblatt suggests there is a contradiction between the 'overarching scheme' of 'inexorable progress' in the West's imposition of Christianity and empire on the rest of the world, and the 'disorganized' and 'fragmentary' nature of the individual explorers' narratives that supposedly chart that progress (Greenblatt 1991: 2). In the Middle Ages, narratives of discovery were valued according to their capacity to reveal and locate wonders. Since Columbus, however, this process of assimilation worked in tandem with a modern interest in the use-value of discoveries.

Taxonomies (especially of natural products), maps, charts and world systems allowed empires in the modern age to act at a distance, centralizing and exploiting this knowledge to global effect. The dumbstruck wonder of first encounters was rationalized, with the original sensory experience converted to ethnographical knowledge and incorporated in the published narrative. Flora and fauna were shot, transplanted, crated and shipped as valuable resources fuelling global trade. So while scientific explorers worked selflessly in the field to gather useful knowledge, on a global scale there was little contradiction between an overarching scheme of Western imperialism and the seemingly random, disorganized and sometimes sensationalist nature of explorers' narratives. They begin with the mapping of wonders in the Middle Ages, steeped in the legends of antiquity, and carried forward into the imaginary cartographies influencing modern explorers. But the history of Western exploration as a whole is dominated by imperial designs leading to the systematic exploitation of nature and native cultures.

**Select bibliography**

Conrad, J. (1926) 'Geography and Some Explorers', in R. Curle (ed.), _Last Essays_ , London: Dent.

Clark, S. (ed.) (1999) _Travel Writing and Empire_ , London: Zed Books.

Dawson, G. (1994) _Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities_ , London: Routledge.

Driver, F. (2001) _Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire_ , Oxford: Blackwell.

Greenblatt, S. (1991) _Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World_ , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Grove, R.H. (1995) _Green Imperialism_ , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Hanbury-Tenison, R. (ed.) (2005) _The Oxford Book of Exploration_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hulme, P. (1986) _Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797_ , London: Methuen.

Humboldt, A. von (1850–2) C _osmos_ : _Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe_ , London: Longmans.

Humboldt, A. von (1850) _Aspects of Nature_ , 1808, London: Longmans.

Latour, B. (1987) _Science in Action_ , Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Leask, N. (2002) _Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1976) _Tristes Tropiques_ , 1955, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Lorimer, J. (ed.) (2006) _Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana_ , London: Hakluyt Society.

Polo, M. (1974) _The Travels_ , Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Pratt, M.L. (1992) _Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation_ , New York: Routledge.

Smethurst, P. (2013) _Travel Writing and the Natural World 1768–1840_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Spurr, D. (1993) _The Rhetoric of Empire_ , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Wallace, A.R. (2010) _The Malay Archipelago_ , 1869, Oxford: Beaufoy.

Travellers and Tourists

_Zoë Kinsley_

What does it mean to be a traveller rather than a tourist? The traveller, it is often suggested, is adventurous, spontaneous, genuine, active, curious, and in search of a real and authentic experience of other places and cultures; they are likely to want to plan their own travelling itinerary. Tourists, on the other hand, are unadventurous, predictable, artificial, passive, uninquisitive, and happy to experience place and culture performed for them within a setting that is comfortable and familiar; such individuals choose ready-made itineraries packaged for them by a third party. These, or formulations like them, are persistent stereotypes which continue to offer a tempting model for thinking about ourselves in relation to others: while the term 'traveller' offers a positive and independent model of selfhood, 'tourists are never ourselves, always other people' (Thubron 2012: 58). The 'traveller/tourist' dichotomy has its origins in the literature of travel that emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century, at the cusp of what we think of today as mass tourism. That it persisted as a powerful model for thinking about travel and travel writing is evidenced by the fact that some critics of the late twentieth century strongly argued the case for the historical reality of the two types, bemoaning the extinction of the 'traveller' in a modern age of industrial and global travel in which 'tourists' proliferate (Boorstin 1961; Fussell 1980). However, this 'bad tempered nonsense', as Jonathan Raban has described it (1988: 257), has recently been moderated by a larger and more persuasive body of critical study which demonstrates that the 'traveller/tourist' juxtaposition is at once more complicated and more interesting (see Culler 1988; Buzard 1993; MacCannell 1999). Rather than easily defining two historically real categories of people who made journeys, what the contrast between 'traveller' and 'tourist' reveals is a set of cultural assumptions and values that elevates certain kinds of people and their behaviour as superior in a variety of ways – socially, morally, intellectually, ethically – to others.

**Traveller versus tourist**

The turn of the nineteenth century is an important period in the history of British travel, in terms of mobility practices, and the vocabulary used to give expression to the individuals who make journeys. In Britain, steady improvements in roads and map-making over the course of the eighteenth century made travel easier and safer. Spa and seaside towns gained popularity, as did regions such as the Lake District, Scottish Highlands, North Welsh Mountains and the Wye Valley. Whilst the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars may have tempered the flow of travellers to Continental Europe, that lull was only temporary, and the first half of the nineteenth century saw some important innovations which facilitated travel abroad, and made leisure travel more accessible for a much larger portion of the population. By the 1830s, guidebooks for travellers were being produced – by the publishers John Murray in Britain and Baedeker in Germany – which offered advice and itineraries in a standardized format. In the next decade Thomas Cook, making use of the developing British railway system, began to organize travel for groups, and quickly built on his experience of co-ordinating local trips by organizing package holidays abroad.

The rapid development of tailored provision for travellers, and the infrastructures that emerged in popular locations, signalled that tourism had become a commercial industry. Whilst this meant that opportunities for travel began to be extended beyond a privileged and wealthy elite, it also evoked negative criticism from those who saw the new 'mass' tourism as eroding the principles and values of an earlier and supposedly more genuine form of travel. Whilst the term 'tourist' first emerged in English in the late eighteenth century as a synonym for 'traveller', it was not long before it began to be invested with negative associations. This shift in the meaning of 'tourist' has been carefully delineated by James Buzard (1993), who cites early examples of disparaging usage such as the opening lines of William Wordsworth's poem 'The Brothers' (1799), in which an exasperated Lake District priest exclaims 'These tourists, heaven preserve us!' (Wordsworth 1981: 402). By the mid nineteenth century 'tourist' had come to denote a particular 'type' of travel from which most commentators actively attempted to distance themselves. When Evelyn Waugh, writing in the interwar years of the early twentieth century, proposed that 'every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist' (Waugh 1930: 44), he expressed a common, and persistent, sentiment that the tourist is always the 'other'.

In considering the values associated with travellers on the one hand, and tourists on the other, it becomes clear that the supposedly straightforward dichotomy of good/laudable versus bad/worthless masks a range of cultural assumptions and prejudices, not least regarding the supposedly superior value of individual over communal experience. As travellers increasingly found themselves part of a crowd, they sought to differentiate themselves as individuals from the others around them who supposedly demonstrated what Buzard terms the 'clustering tendency' (Buzard 1993: 88). The sense that the desires and aspirations of the travelling individual might be thwarted or frustrated by other travellers emerges early on, before Cook's popularization of group travel. Travelling north on the home tour in 1789 Hester Thrale Piozzi states that 'at this time [. . .] there is a Rage for the Lakes'; 'we travel to them, we row upon them, we write about them' (Piozzi 1789: fol. [17r], emphasis in the original). She defines herself as part of an established tradition of Lake District touristic activity, and repeatedly refers to herself in the plural: 'we write', 'we row'. Her own endeavours are subsumed within the rhythms of movement and exertion that are taking place en masse, and her narrative is likewise depicted as a product of this collective, rather than individual, activity. However, in the decades that follow, the texts of travel start to demonstrate a concerted effort on the part of the traveller to differentiate themselves from 'tourists'. Rather than acknowledging their membership of a collective as Piozzi does, we find travellers positively measuring their own behaviour against the negative practices of 'tourists'. The traveller's insistence that he or she is not a 'tourist' is often a claim for individualism, a rejection of sameness.

In his seminal study of tourism in modern society, Dean MacCannell emphasised the stereotypical figure of the tourist as one who is imbued with assumptions about moral and class superiority, and who reveals a yearning for 'authenticity': 'The touristic critique of tourism is based on a desire to go beyond the other 'mere' tourists to a more profound appreciation of society and culture' (MacCannell 1999: 10). This desire (or fantasy) for an experience of travel that is in some ways more 'true' than that achieved by others juxtaposes an ideal of 'genuine encounter with an alien culture or environment' against a 'commodified, staged and inauthentic simulacrum of such encounters' (Thompson 2011: 123). The suggestion that the tourist is somehow 'acting' as traveller rather than genuinely inhabiting that role, and responding in superficial, rather than profound and meaningful, ways, is proposed by Leslie Stephen, writing in the _Cornhill Magazine_ in 1869:

the tourist, in short, is notoriously a person who follows blindly a certain hackneyed round; who never stops long enough before a picture or a view to admire it or to fix it in his memory; and who seizes every opportunity of transplanting little bits of London to the districts which he visits.

(Quoted in Buzard 1993: 91)

The tourist is here defined as one whose senses are dulled and faulty, who looks but does not see, and who makes a journey chosen for them by others. This is lazy, purposeless travel, but it has also, of late, come to be seen by some as culturally and environmentally destructive: tourists, it is alleged, spoil 'previously pristine landscapes' and 'vulgarise the traditional communities they visit' (Thompson 2011: 123). And, as Tim Youngs observes, there is an assumption that 'the traveller will respect difference whereas the tourist will bring about a transformation that will diminish it' (Youngs 2013: 60).

**Othering the tourist**

From the start of the nineteenth century, a differentiation between 'travellers' and 'tourists' becomes increasingly evident in travel writing. These are also the years in which we see a terminology for the identification of autobiographical texts hesitantly emerging, with the term 'self-biography' being challenged by 'autobiography' in the 1790s (Treadwell 2005). The relationship between travel writing and autobiography is complicated, with both being 'notoriously fuzzy, hybrid, complex genres' (Polezzi 2004: 121), yet in the emergence of the 'traveller/tourist' distinction at this historical moment we certainly see evidence of the travel narrative form being used to negotiate issues of selfhood. The othering of the tourist as antithetical to the self of the traveller involves a rhetorical manoeuvre, which originates in the discourse developed by travellers to differentiate themselves from the travellees, or native inhabitants of the places they journeyed to. Travellers have always examined their own identity in relation to those they encounter whilst on the move, but as recreational travel increases, the travelling gaze starts to turn to consider fellow travellers (see MacCannell 1999: 9–10).

For Richard Ayton, circumnavigating the British coastline in the early nineteenth century, the landscape and topography of travel can be divided up into spaces for different types of individual. In _A Voyage Round Great Britain_ (1814–25) he describes the parts of the British coast that had become fashionable for sea-bathing as 'flat and convenient', with 'smooth paths for ladies to walk on, and safe paths for gentlemen to ride on'. These might be described as the territory of the tourist, easy and devoid of surprise or risk. For Ayton, however, the 'most [. . .] admired' parts of the coastline are characterized by 'ruggedness and sublimity'. These, he says, are 'subversive' of, or antithetical to, the first environment. Explicitly defining them as superior to the communal spaces of seaside resorts, Ayton suggests they will be desired and sought out by an altogether different kind of traveller, one who seeks out adventure and risk as opposed to safety, the sublime rather than the beautiful (ibid.: iii–iv). By establishing spatial parameters for the movements of different types of traveller, Ayton offers an early articulation of the concept of going off 'the beaten track', described by Buzard as the most 'dominant and recurrent image in the annals of the modern tour [. . .] which succinctly designates the space of the "touristic" as a region in which all experience is predictable and repetitive' (Buzard 1993: 4). The anti-touristic impulse to physically, but also emotionally and intellectually, step beyond the limits of the ground that others tread encapsulates the traveller's desire to be different and individual, both in travel practice and text.

In 1844 Charles Dickens decided to take a break from novel writing, and travelled with his family to Italy, where they stayed for almost a year. His account of that time abroad, _Pictures from Italy_ (1846), is permeated by a desire to go off the beaten track. He expresses a preference for following old roads and tracks where possible, always with a sense that by doing so he accesses a more authentic experience of place. Of journeying to Rome, he writes that he is 'possessed by a great desire to go there by the ancient Appian way, long since ruined and overgrown'. Dickens's prose invests the landscape itself with agency, and portrays it in a continuous and dynamic relationship with the traveller who walks across it. Loose walls 'came across our path'; a ditch sometimes 'obstructed our progress'; the 'fragments themselves, rolling from beneath our feet, made it a toilsome matter to advance'. Dickens depicts himself and his companions as trackers, explorers, sleuths who are required to trace the lines of the landscape which do not reveal themselves easily: 'we tracked a piece of the old road, above the ground; now traced it, underneath a grassy covering, as if that were its grave' (Dickens 1998: 149). This pleasure of discovery as an active process is echoed elsewhere in _Pictures from Italy_ , for example in Genoa where Dickens celebrates the joys of losing one's self 'twenty times a day' (ibid.: 38).

The positive model of travel as immersion and participation, via which Dickens frequently frames his own travelling behaviour and experiences, is contrasted with the stereotypically 'touristy' behaviour of other English travellers he encounters, in particular Mrs Davis and her party. Mrs Davis becomes a caricature of superficial, deplorably Anglo-centric tourist behaviour. She insistently refuses to attempt to understand her local guide – 'I don't understand a word you say' – and, along with the rest of her group, screams 'in the strangest places, and at the most improper seasons' (ibid.: 130). However, despite the stock accusation of touristic blindness – 'I don't think she ever saw anything, or ever looked at anything' – there are ways in which Mrs Davis might not appear so markedly different from Dickens. Just as he persistently pursued the Appian Way above and beneath ground, so too does Mrs Davis demonstrate a desire to trace things to their origins and penetrate her environment:

During the Holy Week, they were in every part of every scene of every ceremony. For a fortnight or three weeks before it, they were in every tomb, and every church, and every ruin, and every Picture Gallery; and I hardly ever observed Mrs. Davis to be silent for a moment. Deep underground, high up in St. Peter's, out on the Campagna, and stifling in the Jews' quarter, Mrs. Davis turned up, all the same.

(Ibid.: 129)

Is this impulse towards 'deep' and active participation so different from that demonstrated by Dickens himself? If we take Dickens's account to be accurate, there are some tangible differences. Mrs Davis is travelling in a group of 'fifteen or twenty', Dickens explores the Appian Way in a 'little party of three'; Mrs Davis rarely stops talking, whilst Dickens relishes the 'awful silence', which is only disturbed by 'unseen larks'; and whereas Mrs Davis is depicted as a tourist of leisure, Dickens reminds us of the relationship between travel and _travail_ by figuring his own efforts as 'work' and 'labour' (ibid.: 129–30, 149). Thus there is a difference in circumstance as well as sensibility between the two individuals, which possibly justifies their depiction as tourist on the one hand, traveller on the other. Nevertheless, to have witnessed Mrs. Davis in each of these comically depicted scenarios, Dickens's journey must have been dictated by a very similar itinerary to hers, and in fact his description of his own experience of Holy Week in Rome is one of similarly frenetic activity and inquiry: 'we made acquaintance with every post and pillar in the city' (ibid.: 129).

MacCannell writes that it is 'significant that people who are actually in accord are struggling to distance themselves from themselves via this moral stereotype of the tourist' (MacCannell 1999: 9). Dickens's portrayal of Mrs Davis allows him to distance himself from those elements of touristic practice that he considers antithetical to his own ideals; by othering her as 'tourist' he cleanses the travelling self of negative connotations. At least in part, Dickens denigrates Mrs Davis because she travels as part of a large group, conforming to Buzard's formulation of the 'crowd-haters' who 'reasoned that an increase in tourist density in particular places implied flaws in the individuals so densely compacted' (Buzard 1993: 92). We see this elsewhere in the _Pictures_ , in Dickens's linguistic choices that figure 'tourists' as a group of which he is not part. This distrust of travel groups, expressed only years before the establishment of the Cook tours, harks back to eighteenth-century distrust of the crowds who gathered at popular home tour locations. In the fictional home tour narrative _The Expedition of Humphry Clinker_ (1771), Tobias Smollett suggested that the growth of fashionable resorts, and consequent increases in visitor numbers, led to physical overcrowding of sites, but also threatened social degeneracy. In Bath, Smollett's partly autobiographical character, Matthew Bramble, states that 'the mob is a monster I never could abide [. . .] I detest the whole of it, as a mass of ignorance, presumption, malice, and brutality' (Smollett 1967: 66). Matthew is an aging, reactionary hypochondriac whose views reveal his anxieties about social mixing and the emergence of a newly moneyed class in Britain. However, whilst his young nephew Jery views the crowd differently – 'this chaos is to me a source of infinite amusement' (ibid.: 78) – both men, young and old, liberal and conservative, view the touristic mob as 'other', they figure themselves as observers of, rather than participants in, that group. The later binary model of 'tourist/traveller' emerges at least in part from this desire to be distinct from the masses.

At the same time as Dickens distances himself from the touristic crowd, he also works hard to remind us what is different and individual about his own travelling experience, what makes him a 'traveller' as opposed to a 'tourist'. His account of Venice is a case in point; entitled 'An Italian Dream', it presents the author's movements around the city as an indistinct journey which defies formal or temporal frameworks: 'I took but little heed of time [. . .] But there were days and nights in it' (Dickens 1998: 83). His deliberately hazy reconstruction of this episode – 'I thought I entered the Cathedral', 'I thought I entered the old palace' (ibid.: 80) – denies the certainties and definitive answers of the guidebook tradition of prescriptive, itinerant travel, which he rejects elsewhere in the text. In other sections of the narrative he employs the persona of 'suffering traveller' that had been powerfully employed by Romantic travellers before him (see Thompson 2007). Emphasising the danger of his endeavours, he asserts physical and mental exertion as markers of authenticity. Dickens's ascent of Vesuvius through thick snow and ice, for example, is presented as an exceptional and perilous experience. Of his large expedition group, it is only Dickens and two others who are brave enough to look over the 'brim of the flaming crater' (Dickens 1998: 174). And the author stresses that his account will be unlike those of travellers who have visited the volcano before him. Addressing the reader directly he states that 'You have read, a thousand times, that the usual way of descending, is, by sliding down the ashes'; however, his text is not like those others, there is 'no vestige of ashes to be seen', and Dickens is forced to descend on the ice (ibid.: 175). By means of these various rhetorical strategies, then, Dickens asserts both the travelling self, and the narrative he authors, as different from the others who have travelled and written before him. That posturing as individual 'traveller', distinct from the 'tourist' group, serves to promote a sense of authoritative selfhood which, whilst not without moments of rupture as we will see, still articulates a self-confidence that is less easy to find in travel writings of the next century.

**The post-tourist**

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whilst the 'traveller/tourist' dichotomy still has a presence in travel writing, authors increasingly demonstrate awareness of the fact that those labels become more and more difficult to apply persuasively. In a global culture in which travel is easy and often relatively cheap, it is more difficult to make journeys off the beaten track. In contemporary travel writing there is an increasing awareness that we might, in fact, all be tourists, or rather, as Maxine Feifer argues, 'post-tourists':

the post-tourist knows that he is a tourist: not a time traveller when he goes somewhere historic; not an instant noble savage when he stays on a tropical beach; not an invisible observer when he visits a native compound.

(Feifer 1985: 271)

There is, then, a self-consciousness in evidence in the writings of the 'post-tourist' that exposes a sense of limitation, and an acknowledgement of the elusiveness of authority and authenticity. As Michael Kowalewski has argued, postwar travel writers have an 'enriched sense of the diversity and complexity of other cultures' (Kowalewski 1992: 10), which in turn produces heightened awareness of the inadequacies of the old conventions of 'manners and customs' description which attempted to dilute nations and cultures down to a core set of supposedly common traits and characteristics. The post-touristic recognition of plurality calls 'our collective ability to represent foreign peoples' into question (ibid.: 10), and demands new approaches.

The contemporary travel writer's job is often complicated by a sense of belatedness, by the conviction that travellers in earlier periods of history had greater access to more individual and authentic forms of travel. However, we should be cautious about identifying this as a particularly modern phenomenon. The harking back to an older golden age of travel that provided authentic experiences of discovery is in evidence from at least the eighteenth century. Travelling to Scotland in 1773, Samuel Johnson laments the fact that he is unable to observe the Highland clan system in its 'original character': 'We came hither too late to see what we expected, a people of peculiar appearance, and a system of antiquated life' (Johnson and Boswell 1984: 73). The post-touristic turn in travel writing resonates deeper than the traveller's acknowledgement that he or she has arrived 'too late', or has been preceded by many others. It demonstrates heightened awareness of the politics of writing another place and culture, and of the problems inherent in representing the voices of the people encountered. The resulting texts often question the validity or desirability of an authoritative narrating voice, either by turning inwards to place emphasis on the self of the traveller, rather than those they encounter, or by eliding or fragmenting the travelling self by introducing other voices.

Carl Thompson has pointed to the ways in which 'post-touristic' accounts display postmodern qualities of 'playfulness and parody', citing texts including Bruce Chatwin's _The Songlines_ (1987) and W. G. Sebald's _Die Ringe des Saturn_ (1995; English translation, _The Rings of Saturn_ 1998) as examples which ' "decentre" the narratorial self' by creating polyphonic narratives via the interweaving of multiple intertexts and digressions (Thompson 2011: 126–7). Self-mockery and self-ironization are also common techniques by which travel writers deliberately undermine their own authority, and again we can find precursors for such rhetorical strategies in much earlier narratives. Whilst Laurence Sterne's _Sentimental Journey_ (1768) is a striking early example of playful satirization of the conventions and typologies of travel writing, moments of self-deprecating self-scrutiny also punctuate Dickens's account of Italy. The opening pages of _Pictures from Italy_ set up a comic contrast between the travel-narrator and his 'French Courier' who 'looked a great deal more patriarchal than I', and in Verona he laughs at himself for reading _Romeo and Juliet_ in his room at the inn, 'of course, no Englishman had ever read it there, before' (Dickens 1998: 8, 89). Despite elsewhere differentiating himself from 'other' tourists, there are moments in Dickens's writing in which he hints at the realization that any such distinction is illusory.

Jonathan Raban is a contemporary writer whose texts establish conversations with earlier travellers including Sterne, and who, like the author of _Sentimental Journey_ , employs self-mockery as a means of de-stabilising his own position as narrator. There is often nostalgia in Raban's writings, harking back to times in which 'Journeys had to be improvised, day by day, without benefit of travel agents'. He stresses how different things are for 'my generation', and in a gently mocking passage, points out how even Redmond O'Hanlon, supposedly one of the last adventurers, contracted the 'great travellers' disease', infectious peritonitis, not in 'some distant corner of the world', but 'at a Chinese restaurant in Mill Hill' (Raban 1988: 249). In _Coasting_ (1986), Raban's account of his voyage by boat around the coastline of Britain set against the backdrop of the outbreak of the Falklands War, there is much self-ironising, frequently centred upon the ways in which the author falls short of a masculine stereotype of 'seafarer'. Situating himself in a tradition comprised of 'a certain dubious band of Englishman', Raban depicts himself as 'soft and wet' in sharp contrast with other 'aggressive' sailors. 'I am not shipshape', he declares, 'I am irreligious and a physical coward': 'Among the objects generally thought to be desirable on voyages, I fall clearly into the same category as umbrellas and wheelbarrows' (Raban 1987: 22, 34).

Post-touristic strategies of self-effacement, whilst in some ways establishing a new attitude in travel writing which rejects historic assumptions about the traveller's superiority to, or right to pass judgement on, the cultures he or she visits, are usually not straightforward. Whilst Raban's self-representation in the early pages of _Coasting_ depicts a traveller who is weak and cowardly, the macho persona that he presents as antithetical to his own is also called into question. The 'manliness' of those other men against which Raban measures himself is depicted as a façade which thinly conceals anxiety, 'despair', and 'some serious inner weakness' that immediately seems more significant than Raban's own. He depicts himself as an outsider, yet he has no real desire for inclusion within that particular 'band' of men (ibid.: 33–4). The 'traveller/tourist' dichotomy seems turned on its head here – Raban is the amateur, playing at a form of travel which those 'others' could arguably be seen to practise more authentically – and yet what is consistent is the traveller's desire to differentiate himself from the group, to claim individuality. We laugh at Raban as he launches his boat – a launch described as being like 'the eccentric submersion of a thatched Tudor cottage' (ibid.: 47) – but we have no doubt that he prefers to voyage alone.

Michael Kowalewski identifies developments in transport as having a fundamental effect 'not only in conveyance and communication but in thought, feeling, behaviour and human consciousness' (Kowalewski 1992: 3). Raban's travel writing echoes this, and asserts travelling by boat as the last mode of transport that offers a true sense of adventure, revealing in the process yearnings for escape, discovery, and solitude that have been voiced by travellers for centuries. His prose tremors with excitement and wonder as movement beyond 'the beaten track' is achieved by moving off land: 'I cannot imagine a solitude more absolute than that of being in a small boat on a rough sea out of sight of land' (Raban 1987: 38). Yet, boats are not only about solitude for Raban; in _For Love and Money_ (1988) he remembers 'wander[ing]' down the Mississippi in a '16-foot open boat' and describes boat travel enabling assimilation and inclusion. 'I'd never felt less of a tourist, or more easily able to drift into the lives of strangers', he writes, 'You're a part of this, not a spectator of it' (Raban 1988: 250). That desire to penetrate place and society, to be part of it rather than outside it, has a lot in common with Dickens's desire to get 'lost' in Italy.

Despite its post-touristic, postmodern qualities, there is in Raban's work a lingering sense that there is still an 'authentic' travelling experience to be had, the desire for which is a basic human impulse. The 'traveller/tourist' dichotomy as it has been traced through this chapter, was commonly used, in the early years of mass tourism, as a mode of self-promotion, of asserting the superiority of the 'traveller' over mere 'tourists'. The vestiges of that tradition can still be found, but in recent writings they are commonly nuanced by a questioning of the self and of the author's 'traveller' status. Whilst Raban suggests that authenticity can be found by stepping into a boat, the Latourex school of thought offers playful suggestions for 'Experimental travel'. Founded in Strasbourg in 1990, Latourex are 'dedicated to the study of those fundamental mechanisms of human activity gathered under the title of "tourism", with emphasis on new ways of seeing other places' (Antony and Henry 2005: 25). Their models for touristic exploration offer a way of going off the beaten track, not by adopting a new mode of transport, or going to a new place, but by conceiving of travel and tourism differently. With experiments that can be adapted for any destination, any 'bank balance', 'Experimental travel focuses on the mental journey, the sense of play and the possibility of discovery' (ibid.: 24). It is also a model for travel that emerges from, and is enacted through, dialogue, collaboration, and friendship. Over 150 years after the introduction of the Thomas Cook tours, perhaps this is where the hope lies for the democratisation of travel in the twenty-first century, in a model that embraces the patterns of tourism but inverts them and tests their limits, offering the potential to be a 'traveller' within the frameworks of a new kind of tourism.

**Select bibliography**

Antony, R. and Henry, J. (2005) _The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel_ , Melbourne: Lonely Planet.

Ayton, R. (1814–25) 'Introduction', in _A Voyage Round Great Britain, Undertaken in the Summer of the Year 1813, [. . .] By Richard Ayton. With a Series of Views, [. . .] drawn and engraved by William Daniell, A.R.A_., London.

Boorstin, D. (1961) _The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream_ , London: Weidenfield and Nicolson.

Buzard, J. (1993) _The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918_ , Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Culler, J. (1988) 'The Semiotics of Tourism', in _Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions_ , Oxford: Blackwell.

Dickens, C. (1998) _Pictures from Italy_ , ed. K. Flint, London: Penguin.

Feifer, M. (1985) _Going Places: The Ways of the Tourist from Imperial Rome to the Present Day_ , London: MacMillan.

Fussell, P. (1980) _Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Holland, P. and Huggan,. G. (1998) _Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing_ , Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Hollington, M. and Orestano, F. (eds) (2009) _Dickens and Italy: Little Dorrit and Pictures from Italy_ , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.

Johnson, S. and Boswell, J. (1984) _A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland_ and _The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides_ , ed. P. Levi, London: Penguin.

Kowalewski, M. (1992) 'Introduction', in M. Kowalewski (ed.) _Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel_ , Athens and London: University of Georgia Press.

MacCannell, D. (1999) _The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class_ , Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.

Ousby, I. (1990) _The Englishman's England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism_ , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Piozzi, H.L. (1789) 'Journey to the North of England and part of Scotland Wales &c', John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester, Eng. MS 623.

Polezzi, L. (2004) 'Between Gender and Genre: The Travels of Estella Canziani', in G. Hooper and T. Youngs (eds), _Perspectives on Travel Writing_ , Aldershot: Ashgate.

Raban, J. (1987) _Coasting_ , London: Picador.

Raban, J. (1988) _For Love and Money_ , London: Picador.

Smollett, T. (1967) _The Expedition of Humphry Clinker_ , ed. A. Ross, London: Penguin.

Thompson, C. (2007) _The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination_ , Oxford: Clarendon.

Thompson, C. (2011) _Travel Writing_ , London and New York: Routledge.

Thubron, C. (2012) 'Travel Writing Today', in C. Forsdick and T. Youngs (eds), _Travel Writing: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies_ , Volume 1, London: Routledge.

Treadwell, J. (2005) _Autobiographical Writing and British Literature, 1783–1834_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Urry, J. and Larsen, J. (2011) _The Tourist Gaze 3.0_ , 3rd edn, London: Sage.

Waugh, E. (1930) _Labels: A Mediterranean Journal_ , London: Duckworth.

Wordsworth, W. (1981) _The Poems_ , ed. J.O. Hayden, Volume 1, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Youngs, T. (2013) _The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing_ , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Picturesque Travel

The Aesthetics and Politics of Landscape

_Elizabeth A. Bohls_

In August 1803, Dorothy Wordsworth, with her not-yet-famous brother and their friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was hiking along Loch Lomond in the Scottish Highlands. Turning a corner, they suddenly:

saw a very craggy-topped mountain amongst other smooth ones [. . .] We called out with one voice, 'That's what we wanted!' alluding to the frame-like uniformity of the side-screens of the lake for the last five or six miles. As we conjectured, this singular mountain was the famous Cobbler, near Arrochar.

(Wordsworth 1997: 90)

The travellers' joyous cry marks a historically specific type of pleasure to be gained from travel. The aesthetics of the picturesque flourished between roughly 1780 and 1820, endured well into the nineteenth century, and established conventions and practices still fundamental to tourism. Highly popular among educated Britons, picturesque travel in its original form involved visiting scenic areas like the Lake District, North Wales, and the Scottish Highlands for the purpose of viewing (and if talented, drawing) natural scenery. Not just any scene would do; as the term implies, for landscape to be deemed 'picturesque' it had to conform to an aesthetics derived from a canon of Continental and British landscape painting including Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa, and Thomas Gainsborough (Bermingham 1986: 57).

To be versed in the picturesque was a potent form of cultural capital for aspiring members of Britain's elite. This emerging taste held political implications, extending the ongoing debate on the representation of landscape and its relation to ideas of social and political order. Criteria for picturesque views were elaborated by theorists including William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight and implemented in a spate of picturesque travelogues and guidebooks. Price and Knight theorized the picturesque as a way for other aristocratic landowners to improve their estates; Gilpin's picturesque, in contrast, was more controversially aimed at middle-class tourists, a type of traveller Kim Ian Michasiw has recently described as 'sensationalist nomads moving through a world over which they have no control' (1992: 82). Picturesque tourism thus represented a 'bourgeois democratization of land and taste', a challenge to elite hegemony (Fulford 1996: 142). A different kind of challenge to picturesque aesthetics came from women. Like all mainstream aesthetic theory, the picturesque assumed a male viewer or subject. Women travel writers subtly resisted their exclusion from gentlemanly privilege and probed its consequences (Bohls 1995).

Among them was Dorothy Wordsworth, whose _Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803_ (written 1803–5, though not published in her lifetime) was composed in the genre of the picturesque tour. The view of the Cobbler was the kind valued by 'prospect-hunters and picturesque travellers' (1997: 102), from whom Wordsworth strove to distinguish herself as more truly tasteful, more adventurous, and less pretentious. The 'craggy-topped mountain' possesses the quality of roughness, which 'forms the most essential point of difference between the _beautiful_ , and the _picturesque_ ; as it seems to be that particular quality, which makes objects chiefly pleasing in painting' (Gilpin 1994: 8). More is needed, however: a picturesque scene must be composed using painterly criteria. Wordsworth's casual use of the term 'side-screens', for example, displays her command of the technical jargon that Jane Austen satirized in _Northanger Abbey_. Following Henry Tilney's lecture on 'fore-grounds, distances, and second distances – side-screens and perspectives – lights and shades', Austen's naïve heroine Catherine Morland is 'so hopeful a scholar' of the picturesque that 'she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape' (Austen 2002: 125).

Picturesque travel was not, of course, confined to the British Isles. Some of the most interesting recent scholarship takes up the colonial or imperial picturesque. The second text I'll discuss here, _Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa_ (1824) by William Burchell, a naturalist and trained artist, weaves picturesque aesthetics into a two-volume illustrated account of his epic 4,500-mile journey through the sparsely settled land. His efforts to view South Africa's arid landscape through an aesthetic derived from the very different topography and climate of Europe led to revealing tensions. Imprecise and contentious from the outset, the concept of the picturesque proved increasingly elastic. In addition to landscape, Burchell's book includes portraits of South African indigenes – an ethnographic picturesque often practiced by colonial travellers. Its seeds can be found in the domestic picturesque, often ornamented with human figures like gypsies and 'banditti' that suggest an intercultural element inherent in picturesque aesthetics.

Old age and poverty also provided the visual ruggedness favoured by theorists of the picturesque, although Victorian commentators, most famously John Ruskin, took issue with the ethics of a sensibility 'attracted by dilapidation and obsolescence in architecture and by the impoverished and marginalized in human beings' (Andrews 1994: 286). But the picturesque persists in Victorian texts such as Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré's _London: A Pilgrimage_ (1872). London's impoverished, multi-ethnic East End, in particular, proves a feast for the picturesque eye. This lavishly illustrated volume interweaves the pleasure of picturesque tourism with the new, deeply conflicted pleasure of liberal guilt. In the city or the countryside, in colonial and domestic contexts, the picturesque has complex ideological implications. Viewing land as picturesque landscape could insulate the tourist from depressing poverty or threatening cultural difference; domesticate the exotic, while enhancing its allure; or celebrate the primitive, while reaffirming the need for modernization. The practice of framing and distancing picturesque scenes involves recurrent tension or strain, however, as the texts of Wordsworth, Burchell, and Jerrold and Doré reveal.

**Dorothy Wordsworth's** _**Recollection of a Tour Made in Scotland**_ _**A.D.**_ _**1803**_

Picturesque tourism was mediated in more and less obvious ways, from the travel books the Wordsworths read to the advice they got from other travellers. Capable of forming her own opinions, Dorothy Wordsworth nonetheless seeks out and enjoys standard picturesque attractions like waterfalls and ruined castles. She knows what she's after, including an authentically Scottish Scotland that gives her joy when she feels she's found it. Near the Lowland River Nith, 'a single cottage by the brook side' leads her to announce, 'We now felt indeed that we were in Scotland; there was a natural peculiarity to the place' (Wordsworth 1997: 48). Wordsworth nonetheless makes fun of other tourists' search for authenticity, like the ones who 'stuffed the pockets of their carriage with bundles of heather, roots and all, just as if Scotland grew no heather but on the banks of the Clyde' (ibid.: 65). The poets further distinguish themselves from ordinary tourists by getting off the beaten path of the standard Highland itinerary, firmly in place by 1803 (Andrews 1989). From Loch Lomond they veer off to the Trossachs, little known at the time, although part of the standard Scottish tour after Walter Scott published the hugely popular _Lady of the Lake_ (1810) and _Rob Roy_ (1817). In 1803, however, local inhabitants, at work in a field, seem perplexed at the southerners' arrival. 'A laugh was on every face when William said we had come to see the Trossachs; no doubt they thought we had better have stayed at our own home' (Wordsworth 1997: 97). The very idea of picturesque tourism, an artefact of social and educational privilege, was incomprehensible to these rural Scots. The Wordsworths' status as tourists marked them as members of an elite, distinguished from the majority of the population.

Dorothy Wordsworth clearly commands the specialized vocabulary of the picturesque, the bread and butter of travel writers from Gilpin onward. Her responses to individual scenes and her general assessment of Scotland's landscape often echoes Gilpin; they shared 'a delight in irregularity, intricacy, and variety of forms and colours' (Nabholtz 1964: 124). She lauds the intricacy of a lake view near Portnacroish: 'one of the most delightful prospects that, even when we dream of fairer worlds than this, it is possible for us to conceive in our hearts' (Wordsworth 1997: 143). Finally, though, Wordsworth shares many picturesque travellers' sense of the inadequacy of language to convey this special kind of visual pleasure. She recalls 'a sentence in a little pamphlet written by the minister of Callander', who ends 'six closely-printed pages' by writing, ' "In a word, the Trossachs beggar all description" – a conclusion in which everybody who has been there will agree with him' (ibid.: 104). Tail-chasingly circular, feeding on print and producing more of it, picturesque travel nonetheless eludes words: 'if I were to go on describing for evermore, I should give but a faint, and very often a false, idea of the different objects and the various combinations of them in this most intricate and delicious place' (ibid.: 104).

Wordsworth is quick to find fault with less satisfactory aspects of her Scottish experience, especially more developed tourist attractions like the Falls of Clyde. Though 'much affected by the first view' of Cora Linn – she's never seen such a big waterfall – she can still criticize the infrastructure: 'there were some buildings that I could have wished had not been there'. Further along the gravel walk is a building they like: a quaint 'pleasure-house' resembling 'the huts in the prints belonging to Captain Cook's voyages'. Though 'beautifully wrought', it is badly placed, without a good view. 'We wished we could have shoved it about a hundred yards further on' (ibid.: 63–4). The picturesque tourist takes pleasure in exercising her discriminating taste, condemning un-picturesque views and tasteless ornaments, praising those that succeed.

Here, picturesque travel intersects with another kind of travel book highly popular in the eighteenth century: the exploration narrative, and more specifically John Hawkesworth's official account of James Cook's Pacific voyages. Wordsworth links its illustration of Tierra del Fuegans' primitive dwelling to the faux-primitive hut crafted by the aristocratic proprietor of the River Clyde 'pleasure-grounds'. The pleasures of picturesque travel include the primitive or exotic – even the manufactured primitive, if tastefully done. Wordsworth's sense of Scotland, especially the Highlands, as exotic emerges in a pattern of imagery throughout her journal. On Loch Lomond she views 'an outlandish scene – we might have believed ourselves in North America' (ibid.: 87). A ferryman's house near the Trossachs looks 'Hottentotish' (ibid.: 92); the 'sagacity' of a Highland guide, who finds a track 'where often no track was visible to us', reminds Dorothy 'of what we had read of Hottentots and other savages' (ibid.: 186). The Gaelic language is mere 'gabbling' to her ears (ibid.: 110), though she portrays individual Highlanders as kind and intelligent.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, picturesque tourists typically chose destinations like Wales or the Scottish Highlands in Britain's internally colonized 'Celtic fringe'. There the primitive, safely relegated to a space and time (the vacation) removed from civilized modern life, could be celebrated, while simultaneously the need for modernization was subtly reaffirmed (Bohls 1995: 195; Lynch 1990: 367–72). This attraction to areas seen as less developed than England had its roots in Enlightenment theories of history that viewed all civilizations as moving through successive stages, from hunting and gathering through herding and settled agriculture to the advanced commercial societies of eighteenth-century Europe. By visiting or reading about places like the Scottish Highlands – or North America, Tahiti, or Africa – English tourists believed they could travel through time, as it were, and experience earlier stages of civilization. This often had the effect that the anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls 'denial of coevalness' (Fabian 2002): travellers viewed the inhabitants of such places as living in a different temporal order than themselves, stuck in the past.

The picturesque tourist seeks out static scenes or tableaux and describes them in a language of visual abstraction. Alan Liu has traced the genesis of picturesque landscape through the history of painting as the gradual disappearance, or arrest, of historical narrative in favour of mere landscape and sheer form (Liu 1989: 65–76). But it is hard to suppress narrative entirely (Copley and Garside 1994: 6). A traveller must travel from scene to scene, inevitably distracted by human interactions along the way. Even Gilpin, touring the highly picturesque Tintern Abbey, is moved to remark on the wretchedness of the beggars living in the ruins. One old woman offers to show him the monks' library:

She could scarce crawl; shuffling along her palsied limbs, and meager, contracted body, by the help of two sticks [. . .] All indeed she meant to tell us, was the story of her own wretchedness; and all she had to shew us, was her own miserable habitation. We did not expect to be interested; but we found we were.

(Gilpin 1782: 256)

The intrusion in this way of real-life, suffering human beings troubles the picturesque's aestheticizing agenda. Similar tensions can be felt in Dorothy Wordsworth's journal, a text which 'confronts us with its dividedness, its ambivalence about its own project' (Bohls 1995: 185). _Recollections of a Tour_ interrupts its touristic stance with its interest in practical matters that scenery-seekers generally ignored: the poverty or (occasionally) prosperity of rural inhabitants, their education, or their religious practice, as when she observes how far rural Scots are willing to travel to attend church services. Most poignant are Wordsworth's encounters with less privileged travellers like the beggar woman she meets near Luss. 'I thought what a dreary waste must this lake be to such poor creatures, struggling with fatigue and poverty and unknown ways!' (Wordsworth 1997: 85). Moments of empathy with material hardship momentarily break the frame of picturesque travel. Wordsworth also reflects self-consciously on the specialized, historically specific character of her endeavour. Watching 'the renowned Miss Waughs of Carlisle' arrive with their entourage at the New Inn of Arrochor, she muses that twenty years ago 'such a sight had not been seen here except when the Duke of Argyle, or some other Highland chieftain, might chance to be going with his family to London or Edinburgh' (ibid.: 116). Then, rural aristocrats sought city pleasures; now city dwellers penetrate the countryside in pursuit of a different kind of sensation.

**The imperial picturesque**

As Wordsworth's colonial tropes suggest, picturesque travel to Britain's underdeveloped periphery had an imperial dimension. Picturesque aesthetics – and aesthetic discourse generally – came to play an important part in writing about travel and exploration further afield. The heyday of the picturesque coincided with Britain's unprecedented global expansion during the French Wars (1793–1815). What happened when travellers tried to apply a European pictorial vocabulary to topography and climates very different from those of Britain or southern Europe? For instance, George Back and Robert Hood, the naval draughtsmen who illustrated Captain John Franklin's _Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea_ (1823), were trained in artistic conventions rooted in the picturesque. Confronted with the vast, threatening Arctic tundra, they produced images that both obeyed and eviscerated these conventions. Portraying 'painful human effort against nature', with human figures dwarfed by huge natural forms, 'arbitrary perspective and divided frame', the drawings by Back and Hood comment ironically on 'European pictorial assumptions' (Belyea 1990: 8).

Tropical destinations presented a very different challenge. Influential images by the artists who sailed with Cook to the Pacific, including William Hodges, helped motivate other artists to go beyond the European continent in search of visual material. The exotic also nourished picturesque taste, eventually expanding the use of the term. 'Buildings, landscapes, peoples, costumes, and even customs deriving from distant or little-known countries' (Smith 1985: 201) came to be labelled picturesque. The German traveller and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, influenced by the Cook voyages, conjectured that 'each climate has a beauty peculiar to itself', opening a world of new possibilities to the landscape painter (ibid.: 203). The Indian subcontinent, where British power was expanding, offered a vast field for picturesque taste. British colonizers 'found the Picturesque to be a perfect intellectual tool for imaging the landscapes of South Asia [. . .] the subcontinent seemed to possess all of the required elements for properly picturesque views' (Edney 1997: 59–60). Luxuriant vegetation, jagged mountains, and crumbling architecture abounded. Romita Ray's _Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India_ (2013) surveys British artists' and writers' diverse engagements with India's topographical variety. The picturesque, she suggests, 'was constantly reinvented by local imaginings and regional tropes, its hybrid fictions essential for asserting Englishness _through_ the foreign' (Ray 2013: 11).

Scholars of the picturesque thus have varying ideas about the role played by the picturesque in the processes of colonization and imperial rule. It could enhance the allure of exotic landscapes, or assimilate alien terrain to well-known categories. For David Bunn, the picturesque helped to naturalize the settler subject and establish a version of the bourgeois public sphere in South Africa (1994: 138). For Nigel Leask, on the other hand, the associative connection established by the picturesque between white colonists and the metropole helps to explain the failure of a 'mixed' colonial public sphere to thrive in India (2002: 178). For Sara Suleri, the picturesque reassuringly neutralized disturbing elements of the colonial experience, especially the 'dynamic cultural confrontation' (1992: 76) with the local population. This defensive strategy could fail, as I argue with reference to the colonial West Indies, when enslaved Africans countered with their own aesthetic representations (Bohls 2002: 74). Yet in regions around the globe whose topography and climate dramatically diverged from those that produced the picturesque, explorers and colonists invoked this metropolitan aesthetics as part of the colonizing project.

Another such region was southern Africa. When the British took over the Cape Colony from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars, colonizing South Africa's hinterland became a possibility. William Burchell, trained as both a naturalist and an artist, arrived at the Cape in 1810, and set off to explore the South African interior. Between 1811 and 1813 he covered 4,500 miles in a purpose-built covered wagon, collecting forty-eight crates of specimens – plants, animal skins, seeds, insects, bulbs and fish. His two-volume _Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa_ (1822–4) is illustrated with his drawings of the landscapes and inhabitants of this vast, hot, alien land.

Burchell's drawings and descriptions invoke the picturesque while explicitly raising the question: 'is there an African species of beauty to which the eye nurtured on the European countryside, trained on European pictorial art, is blind?' Can a European develop an African eye? These are questions asked by J.M. Coetzee in _White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa_ (1988: 38). Water, Coetzee points out, was highly valued by picturesque travellers in the British Isles. The standard scenic destinations of the Lake District and Scottish lochs provided rich visual and metaphorical materials; rivers and waterfalls are prominent in European landscape painting and picturesque travelogues. South Africa, however, is dry. Burchell acknowledges this fact, yet seeks also to redefine the picturesque to encompass this very different scenery:

Our course lay over a hard, even, bare, and open country, the surface of which was here and there relieved from its monotony, by a broad and far-extended undulation. The train of wagons [. . .] drew a lengthened perspective line on which the eye could fix. [. . .] Not a green herb enticed the eye; not a bird winged through the air: the creation here, was nought but earth and sky

[. . .]

There is always a pleasure in novelty; and even the desert may be found at some times, to afford the traveller both the one and the other. The painter who viewed these scenes, might, if he knew it not before, feel a conviction that the truest definition of _Taste, Beauty,_ the _Picturesque_ , may be found in that of the word _Nature_.

(Burchell 1967: I, 288)

Faced with pervasive sameness, Burchell moves from negation toward an attempt, if tentative, to redefine the terms of European aesthetics. Only near water, however, does he have much success. The rushes growing around hippopotamus ponds near the Reed River 'exhibited a species of the picturesque quite new and peculiar' (ibid.: I, 262). More such vegetation helps the painter adjust his palette to his new surroundings, catching the subtle colours of South Africa:

there was a certain beautiful appearance in the rushes which grew in the water along the bank, that no painting could express. Their principal colour was a fine sober green [. . .] Their tops being dead or half withered, were of every shade between white, Naples-yellow, and light-ochre. They spread in large extended patches [. . .] exhibiting an inimitable delicacy and gradation of keeping.

(Ibid.: I, 264)

As a technical term, 'keeping' means the maintenance of a proper relation between near and far objects in a picture: preserving harmony of composition. Burchell's _Travels_ struggles to define a new harmony in a South African key.

The River Gariep inspires high enthusiasm. 'The water glittering under a fervid sun [. . .] opened as enchanting a view as it could be possible for fancy to imagine'. The spot 'realized those ideas of elegant and classic scenery, which are created in the minds of poets' (Burchell 1967: I, 315–6). The river has practical as well as aesthetic advantages. Burchell's 'Hottentot' (Khoi) employees happily swim while he sketches on the bank, which is

clothed with wood from its mouth upwards as far as it has been explored. This line of trees [. . .] would furnish timber sufficient for all the purposes of _colonization_ on its banks, and I cannot but believe that at some future period settlers will be tempted [. . .] to form a lengthened colony along its courses

(Ibid.: I, 319, italics in original)

After his return to England, Burchell testified before a parliamentary committee on South Africa's suitability for emigration, and also subsequently published a pamphlet, _Hints on Emigration to the Cape of Good Hope_ (1819). His verbal and visual depictions of picturesque landscape in South Africa similarly helped to promote the colonial project, by creating such an inviting image of the region.

Along with landscapes, Burchell's illustrations include portraits of indigenous South Africans. These fall under the expanded sense of the picturesque that includes exotic peoples, costumes, and customs: an ethnographic picturesque, intersecting with natural history's taxonomizing drive as well as the administrative needs of colonial rule. The ethnographic picturesque is apparent in the eight-volume _People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations_ published during the second decade of the British Raj, from 1868 to 1875, and edited by John Wilson Kaye, Secretary of the Secret Department of the India Office. The volumes consist of 468 photographs with captions offering evaluative racial and cultural commentary, and Sara Suleri has suggested that the focus here on ethnic types and costumes was comforting for the British colonizers, constituting 'a sartorial aesthetic' which 'somehow suggests that the colonized can be completely known' (Suleri 1992: 103–4, 108). In a similar spirit, some of Burchell's portraits have an anonymous typicality – 'A Bushman, Playing on the Goráh', 'A Kóra' – while a few are individualized, like his 'Portrait of Speelman, a Hottentot'.

_Figure 22.1_ 'Portrait of Speelman, a Hottentot'. From William J Burchell, _Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa_ (London: Longman, 1822), vol. I, p. 167, plate 2. Courtesy of Harold Strange Library of African Studies, Johannesburg, South Africa.

The latter is 'the _dandy_ of our party, with this exception to the character, that he was a man and had brains' (Burchell 1967: II, 102). The portrait combines exotic touches (a quaint headdress and leopard-skin pouch) with neatness and humility, showcasing an unthreatening colonial hybridity.

**The urban picturesque: Jerrold and Doré's** _**London: A Pilgrimage**_

The height of the picturesque fad had passed by the time Burchell published his _Travels_ , yet the word and concept of the picturesque endured into the Victorian era (and arguably continues down to the present day). Taking it out of the countryside and into the city was less of a stretch than it might seem. Variety and individuality, not to mention raggedness and dilapidation, could be found in London's architecture, as well as its teeming population. If 'homogenizing cultural constraints' were rubbing the rough edges off of the bourgeoisie, the urban poor stayed picturesque. 'Indeed the colourful, vivacious, varied cockney street life of London constituted a tourist attraction itself' (Andrews 1994: 287–8). But the urban proletariat could be threatening in a way that the picturesque figures of rural Britain – the idle labourer or even the strolling gypsy – had never been.

Seen from a distance, poverty, neglect, and decay could be aesthetically appreciated, even if they were ugly and disgusting up close, argued Uvedale Price in his _Dialogue on the Picturesque and Beautiful_ (1801). By mid-century, though, this view was being questioned. As Charles Dickens wrote to a friend after visiting the slums of Naples in 1845, 'The condition of the common people here is abject and shocking. I am afraid the conventional idea of the picturesque is associated with such misery and degradation that a new picturesque will have to be established' (quoted in Andrews 1994: 286). John Ruskin famously proposed a new version of the picturesque in 1856. On the example of his favourite painter, J.M.W. Turner, he contrasted the old heartless surface picturesque, delighting in disorder and ruin, with a higher kind that could successfully communicate the artist's sympathy with his subject.

Could a tour of the metropolis successfully practice Turner's higher picturesque? As late as 1872, the journalist Blanchard Jerrold and the artist Gustave Doré teamed up to produce a lavishly illustrated volume entitled _London: A Pilgrimage_. They positioned their book as social exploration, referencing Henry Mayhew's famous _London Labour and the London Poor_ (1850–2). But it was reviewed as a gift book, a luxury consumer item, suitable for coffee-table display (Ghosh 2013: 91). Their Preface makes a case for urban tourism. 'London an ugly place indeed! We soon discovered that it abounded in delightful nooks and corners: in picturesque scenes and groups; in light and shade of the most attractive character' (Jerrold and Doré 1872: ix). Chapter II, 'The Busy River-Side', suggests a multicultural component in the city's picturesque appeal:

About the Tower there are picturesque studies by the score. The Jewish quarter is at hand; and therein may be found in plenty such dark alleys and bye-ways for such venerable or striking figures as would have warmed the genius of Rembrandt to enthusiasm. Or take the line of marine-store dealers facing the brown, unbroken walls of the docks! Their shows abound in delightful accidents of form and colour. The hard-visaged dealers and the slouching customers form themselves into well-contrasted groups. Among the customers are men of many nations—but all browned by the sun, and hardened by the sea-spray.

(Jerrold and Doré 1872: 25–6)

The vocabulary of the artist or the picturesque tourist – 'light and shade', 'form and colour', 'well-contrasted groups' – kindles to 'enthusiasm' as the pilgrims approach the 'Jewish quarter'. This attraction to the foreign or exotic was part of picturesque aesthetics almost from the beginning. Price's dialogue, for example, locates the picturesque in 'some gypsies [. . .] sitting over a half-extinguished fire' with 'sooty faces, and black tangled locks' (1994: 231).

_Figure 22.2_ 'Wentworth Street, Whitechapel'. From Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, _London, a Pilgrimage_ (New York and London: Benjamin Blom). Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.

Jerrold and Doré's picturesque exoticism reaches its peak in London's impoverished, multicultural East End, home to 'The German, the Jew, the Frenchman, the Lascar, the swarthy native of Spitalfields, [and] the leering thin-handed thief' along with 'endless swarms of ragged children' (1872: 124). In Doré's engraving, 'Wentworth Street, Whitechapel', the East-Enders crowding the doorways include stereotypical Jews with exaggerated hook noses, top hats and beards, such as the man at lower right, as well as a swarthy, turbaned figure (centre right) wiping a plate with his robe. The subjects' facial expressions show no evidence of the 'valiant cheeriness full of strength' that Jerrold's text claims for the neighborhood (1872: 125). Rather, they seem 'downcast and almost sullen', as Tanushree Ghosh observes – in particular the child at the centre, cradling a baby, looking directly at the viewer. She is not the only figure in the group returning the spectator's gaze. This choice on Doré's part 'interrupts the possibility of looking at [the East-Enders] as passive objects. Instead the effect is to interpellate the viewer into the image as a figure who [. . .] _ought_ to _act_ ' (Ghosh 2013: 113, 114).

The tension between text and image in this illustrated travelogue leaves it somewhere between the old heartless picturesque and a Turnerian picturesque of sympathy – or liberal guilt.

Such a tension or alternation between distance and sympathy marks the most interesting texts of picturesque travel, as we saw in Dorothy Wordsworth's Scottish journal. Exercising the tourist's privileges of mobility and taste, she can nonetheless empathize with less privileged travellers, as well as with those who inhabit the isolated areas she visits. The politics of land and landownership were played out through the aesthetics of the picturesque, both in the British Isles and around the globe, as Britons surveyed the diverse landscapes that their nation explored and colonized. Rural countryside, rugged hinterlands, and even the Victorian city could yield aesthetic pleasure when viewed through the picturesque frame. Modern tourism owes a debt to the picturesque when tourists (wielding cameras rather than Claude glasses)1 affirm their taste and accumulate cultural capital by snapping photos of natural scenes pre-viewed for them by guidebooks or websites. Yet in modern times, as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this is not always a harmless process: reifying individuals or whole populations as quaint, exotic, or picturesque – like Burchell's 'Hottentots' or Doré's East-Enders – is another element of picturesque aesthetics that may be said to survive in contemporary tourist practice.

**Note**

1 The landscape mirror or Claude glass, named for the painter Claude Lorrain, was a convex mirror on a foil backing, in which a traveller could compose a landscape to resemble a painting.

**Select bibliography**

Andrews, M. (1989) _The Search for the Picturesque_ , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Andrews, M. (1994) 'The Metropolitan Picturesque', in S. Copley and P. Garside (eds), _The Politics of the Picturesque_ , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Austen, J. (2002) _Northanger Abbey_ , 1817, ed. C. Grogan, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.

Belyea, B. (1990) 'Captain Franklin in Search of the Picturesque', _Essays on Canadian Writin_ g 40(1): 1–24.

Bermingham, A. (1986) _Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860,_ Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Bohls, E.A. (1995) _Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818_ , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Bohls, E.A. (2002) 'The Planter Picturesque: Matthew Lewis's _Journal of a West Indian Proprietor_ ', _European Romantic Review_ 13: 63–76.

Bohls, E.A. (Forthcoming) _Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1770–1833_ , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Bunn, D. (1994) ' "Our Wattled Cot": Mercantile and Domestic Space in Thomas Pringle's African Landscapes', in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), _Landscape and Power_ , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Burchell, W. (1967) _Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa_ , 1822–24, Cape Town: C. Struik Ltd.

Coetzee. J.M. (1988) _White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa_ , New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Copley, S. and Garside, P. (1994) 'Introduction', in S. Copley and P. Garside (eds), _The Politics of the Picturesque_ , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Edney, M.H. (1997) _Mapping an Empire: the Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843_ , Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Fabian, J. (2002) _Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object_ , 1983, New York: Columbia University Press.

Fulford, T. (1996) _Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth_ , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Ghosh, T. (2013) 'Gifting Pain: The Pleasures of Liberal Guilt in _London, a Pilgrimage_ and _Street Life in London_ ', _Victorian Literature and Culture_ 41: 91–123.

Gilpin, W. (1782) _Observations on the River Wye, and several parts of South Wales, &c. relative chiefly to picturesque beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770_, London: R. Blamire.

Gilpin, W. (1994) _Three Essays: on Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel, and on Sketching Landscape, to which is added a Poem_ , 1792, in M. Andrews (ed.), _The Picturesque: Literary Sources and Documents_ , East Sussex: Helm Information.

Jerrold, B. and Doré, G. (1872) _London: A Pilgrimage_ , New York and London: Benjamin Blom.

Leask, N. (2002) _Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing 1770–1840: 'In an Antique Land'_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Liu, A. (1989) _Wordsworth: The Sense of History_ , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Lynch, D. (1990) ' "Beating the Track of the Alphabet": Samuel Johnson, Tourism, and the ABCs of Modern Authority', _English Literary History_ 57: 357–405.

Martins, L. and Driver, F. (2005) ' "The Struggle for Luxuriance": William Burchell Collects Tropical Nature', in F. Driver and L. Martins (eds), _Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire,_ Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Michasiw, K.I. (1992) 'Nine Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque', _Representations_ 38: 76–100.

Nabholtz, J.R. (1964) 'Dorothy Wordsworth and the Picturesque', _Studies in Romanticism_ 3: 118–28.

Price, U. (1994) _A Dialogue on the Distinct Characters of the Picturesque and the Beautiful_ , 1801, in M. Andrews (ed.), _The Picturesque: Literary Sources and Documents_ , East Sussex: Helm Information.

Ray, R. (2013) _Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India_ , New Haven: Yale University Press.

Ruskin, J. (1994) 'Of the Turnerian Picturesque', 1856, in M. Andrews (ed.), _The Picturesque: Literary Sources and Documents,_ East Sussex: Helm Information.

Smith, B. (1985) _European Vision and the South Pacific_ , 2nd edn, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Suleri, S. (1992) _The Rhetoric of English India_ , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Urry, J. and Larsen, J. (2011) _The Tourist Gaze 3.0_ , Los Angeles and London: Sage.

Wordsworth, D. (1997) _Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803_ , ed. C. K. Walker, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Guidebooks

_Scott Laderman_

In April 2013, Rick Steves, the venerable American travel writer whose best-selling guidebooks to Europe have reassured an untold number of his compatriots abroad, posted what may have seemed like a surprising entry on Facebook. 'Are guidebooks dead?' he asked bluntly (Steves 2013). Steves' question is one that journalists had been pondering for years. With the growth of online travel information and the ability to access it quickly through mobile technology, were guidebooks, they wondered, an archaic medium doomed to extinction? It may be too soon to tell, although Steves was optimistic, predicting that guidebooks will slowly make the transition to the digital age while remaining relevant to plenty of tourists. But whatever the future holds, there is no doubt that by the late twentieth century guidebooks had emerged as a ubiquitous accessory for millions of global travellers.

Given their ubiquity, it is startling how little scholarship exists on the genre. The relative handful of extant works (e.g., Bhattacharyya 1997; Buzinde 2010; Iaquinto 2011; Koshar 1998; Koshar 2000; Laderman 2002; Laderman 2009; McGregor 2000; Siegenthaler 2002) represents but a fraction of the scholarship on travel writing more broadly. This cannot be explained by guidebooks' marginality. On the contrary, guidebooks constituted probably the most influential form of travel writing of the twentieth century, helping countless tourists set their itineraries and interpret what they would see. Guidebooks cover every country on the planet and, until the Internet age, it was a rare tourist who had never consulted one.

The origins of the modern guidebook can be traced to nineteenth-century Europe, but it was the explosion of international travel following the Second World War that was responsible for their meteoric growth. Why? Guidebooks have enabled millions of people to navigate a world that could seem simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. Nervous travellers have taken comfort in their provision of restaurant and lodging recommendations; their advice on local customs, ground transportation, and whether or when to tip; and their basic assistance in overcoming the linguistic hurdles that confront globetrotting tourists in a culturally diverse world. More broadly, they have developed an important function within the tourism industry by identifying, as John Murray III put it in his 1858 _Handbook for Travellers on the Continent_ , 'what ought to be seen' (Koshar 1998: 323). Guidebooks thus do more than provide logistical information. They inform tourists what is worth visiting or noticing, and, crucially, they suggest how these worthwhile attractions should be interpreted and understood.

Guidebooks are not spatially comprehensive; they select and mediate a limited number of sites from a seemingly infinite number of possibilities. What cultural geographer Mike Crang said broadly of tourist discourses could more narrowly be said of the function of guidebooks: they 'create sights to be seen, they etch significance onto the landscape, and [they] direct our attention' (2004: 77). In other words, guidebooks engage in a process of what Dean MacCannell called 'sight sacralization' (1976: 42) and so help to construct what John Urry dubbed 'the tourist gaze' (1990). They mark certain places as worth visiting, attributing to them some special significance or meaning. By implication, those places that go uncovered find themselves relegated to unworthiness. If guidebooks elect not to sacralize a destination, does it really merit a visit?

It must be noted that guidebooks are hardly uniform or interchangeable. They possess different personalities and appeal to different demographics. Some, such as those published by Fodor's, are clearly associated with more middle- and upper-middle-class tourists. Others have targeted what Lonely Planet co-founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler called '[i]ndependent-minded travellers' or the 'huge subversive travel market' (Shenon 1996: 35, 37). This has especially been the case since the 1973 arrival of Lonely Planet's _Across Asia on the Cheap_ , a volume that built on the earlier success of Arthur Frommer's _Europe on $5 a Day_ and, even more pertinently, the 1971 _Hitch-Hiker's Guide to Europe_ published by Pan Books.

The growing popularity of such 'independent-minded' travel in recent decades has coincided with a growing desire among tourists not to be associated with 'tourism'. As James Buzard demonstrated in _The Beaten Track_ (1993), there has long been a viciously negative connotation associated with 'the tourist', a term that in the twenty-first century might conjure images of camera-toting automatons cluelessly attempting to purchase tokens of cultural authenticity. Guidebooks, whose raison d'être is of course the modern tourist, have paradoxically become entangled in this anti-touristic rhetoric, instructing their readers how to think and behave like 'the locals' while serving as visible markers of anti-touristic credibility. A _tourist_ might use a Fodor's, for instance, while what sociologist Peter Corrigan (1997) calls an _untourist_ – a tourist who sees his or her travels as somehow transcending 'tourism' – would prefer a Rough Guide. The sentiment is evident in the popular books produced by Rick Steves, who regularly advises his American audience to become 'temporary Europeans' – or 'the best German or Spaniard or Italian' they can be – when wandering through Europe (Steves n.d.). But the anti-touristic rhetoric is probably most striking in the guidebooks published by Lonely Planet.

Enabled by the mid-twentieth-century growth in Western wealth, the 'subversive' backpackers to whom the Wheelers were referring took to the world with gusto in the 1970s, often viewing themselves as a unique and enlightened subculture; they were 'travellers', they insisted, not 'tourists'. The latter, in their view, were to be unsparingly derided. Ranging from the benighted masses that stayed in chain hotels to those 'coach tourists with glazed eyes' who, in the smug characterization of one twenty-first-century guidebook, 'obediently plod through a number of over-restored Gothic chapels', these hordes of sheepish 'tourists' ruined the apparently more authentic experiences of the supposedly non-touristic 'traveller' toting a Lonely Planet or a Rough Guide (Gray, et al. 2001: 730-731). It is not that such 'travellers' did not visit these same chapels; rather, it is that they supposedly experienced a more genuine communion with the sites than the vulgar 'tourists' who visited beside them.

Yet guidebooks' symbolic currency and sight sacralization are only part of the story. Their referential nature – they purport to provide the necessary facts – gives them an air of objective authority that elides their inevitably politicized content. To be sure, people read guidebooks in different ways and are certainly capable of problematizing their narratives. They may appreciate, moreover, that the authors have opinions about the places they cover and that certain 'brands', such as Lonely Planet, are understood to emphasize certain things. But the descriptive content within guidebooks' pages – the history, the culture, the science – is generally assumed to be factually driven and thus largely unbiased and accurate. An analysis of three volumes published since the early twentieth century indicates otherwise, however, shedding light on the ways that guidebooks can in fact often function as politicized texts, not as the mere referential sources that they generally purport to be.

**Race and empire in the Philippines**

In 1926, the New York publishing house Robert M. McBride and Company released Lucian Swift Kirtland's _Finding the Worth While in the Orient_. Kirtland was a Yale-educated reporter who covered the First World War for _Leslie's Illustrated Weekly_. During the 1920s he wrote for _Harper's Monthly_ , _Red Book_ , _Asia_ , _Travel_ , and the _American Legion Weekly_ , among other publications, and his prose was often accompanied by the photographs taken by his wife, the war correspondent Helen Johns Kirtland. _Finding the Worth_ was the second of his books about travel; the first was _Samurai Trails_ (1918), a chronicle of his time in Japan.

_Finding the Worth_ was Kirtland's attempt to produce a general Asian guidebook for Western tourists, with its information, he wrote in a nod to one of the genre's principal conventions, 'dispensed impartially' (Kirtland 1926: vii). The volume consisted of distinct chapters on the nations and colonial territories stretching from Japan, Korea, and China to the Philippines, mainland Southeast Asia, and India, as well as an introduction that broadly addressed practical concerns such as the continent's weather, costs, food, and accommodations. For Kirtland, as for many of his contemporaries, the remarkable cultural diversity of Asia (and the Middle East) was perfunctorily homogenized as 'Oriental' (see Said 1978). The region's best hotels thus offered 'the material luxuries of Western invention' – the 'West', too, being of course a social construction – with 'the gracious touch of traditional Oriental hospitality' (Kirtland 1926: 3–4).

If guidebooks attempt to not only sacralize but 'sell' the places they cover – publishers do not usually make it a practice to discourage people from visiting – _Finding the Worth_ was no exception. Its chapter on the Philippines, which was then an American colony, illustrates Kirtland's effort to dispel the conventional wisdom and offer tourists a number of reasons to make the trip, providing a more nuanced view of the much-derided islands than some earlier authors had allowed. He opens the chapter by quoting Thomas Bankes' 1790 description of the archipelago as 'neither safe nor desirable', like 'a fair person with a foul temper' (ibid.: 231). Despite the passage of more than a century, Kirtland writes, the views of foreigners have hardly changed. But Kirtland suggests that this negative impression of the Philippines is mistaken, as the remarkable contrasts the archipelago offered, both geographically and demographically, make it stand out among tropical destinations:

[I]f the lure which draws you to the East is concerned solely with the art and culture of the ancient civilizations of Asia, then of a certainty the Philippines are not for you. But if the beauties of Nature draw you, if you have that variety of curiosity which is interested in a diverse picture of strange peoples, then your quest might well lead you to these islands.

(Ibid.: 233)

As its reference to 'strange peoples' implies, _Finding the Worth_ appears – at first blush, at least – to differ little from modern guidebooks. Mimicking the tourism industry more broadly, such guidebooks tend to valorize that which is seemingly primitive and premodern while paradoxically destroying it. Kirtland thus celebrates the Philippines' 'unbelievable number of tribes' with their differences in 'temperament, personality, and ways of life', from the 'adroit and adaptable Christianized Tagalogs of Manila' to the 'primitive, pagan Igorots of the Baguio hills' and 'those haughty, fierce-tempered ex-corsairs of the southern islands, the Mohamedan Moros' (ibid.: 233). In the homes of the 'masses of the people', he writes, a visitor 'will find things no whit different from what Magellan saw, from the piles upon which they perch to the laying of their leaf thatched roofs'. Filipinos may 'worship the Christian God and the Christian saints', Kirtland informs his readers, 'but when they are busy with their domestic duties, certain indigenous spirits and sprites are much nearer to their imagination'. Villages just minutes from Manila 'are as primitive in every essential as you might have seen if you had stood on the same spots three hundred years ago', he claims. And the 'pagan villages in the faraway valleys'? These are even more remarkable. 'Except that they have perforce abandoned the thrilling diversion of head-hunting, you can find villages uncorrupted (or should I say unrefined?) by any alien notions whatsoever' (ibid.: 241).

The Filipinos were, to Kirtland and other Americans, very much a people apart. What Johannes Fabian (1983) called the 'denial of coevalness' in anthropological writing is evident throughout _Finding the Worth_. But there was an explicit politics to Kirtland's observations. Just as he marvels at the 'ancient East' with its 'old and genuine' attributes while bemoaning Asia's 'modern port cities, with their Western veneer', he embraces the civilizing mission seeking to upend the romanticized vestiges of the 'life and culture of the East' (Kirtland 1926: vii). From the 'noble savages' of North America (Berkhofer 1978) to the 'picturesque pagan tribes' (Kirtland 1926: 244) of the Philippines, it was not unusual for such contradictory impulses to coexist – awkwardly and seemingly illogically – in colonialist writings.

When Kirtland published his guidebook in 1926, the Philippines had already experienced more than a quarter-century of American colonization. His positive remarks about the islands' geographic attributes and 'strange peoples' might have gone some distance in dispelling the notion of 'an uninspiring and dolorous land', but he did little to rebut what he called the 'general opinion' that 'America has been doing her best to coddle into a state of modern civilization and progress an ungrateful set of natives' (Kirtland 1926: 232). To the extent that he did challenge that view, it was not through an assertion that the Filipinos were already 'civilized'; rather, it was by intimating that they were in fact grateful for the coddling. With its open embrace of the US civilizing mission, then, _Finding the Worth_ departs from much of the more recent guidebook literature; imperial objectives, it suggests, may have historically trumped what is now an almost reflexive valorization of the premodern.

And the United States, in Kirtland's telling, was exceptionally skilled in pursuing those imperial objectives. This was especially so with the task of racial uplift. Yes, Manila contained 'a sophisticated minority of native society', he conceded, but Manila was 'certainly not the Philippines' (ibid.: 239-240). If one wished to see 'the people' – by which he apparently meant allegedly more authentic Filipinos – one had to 'go into the countryside' (ibid.: 240). There, 'the acceptance of Christianity has made the cleavage from the ancient past so final that it is impossible to think that the Filipino spirit of nationalism, no matter how fervid it may become' – and the Americans of course had some experience with its fervidity – 'will ever turn backward to look for its inspiration' (ibid.: 241). Evidence of the US civilizing mission could be found at places such as the Industrial School for Girls at Teachers' Camp. The 'native maids' who attended the school may have been born as 'picturesque pagans', he wrote, but 'dressed in conventional Western style [. . .] they have [to all outward appearances] taken the hurdle from barbarism to civilization without showing any effect from the jump' (ibid.: 246). Can it really be true, he wondered, that civilization had so easily taken hold?

Evidently, yes. Head-hunting offered but one illustration. Visitors to mountainous Baguio might once have worried that 'every youth' coveted a stranger's head as 'the most resplendent trophy he could possibly present to the coy maiden of his heart', but such fears need no longer alarm travellers. Visitors could now 'wander wherever they please and be confident of their safety and of a hospitable welcome' (ibid.: 245). Christian proselytization, of which Kirtland approved (ibid.: 248–249), certainly contributed to this transformation. But so did American colonization more broadly. US occupation had tamed some of the tensions on the island of Mindanao, where the Muslim Moros and Christian Zamboangueños had lived as 'hereditary enemies for centuries' (ibid.: 249), and it proved positively liberating in demolishing for Filipinos the racial exclusivity of earlier European colonialism, such as the restriction to 'the white caste' of carriage drives through Manila's famous 'patrician park' known as the Luneta (ibid.: 237–238).

Kirtland's celebration of America's civilizing mission was symptomatic of the imperial mindset that characterized much of the era's travel literature. Given Christianity's forward march and the opening of the Philippines to the luminescence of American colonization, the slaughter that had accompanied America's turn-of-the-century conquest of the islands was easy to overlook. So Kirtland did. There was nary a word about the atrocities visited upon the Filipino population during America's war of Pacific expansion. Such realities were inconsistent with the happy tale of progress to be found in _Finding the Worth_ 's pages.

**Service in Vietnam**

A comparable blindness to American empire building would accompany the intervention in Vietnam decades later. The 'hardy citizens' of the Republic of Vietnam ('South Vietnam') were 'democracy's greatest friends and communism's greatest foes', _Olson's Orient Guide_ gushed in 1962. And, the volume's American namesake pronounced unequivocally, '[t]hey love us' (Olson 1962: 972–973). The guidebook may have been blunter and more delusional than its contemporaries in celebrating Washington's growing attention to that corner of the Southeast Asian mainland, but it was hardly alone in embracing Cold War ideology. Western guidebooks in fact viewed much of the world through an anti-Communist lens in the 1950s and 1960s. With the case of Vietnam in particular, guidebooks largely rejected the notion that the Vietnamese revolution was a struggle for national liberation. The insurgency was instead situated within a simplistic Cold War framework. As such, support for the Ngo Dinh Diem regime and its successors amounted to support for freedom and democracy, Vietnamese opposition to the US-backed Saigon government was evidence of international Communist subversion, and American intervention in this faraway land was a matter of national defence.

While the discursive framework will hardly seem surprising to scholars of Cold War culture, these scholars might be surprised by the identity of one of the era's most prolific guidebook publishers: the US Department of Defense. With Washington's dispersal of the American armed forces across the globe, the Pentagon produced a series of 'pocket guides' for American servicemen (and the relatively few women) fulfilling their military duty overseas. There had been volumes produced as early as the Second World War for Hawaii, China, North Africa, and other relevant locales, but the escalation of the Cold War generated new demands for easily digestible information that would assist with country-specific orientation and ideological instruction.

The volume for Vietnam, in hindsight, appears one of the most startling. First published in 1963 – subsequent editions appeared in 1966 and 1971 – the 136-page _Pocket Guide to Viet-Nam_ followed many of the conventions of the genre. There were sections on Vietnamese history and culture, from food and manners to architecture and gender expectations; one section title, for example, informed readers forthrightly that in Vietnam a 'Woman's Place Is at Home' (OAFIE 1963: 41). There were enticing photographs of waterfalls, festivals, and temples. There was an introduction to Vietnam's beaches and beach activities, as well as lists of suggested readings and useful phrases. And there was of course a wealth of information on places to see and visit.

Created by a Pentagon unit called the Office of Armed Forces Information and Education (OAFIE), the pocket guides sought to justify the nation's Cold War mission while selling the excitement of overseas travel. Accordingly, the guides pointed to the many pleasures available to American personnel in Vietnam. The adventurous, for example, could attempt tiger and elephant hunting in the mountainous interior or deep-sea fishing and water-skiing along the sparkling coast. Those less inclined to outdoor pursuits could visit the museums and markets of bustling Saigon or the historical remnants of imperial Hue. But while highlighting such pleasurable opportunities, the guides also sought to convince servicemen that their presence in Vietnam was essential to US national security. This was no minor hurdle. Pentagon officials had lamented in 1962 that American personnel were 'not sure why they are in Viet Nam or why it is in the U.S. national interest for them' to be there.1 They thus suggested that a 'timeless indoctrination or orientation' would be necessary, one that framed the revolutionary struggle in Vietnam as an instance of global Communist aggression and not as homegrown resistance to the repressive Diem regime.2 Yet it was important, officials recognized, that their propaganda efforts not be identified as such. 'Troops tend to shy away from "indoctrination", particularly if formal, mandatory instruction is involved. They prefer "information" and are sensitive to any hint that it may be colored by propaganda'3. The pocket guides authored that same year thus seemed ideal instruments in this 'information' campaign. Their seemingly innocuous purpose – providing information on where and how to enjoy oneself while serving in Vietnam – masked their insidiousness. While they hardly represented the Americans' first exposure to Cold War ideology, they certainly helped to reinforce it.

On the whole, the _Pocket Guide to Viet-Nam_ provided a context for the American intervention that divorced it from the taint of French colonialism, associating it instead with the promotion of freedom and a principled defence against Communist expansionism. This was made abundantly clear throughout the guidebook. Its opening sentence provided the preferred context: 'If you are bound for Viet-Nam, it is for the deeply serious business of helping a brave nation repel Communist invasion' (OAFIE 1963: 1). The guide's historical synopsis then tortured the recent Vietnamese past in order to justify the official American view. While the nationalist coalition known as the Viet Minh had in fact worked cooperatively with the United States during the Second World War, this history of collaboration goes entirely unmentioned in the volume, which instead suggested that the 'Communist-directed' Viet Minh merely 'pretended to be a league for the country's independence' (ibid.: 20–21). Likewise, the 'legality of the present Republic of Viet-Nam Government was confirmed' in an October 1955 referendum (ibid.: 21), the guide insisted, failing to mention that the US ambassador at the time judged the referendum a 'travesty on democratic procedures' ( _Foreign Relations_ 1985: 592–593). Subsequent hostilities allegedly erupted because 'South Viet-Nam's progress irked the North'. 'Communist guerrillas began an intensified campaign of terror in the remote countryside of South Viet-Nam' in 1959, servicemen learned, with the US response an attempt 'to strengthen South Viet-Nam's defense against the Communist guerrilla aggression directed by the North' (OAFIE 1963: 22–23). The 'dedicated leadership' of Ngo Dinh Diem had shown what 'a determined nation can accomplish', the Pentagon travel writers cheerfully concluded, with 'general suffrage and free elections' a constitutional reality and new '[e]conomic, health, and educational programs' underway (ibid.: 30–32).

It was an inspiring story, and one that provided purpose to the young American men being sent to Southeast Asia in increasing numbers. But as a representation of Vietnamese realities, the synopsis was complete bunkum. Still, the pocket guide fulfilled its basic objective. There was pleasure to be found for those serving in Vietnam, though the higher purpose of the troops' visit had to always be remembered:

By helping the people of this proud new nation repulse the aggression of the Communist Viet Cong, you will strike a telling blow for democracy. By doing it in a spirit of friendship you will be adding greatly to the strength of the bonds that unite freedom-loving people throughout the world.

(Ibid.: 2)

**What occupation?**

The explosion in international tourism that began in the 1950s led to a flowering of the guidebook genre. Books and series produced by various publishing houses sought to fill every conceivable niche. For high-end tourists there were the LUXE City Guides. Surfers might turn to a country-specific volume such as _Fielding's Surfing Indonesia_ or, more broadly, the Stormrider Guides covering much of the littoral world. Dark tourists could consult Bradt Travel Guides' _World War I Battlefields_ , Greenline Historic Travel's _25 Best World War II Sites: Pacific Theater_ , or Michael Weeks' _The Complete Civil War Road Trip Guide_ to the United States. And solo female tourists had at their disposal the _Go! Girl Guides_ to Mexico, Thailand, Argentina, and London. Among the best-selling guidebooks of the late twentieth century, and certainly among the most influential, were the Lonely Planet 'travel survival kits' that appealed to the hundreds of thousands of lower-budget 'travellers' who set out across every habitable continent in the 1970s. A cottage industry had arisen to accommodate this segment of the tourism market – one that over time grew to billions of dollars – and guidebooks were no exception.

Lonely Planet had from its earliest days presented itself as an independently-minded outfit for 'untourists', touting the benefits of multiculturalism while assuring readers of the publisher's progressive credentials. In 1989, for instance, its guidebooks made a point of publicizing the company's financial contributions to a variety of 'aid groups and associations', from 'donations to famine relief in Africa, to aid projects in India, to agricultural projects in Nicaragua and other Central American countries, and to Greenpeace's efforts to halt French nuclear testing in the Pacific'. In 1988 alone, the publisher noted, 'over $40,000 was donated by Lonely Planet to these projects' (Tilbury 1989: 440). Its textual material would thus offer, one might surmise, an unusually critical analysis of the places it covered, taking into account concerns such as human rights, peace, and international law. Yet, as the first edition of its 'travel survival kit' to Israel reveals, Lonely Planet's coverage could in fact prove disappointingly conventional.

Popular history, like public opinion, is deeply divided on the Israel–Palestine conflict. Scholarship is far less so. Where popular history, especially in the United States, has too often presented a simplistic narrative of a peace-seeking Israel besieged by intransigent Arabs and Palestinian terrorists, academic scholarship – whether from Arab scholars, area studies specialists, or Israel's so-called New Historians – has provided a more sober, nuanced, and factually grounded treatment of the decades-long conflict. In these studies, Israel is more likely to appear as an aggressor, rejecting Arab offers of peace while attempting to consolidate its hold on most of the territories it occupied in 1967. Scholarship, not popular mythology, should drive the coverage presented in guidebooks. In the case of Lonely Planet's _Israel: A Travel Survival Kit_ (1989), it too often did not.

The publisher opened its 1989 volume with an acknowledgment of the fraught political terrain it was addressing. 'One of the golden rules for successful travelling is to avoid discussing religion and politics', it began. 'In Israel, however, they collide inseparably, both with each other and with virtually everything else. This is the Holy Land, and this is Palestine'. The guidebook's objective was thus straightforwardly presented: 'Trying not to preach, condemn, or promote, the broad aim of this guide is to encourage you to go and see Israel for yourself, by providing an honest and accurate account of what you will find there' (Tilbury 1989: 7). Lonely Planet's claim to honesty and accuracy notwithstanding, narratives are never strictly objective, and all writing is infused with a politics. People must decide what to include and what to omit, where to begin and where to end, and whether and how to characterize people, places, and events. That the Lonely Planet guidebook was a political document was evident even in its title: _Israel_ , it was called, not _Israel and the Occupied Territories._ (The title was changed to _Israel and the Palestinian Territories_ with the third edition in 1996.) Within its first several pages, moreover, the regional and country maps (ibid.: 7, 10) failed to demarcate the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights; whether intended or not, this encouraged the effect of legitimizing or naturalizing their occupation by the Israelis.

There is not space in this chapter to present a detailed analysis of the guidebook's historical synopsis. Suffice to say, however, that significant problems exist. We might wonder, for instance, about the fact that the discussion of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which the guidebook frames as a largely anti-terrorist operation, chooses not to acknowledge the most widely publicized massacre of the conflict, in which Israel allowed a Christian militia to murder at least 700 Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Or what about Lonely Planet's failure to mention, except in the most indirect of ways, the ongoing Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon?

Another notable feature of the guidebook was its failure to discuss Israeli occupation policies within the important context of international law. Its introduction to Jerusalem, for example, never employed the word 'occupation' (ibid.: 121), and it presented East Jerusalem's capture and virtual annexation by Israel in 1967 as a passive 'reunification' followed by a seemingly innocuous 'programme of restoration, refurbishment, and landscaping' (ibid.: 123–124). Lonely Planet did acknowledge that '[c]ontroversy continues to surround the status' of the city, but it attributed the almost universally recognized illegality of the annexation not to legal scholars or the international community but to 'Palestinians and other opponents of Israel' (ibid.: 124). It was thus not a matter of global consensus but an argument forwarded by those with a gripe against the Jewish state.

A similar elision existed in the guidebook's treatment of the Golan Heights, with its section on 'Galilee and the Golan' moving seamlessly between Israel proper and the Syrian territory unlawfully annexed in 1981. Indeed, what the guidebook called the 'Golan area' (ibid.: 327) was repeatedly implied to be 'part of Israel' (ibid.: 322). Nimrod Castle was thus 'the biggest and best preserved of Israel's Crusader castles' (ibid.: 328), while Mount Hermon was 'the country's tallest mountain' (ibid.: 329). But both the castle and the mountain are in fact in occupied Syrian territory. What this language suggests is the extent to which guidebooks in many ways construct the places they purport to describe. Their destinations are not objective realities; they are rather what Edward Said (1978) and others have termed 'imagined geographies'. Lonely Planet's inclusion of the Golan Heights within Israel is every bit the social construction that would be, say, a map from the 1980s or 1990s showing East Timor as part of Indonesia.

If occupation was largely absent from the guidebook's treatment of 'Galilee and the Golan', its introduction to the forty-four-page section on 'The Occupied Territories' – a term Lonely Planet applied only to Gaza and the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) – was a model of false balance. 'Arab critics' might argue against Israeli policies, for instance, while 'Zionist critics' might argue that the Israelis have been too lenient (Tilbury 1989: 386). Or, in another example of such feigned balance, the territories 'are seen by the vast majority of Palestinians as land that rightfully belongs to them' while '[m]ost Israelis believe that the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has resulted in greater security for the Jewish State' (ibid.: 386). Such assertions are all fine and good, but did the global community have a view of the occupation's legality and legitimacy? The guidebook did not say. The sanctity of international law was evidently immaterial to Lonely Planet.

**Conclusion**

Addressing a conflict as contentious as that between Israel and the Palestinians is no easy task. But that does not mean that a guidebook should treat certain realities as matters open to reasonable dispute. While partisans will always exist on multiple sides, on some issues the effort to appear balanced in fact legitimizes perspectives that should hardly be accorded legitimacy. Such was the case, I would argue, with portions of Lonely Planet's volume on Israel. While Kirtland's _Finding the Worth While in the Orient_ was a product of the widespread racism and imperial mindset of the first decades of the twentieth century, and the US Defense Department's _Pocket Guide to Viet-Nam_ was a government-issued document intended to indoctrinate its military charges, the guidebooks of Lonely Planet purport to be different.

Produced by an independent publishing house in a more multicultural age, they – like their counterparts from Fodor's, Rough Guides, Moon, Frommers, and other major brands – are presented as reliable factual tools for the modern world traveller. Contemporary guidebooks function within the tourism industry as agenda-setting vehicles and instruments of sight sacralization. They may feign anti-touristic rhetoric, but at many destinations it seems like everybody – whether 'tourist' or 'traveller' – is nevertheless using one. After all, their provision of timetables, cost estimates, and contextual information has spawned an untold number of devoted readers.

Yet despite their pretensions to objectivity, guidebooks are deeply ideological and deeply political documents. They reflect the biases and national sensibilities of their originators, whether it is the early Cold War assumption in _Olson's Orient Guide_ that the United States represented a force for global good or the Zionist view in Lonely Planet's _Israel_ that the Golan Heights was a legitimate part of the Jewish state. Only by acknowledging the discursive politics of referential prose can scholars begin to recognize the important but under-investigated place of guidebooks in the larger travel writing genre.

**Notes**

1 B.P. Flint, Jr, for the Record; Subject: 'Visit of Committee Men to Army Aviation Units [at] Nha Trang, Viet Nam', April 23, 1962; File: Report of Southeast Asia Subcommittee; Accession No. 64-A2021; Box 4; Record Group [hereafter RG] 330; National Archives II, College Park, Maryland [hereafter NA II].

2 B.P. Flint, Jr, for the Record; Subject: 'Visit of Bendetsen Committee to M.A.C.V. Headquarters, Saigon, Viet Nam', April 23, 1962; File: Report of Southeast Asia Subcommittee; Accession No. 64-A2021; Box 4; RG 330; NA II.

3 Office of the Secretary of Defense for the Record; Subject: ' "OBSERVATIONS" During the Southeast Asia Trip', April 20, 1962; File: Report of Southeast Asia Subcommittee; Accession No. 64-A2021; Box 4; RG 330; NA II. This specific observation was made of military personnel in Hawaii.

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The Romantic Literary Travel Book

_C.W. Thompson_

Is there a Romantic travelogue for literary history to recognize? The question has come to seem doubtful in two ways. First, as a result of excellent studies of travel and Romanticism that have stressed how many travelogues of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are hardly Romantic at all and perpetuate the Enlightenment agenda of informing readers pragmatically about the world around them (Jarvis 2012; Leask 2002). But second, as a result of the way in which such studies draw from a variety of printed and manuscript sources without being particularly concerned to distinguish travelogues at least the length of a novella published by Romantic authors in their lifetime. There is however much to be learnt from focusing on the latter. The present chapter uses a comparative overview of the production of arguably Romantic travelogues in different countries to bring out the recurring characteristics offered by this subgenre, as well as the particular problems and cultural histories revealed by the comparison.

In this field, leading French Romantic writers distinguished themselves from the Scandinavians, Germans, and English. More of them published travelogues in their time (more than fifty by 1855), well supported after Waterloo, for economic and political reasons, by every government, the press, and publishers (Thompson 2012). Indeed, producing travelogues became for French authors something of a rite of passage (enabling them to range much further than most German and Scandinavian writers), a development naturally encouraged by the concurrent (late) arrival in France of the Romantic renewal of the arts, historiography, geography, and studies in folklore. This coincidence made the formal freedom and inherent alterities of travelogues a vital field for literary experimentation, as shown by the efforts of Stendhal, Hugo, Nerval, and Quinet. They and others came to appreciate the freedom the genre brought from the shackles of a literary tradition that was more constricting than elsewhere, and the opportunity it gave them to play with a seemingly unlimited range of expressive possibilities – as encouraged by the experimental subjectivity of Laurence Sterne and by the increasing lyricism of French prose since Rousseau. Richer description could now develop into meditations on the self in relation to landscape, history, personal experiences of time, and literary creation. Linear progress gave way to capricious digressions and changes of tone and theme, allowing the travelogue to incorporate poetry, dreams, fantasy, and satire, as well as inset stories. These writers foregrounded fragmentary impressions in order to echo the subjectivity of their observations and the fated incompleteness of any representation. The Romantics now often felt (and sometimes said) that any likeness was incapable of being more than a shadow picture of the multiple dimensions and infinite expanses of time and nature. Their taste for fragmentary description nevertheless rarely prevented their journeys from also becoming quests. These could be for the origins of their own and other religions, of natural forces, or of their selves. They could also be quests for the dynamism of cultures and arts elsewhere, quests that the sheer number of travelogues written brought into implicit dialogue with those of fellow authors. Unwittingly, the French Romantic travelogue thus became something of a collective enterprise, as seems never to have been the case in other regions.

This flowering of the Romantic travelogue in France proves useful in examining the genre elsewhere. For the many examples it gives us, from Chateaubriand to Nerval, encompass all those recurring features, various combinations of which help to define the subgenre. None of these was absolutely without precedent in travel writing. And none of these are by themselves quite sufficient to classify a travelogue as Romantic, not even the two most obvious – an intense preoccupation with various manifestations of time or with nature perceived as dynamic and divine. Even these two need to be combined with some other feature. For as already suggested, Romantic writers do not necessarily produce Romantic travel books. Hazlitt's _Notes of a Journey through France and Italy_ (1826) is hardly one, and the _Rom, Römer und Römerinnen_ ( _Rome and its Men and Women_ , 1818) of Wilhelm Müller only qualifies as such by the attention that Müller, the poet of Schubert's _Die Winterreise_ ( _The Winter Journey_ , 1828), pays to folklore. German and Scandinavian writers especially struggled with the problem of making this informative and descriptive genre serve the demands of the Romantic idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Friedrich Schlegel, as their poetry and fiction were proving able to do. Both the _Minnen från Tyskland och Italien_ ( _Memories of Germany and Italy_ ; published from 1859) that the Swedish poet Per Daniel Atterbom was never to finish sketching and his fellow poet Karl-August Nicander's attempt to avoid such failures in his _Minnen från Södern_ ( _Southern Memories_ , 1831) bear witness to that dilemma (Ebel 1981).

**Charles Dickens,** _**Pictures from Italy**_ **(1846)**

The history of the English Romantic travelogue is distinguished by the fact that the appearance of _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_ between 1812 and 1818 seems to have brought almost to a halt the creation of such work in prose by leading authors. The years between 1783 and 1817 had seen the publication (or interrupted publication in the case of Beckford) of four of the most obvious candidates for such classification: William Beckford's _Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents_ (written in 1783, although publication was halted by his family until 1834), Helen Maria Williams's _Letters Written in France_ (1790), Mary Wollstonecraft's _A Short Residency in Sweden, Norway and Denmark_ (1796), and Mary and Percy Shelley's _History of a Six Weeks' Tour_ (1817). After 1818, I would argue that of major writers, only Dickens's _Pictures from Italy_ (1846) really merits being called Romantic. For Byron made poetry the preferred mode of expression for a writer's travels, as exemplified by Samuel Rogers's _Italy, a Poem_ (1822–28), a pattern roughly similar to that which developed at the same time in Germany. Unlike in France, there was in Britain little funding available for authors' travels, either from the state or from publishers. In British reviews, literary travelogues also met stiff competition from the many exciting reports supplied by the nation's numerous explorers, and after the anthologies of James Hogg, Walter Scott, and Thomas Warton, few readers looked, as they did in France, to literary travelogues for examples of folk tales and poetry.

If we omit for a moment Dickens's _Pictures from Italy_ , always neglected in this context, one can observe the following about the four other English books that seem without question Romantic. All are much preoccupied with historic and/or personal time and all find some place for stories, whether real or fictional (even the first volume of Williams's _Letters_ ). If only two are strongly focused on the revelations of nature (Wollstonecraft, the Shelleys), three take something like the form of a quest or pilgrimage (Beckford, Wollstonecraft, the Shelleys), and all appeal at some point or other to names in the Romantic canon.

Dickens's travelogue is in some respects different from these. It has no strongly autobiographical vein; it is no quest or pilgrimage, and it conveys no Romantic picture of nature. It has however other features which place it squarely in the genre. It has the enthusiasm and energy of the Shelleys' dash to Switzerland. It also retells stories and invokes the Romantic canon; it too is concerned with the flight of time. Like Beckford's _Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents_ , Dickens's journey deliberately presents itself as a capricious collection of fragments and 'impressions' that seek to trace the recurring clash between dreams and reality. Revealingly, in the prefatory 'Reader's Passport', Dickens twice presents his work as no more than 'shadows in the water' (1969: 310–311), an image that Justinus Kerner had bequeathed in 1811 to German Romantics with his novel _Reiseschatten. Von dem Schattenspieler Luchs_ ( _Shadow Pictures of Travel. By the Shadow Showman Luchs_ ), and which Hans Christian Andersen subsequently adopted in _Skyggebilleder af en Reise til Harzen_ ( _Shadow Pictures from a Journey to the Harz Mountains_ ; 1831).

Dickens's insistence on aiming to produce no more than shadowy impressions without 'elaborate descriptions' (1969: 310, 427) of places or arts, and without political commentary, is appropriate for one arriving late as a literary traveller in the country already evoked by Goethe, Madame de Staël, and Stendhal, and since 1842 inventoried for John Murray's guides. He compensates for this, however, by the brio of the rhetoric with which he orchestrates his progress in 1844–45 from Paris to Genoa and then on to Milan, Venice, Rome, and Naples, and by the precision of the droll, familiar images that he finds for the sight, smell, and sounds of places. One thinks of his Avignon 'baking in the sun; yet with an under-done-pie-crust, battlemented wall' (ibid.: 324), his wayside 'blunt-nosed little Virgin [. . .] enshrined in a plaster Punch's show' (ibid.: 378), his Parma cathedral 'odorous with the rotting of Correggio's frescoes' (ibid.: 380), his Verona arena 'like the inside of a prodigious hat of plaited straw' (ibid.: 404), and his Genoese frogs at night that make one think 'that scores upon scores of women in pattens were going up and down a wet stone pavement without a moment's cessation' (ibid.: 341).

That is also the genius of Hugo on his travels, and, like Hugo, Dickens builds his picture of Italy on a series of contrasts between his dream of Italy and the reality; between his hopes and the capacity of Venice to equal and surpass any dream; and between initial disgust or mere disappointment and subsequent delight in Genoa and parts of Rome. Even more obviously Romantic is the darkly Gothic vein that runs through the book and comes to a climax in Naples. Few literary travel books insist to such an extent on Southern lands as full of nightmarish prisons and tombs, from those in Avignon to the Venetian _Piombi_ , the dungeons and catacombs of Rome, and finally the cells of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, which Dickens compares to the Castle of Otranto. And none seem to have been as focused there on death, let alone made a point of actually witnessing the guillotining of an assassin. Herculaneum and Pompeii bring to a climax this open-ended meditation on death, decay, and 'the wheel of Time' (Dickens 1969: 497, 517) on which the last page closes.

However sombre this vein, however sharp the traveller's eye for social decay, however harsh his comments on Italian superstition and catholic practices, Dickens's evident delight in the sights and carnivals of Italy as in his own linguistic virtuosity is sufficient to make _Pictures_ a rejuvenating experience. Much of it has the zest of Mendelssohn's _Italian Symphony_.

**Friedrich Schlegel,** _**Briefe auf einer Reise durch die Niederlande, Rheingegenden, die Schweiz und einen Teil von Frankreich**_ **(1806 and 1823)**

On closer inspection, the history of German Romantic travelogues is rather different from what familiarity with Goethe, Heine, and sundry other poems and novels might lead one to expect. After his early Romantic _Briefe auf einer Reise nach dem Gotthard_ ( _Letters on a Journey to the Gotthard_ , 1779), Goethe's _Italienische Reise_ ( _Italian Journey_ , 1816–17), Georg Forster's _Ansichten vom Niederrhein_ ( _Aspects of the Lower Rhine_ , 1791), and Johann Gottfried Seume's _Spaziergang nach Syrakus_ ( _A Stroll to Syracuse_ , 1803) for the most part conform to the Enlightenment's approach to travel writing and this Enlightenment agenda continued to exert its influence right up to the radical political journalism of Ludwig Börne, the other writers of 'Young Germany', and even, in some respects, Heine (Brenner 1990; Erler 1977; Hermand 1981). And it is astonishing how many of the letters and diaries describing the travels of Kleist, Eichendorff, Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Tieck remained private in their day, however much these nourished their poetry and fiction (Vincent 1941; Schulte 1982). Until Heinrich Heine's _Reisebilder_ ( _Pictures of Travel_ , 1826–34), all that appeared in print was, on the one hand, a few articles and fragments such as Friedrich Schlegel's 'Reise nach Frankreich' ('Journey to France', 1803) and Heinrich von Kleist's satirical 'Fragment eines Schreibens aus Paris' ('Fragments of a Letter from Paris', 1810); and, on the other hand, three lengthier narratives, E.T.A. Hoffmann's _Briefe aus den Bergen_ ( _Letters from the Mountains_ , 1820), Wilhelm Müller's _Rom, Römer und Römerinnen_ (1820), and Friedrich Schlegel's mid-length _Briefe auf einer Reise durch die Niederlande, Rheingegenden, die Schweiz und einen Teil von Frankreich_ ( _Letters on a Journey through the Low Countries, Rhinelands, Switzerland and Part of France_ , 1806, expanded in 1823). And when it comes to Heine, it is essential to remember that the relationship of his travelogue to the above Romantic travel writing and other travel literature is in many ways paradoxical, especially in the sections following the opening 'Harzreise' and 'Nordsee'. For this is a notoriously eccentric text, which manages to be hostile to Goethe and the Romantics and yet to also draw heavily on both. Ranging from Horatian mockery in the opening sections to political fiction in 'Das Buch Le Grand' and blending Aristophanic fantasy with violently aggressive satire in and around Lucca, Heine's _Reisebilder_ seems sceptical of its own genre: it looks backward to the fragmentation and free ways of the English novelist Laurence Sterne, sideways to the 'Young Germany' polemics of Ludwig Börne, and forwards to the more radical experiments of modern travelogues (Brenner 1990).

So it was in poetry and the novel that German Romantics preferred to explore the desires and concepts that drew them to the idea and practice of travel, and if in poetry there was by then no shortage of models, in fiction some recent experiments were particularly inspiring. Goethe's _Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre_ ( _Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship_ , 1795–96) was preceded by Karl Philip Moritz's _Anton Reiser_ (1785–90), and followed by Ludwig Tieck's _Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen_ ( _Franz Sternbald's Wanderings_ , 1798) and Novalis's _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_ (1802) (Pikulik 2000). In the late Romantic period, two novels in particular presented fragmented narratives of journeying with varied registers, dreamlike moments, and symbolic overtones which appealed strongly to contemporary German writers: above all, Kerner's _Reiseschatten_ , which has been called the link in Germany between Sterne and Heine, and (to a lesser extent) Joseph von Eichendorff's _Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts_ ( _The Life of a Good-for-Nothing_ , 1826) (Brenner 1990).

Were there any practical reasons peculiar to the mosaic of close to forty German-speaking states that help to explain this small output of Romantic travelogues? From 1789, war reduced the opportunities for German authors to travel and few were able to go beyond German-speaking lands and Scandinavia. At times, some did succeed in observing the progress of the Revolution and Empire in Paris, but until the 1820s few made it even to the Italy of their dreams, let alone to Spain or the Levant. Soon Heine and Börne would show themselves envious of the support that French writers received for travel from their governments. They must also have been conscious of how little funding and space for literary travelogues were provided by the small periodicals of German Romanticism and even by such newspapers as appeared in Berlin, Stuttgart, Leipzig, and Augsburg, compared to Parisian publications. One reason for this was probably that, whereas French writers seem often to have found it necessary to seek inspiration for change in unfamiliar countries, accounts of which made popular copy, the descriptions that German Romantics made privately of their travels were mostly confined to places too familiar to readers to brighten up publications (Schulte 1982). Even had they been able to persuade newspapers of the interest of such parochial _feuilletons_ , Goethe's _Italienische Reise_ so dominated the whole genre that a challenge was best avoided until Heine cleared the field with his outrageously subjective and fragmented blend of domestic and foreign travel, political polemic, and satirical fiction, all written from the odd perspective of a Jewish cultural outsider in exile.

Heine's _Reisebilder_ being too _sui generis_ , and Müller's rather conventional Roman letters being only superficially Romantic by way of his interest in folklore, it falls to Hoffmann's novella-length account of a trip to the Bohemian Riesengebirge to illustrate the persisting influence of Sterne and the difficulty of expressing effectively in a travelogue the contrast between vulgar tourism and the longing for transcendental ravishment by the World Spirit ( _Weltgeist_ ) through music and landscape. But since Hoffmann's only attempt in the genre is slight, it seems preferable here to look to Friedrich Schlegel's _Briefe auf einer Reise_ of 1806 and 1823 for a revealing and historically significant, if cranky and finally unsuccessful, example of German attempts in the genre to link national characteristics and history to landscape.

The French capital attracted Germans throughout the years of Revolution and Empire, thanks to the draw of its politics, the new collections of the Louvre, the Oriental manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale, and the achievements of French scientists (Erler 1977). The treaties of Lunéville (1801) and Amiens (1802) made tourism possible again for Germans until the return of generalized warfare in 1805 and in 1802, Schlegel moved to Paris and started his review _Europa_ (1803–05) that was to include in its first year his short 'Reise nach Frankreich' as its first and last travel _feuilleton_. This text was however less of a real travelogue, with proper attention paid to the stages of his journey from Dresden to Paris, than a series of didactic notes that expressed hopes about the future contribution of both the equable and freedom-loving Germans and the gay and orderly but aesthetically ungifted French to a Romantic future that would draw on the best of the North, South, East, and West.

Such optimism was widespread in 1802, and the next, longer travelogue that Schlegel would publish in 1806 and expand in 1823 betrays all the disappointment and francophobia that the return of war touched off in many. Shaped more like a real tour than the preceding one, this text combines two journeys that Schlegel had made in 1804 and 1805, and describes him circling northwards from Paris to Brussels, Liège, Aachen, Cologne, and the Rhinelands, before returning through Switzerland and Lyon to Paris. This narrative again omitted details of his progress between key places and substituted didactic entries on artistic and historical themes for any personal narrative of Romantic 'becoming'.

These themes are the glorious past and creative resources of Germany and its spirit, compared to the shortcomings of France and the French, a superiority Schlegel claimed to see revealed in the landscape of the Rhine and in the German origins and spirit of Gothic architecture. Throughout, Schlegel's newfound hatred of the French, their character, their crowded cities, their neo-classical architecture, even the dreary flatness of much of their country – a mere 'desert for the eye [. . .] not even fertile' (1806: 159–160) – is venomous. As soon as one leaves such ill-favoured and ill-tilled lands, the Netherlandish population show what a people with 'Germanic' gifts and willpower can achieve, as do the Swiss again later.

Only the non-French paintings in the Louvre and Notre-Dame redeem Paris. From there, the German spirit at the source of all Gothic architecture provides the thread that Schlegel follows north, guided by the art-collecting Boisserée brothers, to Cambrai, Brussels, Liège, Aachen, and eventually Cologne, home to the crowning achievement of this imaginative style, so grounded in the abundance of nature. What touches Schlegel there are the dispersed remains of all stages of the Gothic style and, in the unfinished cathedral, a masterpiece comparable only to the town hall of Liège, a natural and 'tremendous crystallisation' (1806: 124–125) of life and nature's burgeoning riches. It has been claimed that Schlegel is the first, not only to outline stages of this style's development, but also to insist on the integral roles played in it by stained glass and sculpture (Robson-Scott 1965). One can only regret that in this first part of his journey, such adventurous explorations are all too often interrupted by nostalgic outbursts about the merits of the Frankish Holy Roman Empire and the happiness of France under the early Capetian monarchy, when Schlegel supposed that German blood still flowed through the veins of many French nobles. However understandable in view of the resistance to Napoleon being offered at the time by the Habsburgs, erstwhile rulers of that Empire, this jingoism echoes all too closely the extreme nationalism then being promoted by Ernst-Moritz Arndt.

One is happy to turn from such interjections to Schlegel's reflections about the Rhine at the pivotal point of his journey. One of the most ambitious statements on the meaning of the river and its castles for German Romanticism, this adds some poetic dimensions that had been missing in Georg Forster's very eighteenth-century _Ansichten vom Niederrhein_. Schlegel's reflections start from the proposition that a love of nature, both as garden and wilderness, is central to the German spirit. This German love of wilderness includes of course their love of forests, running streams, and birds, a passion that supposedly expresses the national delight in freedom and unfettered roaming. But Germans also love cliffs and heights, on which they like to settle as in the castles of the Rhine, a taste for awe-inspiring elevation that Schlegel chooses to associate with the national pursuit of the transcendental sublime in soaring Gothic cathedrals as well as in poetry.

In this way his vision seeks to give a deeper historical and spiritual meaning to a landscape that had often been seen as hardly more than the picturesque fief of old robber barons. After it, the remainder of Schlegel's tour to Strasburg, Alsace, and Geneva simply confirms the pre-eminence of Gothic Cologne and of 'German' husbandry. His alternately dull and ghastly return via industrial Lyon and more uninspiring plains, to seek refuge from all that is French in the paintings of the Louvre, does no more than reinforce for the traveller the lessons of the Gothic ideal as a model for all art and indeed moral life, to be realized in some better future. In 1808, Schlegel would become a Catholic.

Clearly, nowadays much of this seems too simplistic, prejudiced, and lacking in irony, suffering as it does from Schlegel's political fury as well from a lack of detail about the lands he traversed. One could well prefer Hoffmann's more coherent attempt to fuse rambling with a Romantic quest for spiritual inspiration. But in its didactic and irascible way, Schlegel's tour illustrates the problems that German Romantics had when crafting accounts of travel and why Hoffmann's preference for exploring journeying in fiction is typical of the choices they made (Dickson 1996: 99–112). Thanks to the circumstances outlined above, none of them produced travelogues as densely rich in personal, cultural, and symbolic dimensions as Nerval's _Promenades et souvenirs_ ( _Walks and Memories_ , 1854–55) and _Voyage en Orient_ ( _Voyage to the Orient_ , 1851). In these Northern parts, it would fall instead to a young Danish poet, novelist, dramatist, and fairy-tale writer, Hans Christian Andersen, to solve the problems they faced and produce a minor masterpiece.

**Hans Christian Andersen,** _**Skyggebilleder af en Reise til Harzen, det sachsiske Schweitz, etc., etc. i Sommeren 1831**_ **(1831)**

In the early nineteenth century, Scandinavians looked mostly to Germany for literary models. Narratives of formative journeys to more southern lands were popular and writers had little problem in finding publishers for their travels, increasingly even obtaining support for these from their governments. In Denmark, the success of the Enlightenment poet Jens Baggesen's strongly autobiographical account of a journey through Europe ( _Labyrinthen_ , 1792–93) soon prompted the Romantic poet and dramatist Adam Oehlenschläger to publish two books on his own travels, the first of them in poetry: _Langelands-Reise i Sommeren 1804_ ( _A Summer Trip to Langeland in 1804_ , 1805) and _En Reise, fortalt i Breve til Hiem_ ( _A Journey Told in Letters Home_ , 1817–18). Small wonder that the young Hans Christian Andersen turned to a Hoffmannesquely fantastic and satirical fictional journey to help launch his career, publishing _Fodreise fra Holmens Canal til Østpynten af Amager i Aarene 1828 og 1829_ ( _A Walking Tour from the Holmen Canal to the Eastern Point of Amager_ ) in 1829. Andersen would go on to publish five real travelogues in his lifetime, but by far the best of these is the first, _Skyggebilleder_.

The journey retold here was Andersen's first abroad, a Romantic pilgrimage at his own expense to Klopstock's grave in Hamburg, the Harz and the Brocken, Leipzig, Dresden (where he met Tieck), and finally Berlin (where he met Chamisso). The short book produced three months later has most of the recurring traits of the Romantic subgenre as it developed in France. It is a self-conscious quest in poetry and prose that explores, in a succession of sketches and 'impressions' (Andersen 2011: 95), the window that travel opens on the interplay of dreams and reality, personal and historical time, and the divine harmonies of earth, sea, sky, music, memory, and birdsong. Stories and legends are collected both for their dramatic value and for the aura they give to places. There is no space here to rehearse in detail instances of Andersen's adroitness in combining these preoccupations with acute and gently ironic observations of the people and places he encountered. Neither the ordinary hardships of the poor and the mentally ill, nor the contemporary sufferings of Poles are forgotten. Here, however, it is most important to highlight the full implications of his title, the musical and theatrical ambitions of the text, and its oneiric qualities and level-headedness.

Andersen's title alludes to the contemporary fashion for shadow theatres and projecting silhouettes on to translucent screens. Repeatedly, Andersen returns to the concept to explain his aim of producing for his readers pages of 'flickering pictures' (ibid.: 93), 'impressions' (ibid.: 95), and 'sketches' (ibid.: 28) from his adventures, together with their often dream-like qualities. Like Dickens later, Baggesen had already used the image in passing (Baggesen 1829: 26), but Andersen's engagement with it is more consistent and central to his purpose, which suggests that one of the most profound, but unrecognized influences on this travelogue is Kerner's similarly oriented novel _Reiseschatten_. Moreover, one of the most striking and effective features of Andersen's book, reinforcing the impression of 'flickering' shadow pictures, is the close attention that he pays to various optical illusions as he travels on water, along streets, and in misty mountains with vertiginous valleys: effects that help to create a sense of dream-like instability in the text.

This suggests an ambition to create something like contemporary Romantic _Singspiele_ (dramas with music) and operas with spectacular scene-changes. Having already written a simple _Singspiel_ for the Royal Danish Theatre where he had previously worked, Andersen admits at the outset that he hoped to structure the whole as a musical drama: 'It was to be a travel drama with overture, prologue and interludes. [. . .] The overture was to be with a full orchestra' (Andersen 2011: 27–28). Throughout, he pays critical attention to performances of plays and operas seen along his route and listens intently to a variety of sounds, from the popular songs of fellow travellers to the songs of birds. His heart and its memories, the sea, the sky, and landscapes are all felt to echo each other in musical harmony: 'There is no dissonance in nature and the world' (ibid.: 121). The text accommodates numerous poems and allows itself to be taken over by the dreams of Andersen and, in one especially oneiric scene, by those attributed to his fellow travellers and to the spirits of nearby flowers. The sleight of hand with which the author effects such transitions, as well as shifts in and out of legends, is sometimes breathtaking.

All of which might nevertheless seem too sentimental, were the narrator not so alert and level-headed about the religious superstitions and anthropomorphic illusions he encounters, so gently satirical about the foibles of tourists and other travellers, and so imaginatively sympathetic to social outsiders like the stubbornly taciturn school mistress. It is a remarkable achievement that none of his subsequent travelogues would equal.

Unexpectedly then, it is in the little known literature of Denmark that we find one of the most representative works of that Romantic subgenre to which some German and English, but above all the French Romantics devoted so much energy around the first half of the nineteenth century.

**Select bibliography**

Andersen, H.C. (2011) _Shadow Pictures from a Journey to the Harz Mountains, Saxon Switzerland, etc._ , 1831, eds. S.H. Rossel and M. Wenusch, Vienna: Praesens Verlag.

Baggesen, J. (1829) _Labyrinthen_ , Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelin.

Brenner, P.J. (1990) _Der Reisebericht in der deutschen Literatur: ein Forschungsüberblick als Vorstudie zu einer Gattungsgeschichte_ , Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.

Dickens, C. (1969) _Pictures from Italy_ , Geneva: Edito-Service S.A.

Dickson, S. (1996) 'Hapless but hopeful: the travellers' tales of Hoffmann', in C. Smethurst (ed.), _Romantic Geographies_ , Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications.

Ebel, U. (1981) _Studien zur skandinavischen Reisebeschreibung von Linné bis Andersen_ , Frankfurt: Haag und Herchen.

Erler, G. (ed.) (1977) _Wanderschaften und Schicksale. Reisebilder von Goethe bis Chamisso_ , Rostock: Historff.

Gish, T. (1963–64) ' "Wanderlust" and "Wanderleid": the Motif of the Wandering Hero in German Romanticism', _Studies in Romanticism_ 3: 225–239.

Handesten, L. (1992) _Litteraere rejser: poetik og erkendelse i danske digteres rejsebøger_ , Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag.

Hermand, J. (ed.) (1981) _Junges Deutschland. Texte, Dokumente_ , Stuttgart: Reclam.

Jarvis, R. (2012) _Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel: Expeditions and Tours in North America, 1760–1840_ , Farnham: Ashgate.

Kalb, G. (1981) _Bildungsreise und literarischer Reisebericht: Studien zur englischen Reiseliteratur (1700–1850)_ , Nürnberg: Hans Carl.

Korte, B. (2000) _English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations_ , London: Macmillan.

Leask, N. (2002) _Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing 1770–1840_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pikulik, L. (2000) _Frühromantik: Epoche-Werke-Wirkung_ , Munich: C.H. Beck.

Possin, H.-J. (1972) _Reisen und Literatur: Das Thema des Reisens in der englischen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts_ , Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

Robson-Scott, W.D. (1965) _The Literary Background to the Gothic Revival in Germany_ , Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Schlegel, F. (1806) _Briefe aus einer Reise durch die Niederlande, Rheingegenden, die Schweiz und einen Teil von Frankreich_ , in H. Eichner (ed.), _Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe_ , Paderborn: Schöningh.

Schulte, F. (1982) 'Studien zur Landschaftsbeschreibung in Harz-Berichten des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts', _Harz-Zeitschrift für den Harz-Verein_ 34: 61–116.

Thompson, C.W. (2012) _French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vincent, E. (ed.) (1941) _Reisen Deutscher Romantiker_ , Jena: Eugen Diederichs.

Modernist Travel Writing

_David Farley_

In the 1890s, Jules Verne, the author of _Around the World in Eighty Days_ (1873), forecast both the ease and ambition of twentieth-century travel when he described to the Italian travel writer Edmondo de Amicis the secret design at the heart of his work, including the numerous volumes that make up his _Voyages Extraordinaires_ (1863–1905). According to De Amicis:

[Verne's] intention is to describe the whole earth in his books and he goes from region to region in a certain predetermined order, not retracing his steps unless through necessity, and then as quickly as possible. He still has many parts of the world left, and has estimated the number of stories he must still write in order to fill out his entire plan. 'Shall I have time for them all?' he asked, smiling.

(De Amicis 1897: 702)

The proliferation of travel writing a generation later, during the period between the two World Wars, testifies to Verne's foresight and to his vision of a globe fully traversed by the intrepid Western traveller. The number of writers who travelled and wrote about their experiences during these years – in what Paul Fussell calls 'the final age of travel' (1989: 4) – speaks both to the ease of foreign travel and to the existence of a market for such books. Whether it was W.H. Auden in China, D.H. Lawrence in Sardinia, Langston Hughes in Cuba or the USSR, Wyndham Lewis or Edith Wharton in Morocco, Graham Greene in Liberia, Rebecca West in Yugoslavia, Freya Stark throughout the Middle East, Jean Cocteau going around the world in eighty days, or any of the numerous other figures who journeyed abroad, travel writing was a staple of the period and, for many of these writers, an important complement to their imaginative work.

There are many historical, political, and socio-material reasons for the increase of travel in the early twentieth century. Perhaps the most notable are the technological and industrial advances that allowed such mobility (advances anticipated by Verne in his novels), and which led to the creation of new markets as well as the spread of conflicts across borders and across oceans. Governments reacted by implementing strict passport and visa regulations in the wake of the First World War in order to control the flow of people across borders in the name of national security. These regulations proved burdensome for the individual traveller – writing about 'the passport nuisance' was _de rigueur_ in this period – but they were also evidence of the normalization of international travel.

In addition to the political, industrial, and technological reasons for the increase in travel, many writers of the time also expressed psychological motivations for going abroad. As noted again and again in the critical literature on the period, the impulse to travel was often bound up with feelings of restlessness and anxiety, feelings prompted by the political situation as well as by the dire economic conditions of the interwar years. Writers travelled because they could, but also because they desired to escape from a claustrophobic post-war environment. Travel writing was often a way for them to recognize and register, through the examples of foreign peoples and contexts, alternatives to Western decline and fatigue. This is the main argument of Fussell's _Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars_ (1980) as well as Samuel Hynes' _The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s_ (1976), two of the landmark studies of 1930s travel writing. In this narrative, it was all that writers could do to remove themselves from the very modern world that allowed such mobility to begin with.

Recently, scholars have shown the travel writing of the period to be less monolithic than critics like Fussell and Hynes suggest (Schweizer 2001; Smith 2004; Farley 2010; Peat 2011; Burton 2014). Rather than being animated by a single impulse or emerging from a single political context, travel writing was subject to the same transformations undergone by the other arts during these years. The early twentieth century saw the beginning and decades-long flourishing of Modernism, a movement with many geographical centres and expressly internationalist in its outlook. The term 'Modernist' covers a wide array of styles and concerns, united perhaps only in the rejection of traditional means of representation. Ezra Pound's rallying cry to 'Make it new' (Pound 1928: 10) is the crudest expression of this urge to distinguish the age from the previous one in which realism reigned.

Experimental in nature, Modernist literature often displays a fractured narrative perspective, which speaks to the difficulty in apprehending the complex modern world. It is also often fragmentary in nature, a device intended to render the deterioration of modern life and the breakdown of cultural wholeness, with the act of reassembly into meaning often consigned to the reader. Helen Carr sees in the travel writing of the twentieth century a blending of the external physical journey with the internal psychological one, reflecting Modernist attempts to textually portray the unconscious through a stream of consciousness (Carr 2002: 74). A further hallmark of Modernist literature is the collapsing or blending of genres and the mixing of media, as the boundaries between poetry, prose, and drama on the one hand, or painting, music, and writing on the other were often deliberately blurred. As Tim Youngs points out, these Modernist devices often run counter to the traditional goals and conventions of the travel narrative, where order is usually imposed through the unified subjective experience and narration of the travelling subject; and yet travel writers who deliberately employed Modernist techniques were showing just how illusory the unity of such experiences could be to begin with, and how difficult it was to record and render the modern world (Youngs 2010: 272). There is no reason, in other words, to suppose that the travel narrative was somehow immune to the transformations that we see in poetry, prose, drama, or the visual arts at the time.

We see these Modernist features most strikingly exemplified in travelogues such as Robert Byron's _Road to Oxiana_ (1937), which Fussell compares to James Joyce's _Ulysses_ (1922) and T.S. Eliot's _The Waste Land_ (1922) for the way Byron makes use of collage and pastiche, and E.E. Cummings' _Eimi_ (1933), an account of a journey to the Soviet Union where the words and syntax are broken up in order to reflect and represent not only the subjective experience of the traveller but also the impenetrable façade of Soviet life. Similarly, W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice's _Letters from Iceland_ (1937) and then Auden and Christopher Isherwood's _Journey to a War_ (1939) blend poetry, prose, and even photography to render these politically ambitious journeys. In _Black Lamb and Grey Falcon_ (1941), Rebecca West merges the story of her own political awakening, the domestic sphere of her marriage, and the convoluted history of the Balkans into a massive work as ambitious as any of the familiar texts of Modernism. This proliferation of travel writing and the need to render the experiences of travel in such radically new ways, speaks to the changing world through which these writers were travelling, the challenges inherent in representing this world, and the need to recognize what lies beyond familiar periodic and geographical boundaries.

The canon of Modernist literature has expanded in recent years in ways that have further bearing on what we might consider Modernist travel writing. In their 2008 _PMLA_ report 'The New Modernist Studies', Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz describe some of these changes in the field. In addition to the temporal expansion of Modernism's boundaries, as scholars reach back to the nineteenth century and ahead towards what is commonly called 'Late Modernism', they also point to what they call the 'spatial' expansion of the field, by which they mean how texts and modes of production from areas of the globe previously ignored are now seen as crucial to understanding the Modernist revolution in the arts (Mao and Walkowitz 2008: 737). The so-called 'transnational turn' in Modernist studies has required that we look beyond such formulae as centre/periphery and instead engage a wider set of texts and concerns.

To speak of Modernist travel writing is thus to speak of travel texts that employ the formal features of Modernist literature mentioned above, but also to speak of works that may originate from beyond the familiar boundaries of the Modernist canon. In order to elaborate on this, I focus on the works of three authors in whose writings we most clearly see the mutual influences of travel and Modernism. In Blaise Cendrars' _The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France_ (1913), we see how the Swiss writer utilizes Modernist technique to convey the strangeness of travelling in the modern world. Aimé Cesaire's _Notebook of a Return to the Native Land_ (1947) is a poem as fragmented, allusive, and radically experimental as Eliot's _Waste Land_. Written in Paris, one of the centres of literary Modernism, it is built out of the experiences of a narrator who travels between home and abroad and who traces the impact of modernity on the racialized, postcolonial subject. In Annemarie Schwarzenbach's _Death in Persia_ (1998), we see the Swiss writer blending the personal and the political whilst simultaneously conflating the internal and external journeys in the manner identified by Carr. I examine the travel writing of these writers in order to deepen our understanding of the relationship between Modernist literature and travel writing, to better understand the unique nature of Modernist travel writing, and to expand the range of what we might consider to be Modernist travel texts.

**Blaise Cendrars: modern conveyances**

Blaise Cendrars' _The Prose of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and of Little Jeanne of France_ was published in 1913. This long poem is not technically a travel narrative, but rather a work built out of the experiences of travel, one which shows how transformative the experience of travel can be to the modern poetic sensibility. In _The Prose of the Trans-Siberian_ , we see the Romantic conception of the journey giving way to a new kind of travel, modern in its means of conveyance and Modernist in its form. It anticipates poems such as Pound's 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' (1920) or Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' (1915) in the way it shows the state of mind of a narrator who is remarkably similar, though not identical, to the author.

It is also Modernist in the way that it combines elements of the visual and the textual. The poem was published as a single sheet, six and a half feet tall, folded accordion-like, and illuminated by abstract artwork by Sonia Delaunay. The images run down the margins of the page, parallel to the text but also bleeding into it. The blending of text and image and the powerful rhetoric of a narrator confronting simultaneously the beauty and destruction of the modern world make this work in many ways seem like a tamer forerunner of _Blast_ (1914), Wyndham Lewis' provocative broadsheet, or the Futurist manifestos of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The effect of Cendrars' original published work is to force the reader to consider the relationship between text and image. But perhaps a more important relationship for our purposes is the one between experience and transcription, as the poem records not just the physical details of travel but the shifting sense of what it means to travel in the modern world.

The 'prose' of the title means here a casual speaking forth, a sense derived etymologically from the Latin _prosa_ , and gleaned experientially through the tone of the poem, as the reader is buttonholed by the narrator who never ceases directing our attention and narrating his forward progress. It recounts a journey undertaken on the Tran-Siberian railroad in 1905, in the company of a French prostitute, the 'little Jeanne' of the title. Over the course of the poem, and as he traverses a modern world where warfare, capitalism, and transportation meet and feed into one another, we see the narrator's growth into a poet.

At the beginning of the poem, we hear again and again the refrain, 'I was a really bad poet', as the narrator's poetic calling is linked to his desire to travel (Cendrars 1992: 15). The language of adventure permeates the early lines, as we see with a reference to Jules Verne. Finding himself in the company of businessmen who are travelling out to trading posts in the Far East with all of their goods, the narrator imagines that these riches are his and he sees himself sleeping atop 'stolen treasures' (ibid.: 1992: 17). It is not just the adventurous spirit of Verne that he conjures, but the Frenchman's very plots: 'I had to guard it from the thieves in the Urals who had attacked the circus caravan in Jules Verne' (ibid.: 1992: 17).

But as these fantasies fade, he is recalled to himself and his own inexperience by the boredom of railroad travel: 'And still, and still / I was as sad as a little boy / The rhythms of the train / What American psychiatrists call "railroad nerves" ' (ibid.: 1992: 18). The modern condition of 'railroad nerves' is a reaction to the monotonous sounds and vibration of the train, and is one of the ways in which his fantasies of adventure are deflated. The people he travels with are all engaged in business or speculation, not in the swashbuckling adventures his imagination had promised. For Verne's Phileas Fogg, all modes of conveyance worked flawlessly according to a timetable worked out in advance, making the various vehicles he travelled of virtually no consequence. Cendrars' narrator, however, can never not think of the train that he is on. For the Modernist traveller, romance and adventure give way to the disillusioned recognition of a mechanized reality that was transforming the self and psyche as surely as it was transforming the external world.

For Cendrars, the awareness of modernity and the experience of travel happen simultaneously. The poem ends with his desire for adventure and escape foreclosed, with the realities of war immediate and palpable, as he sees Russian soldiers returning from the eastern front with Japan, and with the narrator's dream of being a good poet dashed. Instead, in the face of all this violence and suffering that he witnesses, and the difficulty he faces of representing what it is that he saw, he retreats into memory:

I'm scared
I don't know how to take it all the way
Like my friend Chagall I could do a series of irrational
Paintings
But I didn't take notes
'Forgive my ignorance
Pardon my forgetting how to play the ancient game of verse'
As Guillaume Apollinaire says
If you want to know anything about the war read Kuropotkin's
Memoirs
Or the Japanese newspapers with their ghastly illustrations
But why compile a bibliography
I give up
Bounce back into my leaping memory.

(Cendrars 1992: 26)

The poem ends almost inexplicably back in Paris (we don't get an account of the trip back) as he sits down to write the very poem we've just finished reading, and as the memories of his voyages still haunt him. In the final lines, the sound of a train in the distance once again attacks his nerves and shakes him out of himself: 'Sometimes the cry of a whistle tears me apart', Cendrars writes (1992: 29). He ends with a wish very different than the one he began with:

I wish
I wish I'd never started travelling.

(Cendrars 1992: 29)

The poem portrays a narrator who is one of the first to traverse a distinctly modern landscape, one ravaged by war and transformed by technologies of transportation and communication. _The Prose of the Trans-Siberian_ registers these transformations in a voice that, at times, laments a passing world, but in a form that loudly proclaims a deep familiarity with Modernist technique.

**Aimé Césaire: discourse on travel writing**

Like Cendrars's poem, Aimé Césaire's _Notebook of a Return to the Native Land_ , first published as a book in 1947, is not a travel narrative per se, but a poem built out of the experiences of travel. It is energized by the gap between home and away and crafted with the rhetoric of colonial encounters and colonial resistance. It recalls the high Modernism of Eliot's _The Waste Land_ in its miniature-epic scope, its fragmentation, and its rhetorical, incantatory power, yet _Notebook_ is not an elegy for a dying civilization, but a call to action and independence for a people.

Césaire was born in Martinique in 1913 and studied in France in the 1930s. While in Europe, he was associated with the Surrealists and was a key figure in the Négritude movement, which sought to counter French racism in the colonies by forging a bond of common black identity. _Notebook_ emerges from this period, and in it Césaire is concerned with the black colonial subject living in a colonial space, as well as with the larger question of whether a collective black identity could be constructed as a mode of resistance to French colonial rule. The hybrid _Notebook_ is a blend of genres, a mixture of poetry and prose, as we see Césaire carve out a space in the landscape of late Modernist literature across which the rival concerns of blackness and coloniality shape the way in which the traveller sees and the poet speaks. Césaire locates the historical moment of the poem in a larger arc of pre-colonial and colonial histories. Travel is important for Césaire for the way it allows him to understand and counter the rhetoric of difference that was used to prop up Western imperialist discourse. The travelling subject writes his world in a way that runs counter to Western understandings of the travel narrative. Rather than conventional expositions of place and a narrative that emerges from the forward progress of the traveller, the significance of Césaire's travel experiences erupts at different moments in the text. Césaire appropriates the travel genre by focusing on the voices of those who have been silenced. Travel also features on the level of allusion, with references to previous black travellers – who until now have remained voiceless and unrecorded – being crucial to the creation of this black community in the present, as Césaire prophetically forges the vocabulary of a new resistance.

The poem begins with a bleak portrait of a town living under French colonial rule. The landscape he contemplates is of a beaten town, inert, desolate, 'dynamited by alcohol', 'sinisterly stranded'. The inhabitants seem ghostly, not a collective but isolated individuals, a 'throng which does not know how to throng' (Césaire 2001: 3). He then imagines his return to this beaten town, after having been away. _Notebook_ was published while Césaire was still in France, so in many ways this return is as much an imaginative journey as it is an actual one: 'I would go to this land of mine and I would say to it: "Embrace me without fear [. . .] And if all I can do is speak, it is for you I shall speak" ' (ibid.: 13). His language grows prophetic as he seeks to connect the distant glorious past, the more recent colonial past, and the desolate present to a better possible future: 'My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those who break down in the prison holes of despair' (ibid.: 13). He recalls Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian revolutionary hero imprisoned by Napoleon, 'imprisoned in whiteness', but defiant in his loneliness. At this moment, Césaire rejects those pillars of Western rationality, reason, justice, and beauty. Instead, 'We would tell. Would sing. Would howl!' (ibid.: 17). Story, song, and polemic will be the grammar of this dissent.

In the pages that follow, Césaire recalls his ancestors, as a 'strange pride suddenly illuminates' him (ibid.: 33). Here the subject of travel again becomes important, as the _Notebook_ culminates in a kaleidoscopic view of voyages and voyagers. The poem becomes both a way to document the travellers lost to history, 'those who have known voyages only through uprootings' (ibid.: 32), and a platform for the condemnation of white colonizers. He remembers individuals, like Siméon Piquine 'who wandered his entire life – searching for his name' and Grandvorka who was crushed 'under the wheels of the running locomotive': both victims of 'travel' in the modern and colonial world (ibid.: 41). He remembers these figures and accepts his own role as prophet and historian of this unrecorded world: 'And my special geography too; the world map made for my own use, not tinted with the arbitrary colours of scholars, but with the geometry of my spilled blood, I accept' (ibid.: 43). The final image of travel we get is of the Atlantic slave trade, the history of which exists in shipping records, manifests, and insurance policies. Césaire's image of a slave ship is prophetic and apocalyptic, a refutation of the age of exploration and expansion, and the historiography which enshrines them:

And through the shredding of clouds the flashing of a sign the slave ship cracks everywhere [. . .] Its belly convulses and resounds [. . .] The ghastly tapeworm of its cargo gnaws the fetid guts of the strange suckling of the sea!

And neither the joy of sails filled like a pocket stuffed with doubloons, nor the tricks played on the dangerous stupidity of the frigates of order prevent it from hearing the threats of its intestinal rumblings.

(Ibid.: 47)

The fragments that Césaire has shored against his ruin are not the remnants of a dying European sensibility or the tattered textual archives of a decaying civilization but scraps of vision, snippets of stories, and the ways of seeing of the postcolonial subject. The notes appended to the end of _The Waste Land_ , as well as the allusions throughout, ground Eliot's work in the archive of Western civilization (or Western views of eastern civilization). Césaire's poem eschews such grounding, because the archive Césaire draws on is based on his own travel experiences, his own bodied existence, and the unrecorded words, voices, perceptions, and experiences of the victims of French colonialism. _Notebook_ is thus an important text for understanding the intersection between Modernism and travel, one that calls attention to our own ethnocentrism in the construction of this category. Years before (and as if in preparation for) interrogating the discourse of colonialism, Césaire interrogated the discourses of both modernity and travel writing.

**Annemarie Schwarzenbach: angel on the road**

Annemarie Schwarzenbach is currently undergoing a recovery in the English speaking world. _Death in Persia_ (2013), as well as another travel book _All the Roads are Open_ (2011) and her fictional account of her time in Berlin _Lyrical Novella_ (2011), were all written in German in the 1930s and have been translated into English in recent years. Yet the terms of this recovery are still being established. Schwarzenbach was a popular figure while she lived, known for her unconventional lifestyle, anti-fascist activism, and prolific travel. Born of a wealthy family, who disapproved of her Bohemian lifestyle and sexual orientation, Schwarzenbach did all she could to separate herself from them. Travel and writing were two ways that she could accomplish this.

_Death in Persia_ is the most straightforward example of travel writing that I examine here. It is the record of a 1935 trip Schwarzenbach took to Tehran, though it includes elements from previous journeys that she made as well. In this work, Schwarzenbach displays the disillusionment and desire to escape from post-war Europe that we see in much interwar travel, but she recasts these on her own terms in order to recount her own personal and spiritual journey. Not as obviously experimental as Cendrars' _The Prose of the Trans-Siberian_ or Cesaire's _Notebook_ , _Death in Persia_ nevertheless shows traces of Modernist influence gained during her time in 1930s Weimar Berlin, where she circulated in various Bohemian and artistic circles and was well aware of Modernist developments. Reading Schwarzenbach's text under the rubric of Modernist travel writing allows us to make sense of a text that didn't always make sense of the world or the self. It also allows us to see Schwarzenbach at this moment of recovery as part of the Modernist context.

She begins _Death in Persia_ by claiming that 'this book is about errant ways and despair' (Schwarzenbach 2013: 3). And the narrative starts out haltingly, shifting at times back to when she was in Moscow planning her trip to Persia. The narrative is like this throughout, jumping around in time, a hallmark of Modernist writing, as we see Schwarzenbach gradually coming to understand the way the West is implicated in the troubled political situation in Persia. There is also a personal narrative layered with these political themes, as Schwarzenbach recounts a love affair with Jalé, the daughter of the Turkish ambassador stationed in Iran, an affair that colours her time in Persia and shapes her narrative. The main trajectory of _Death in Persia_ is the physical and political journey (Schwarzenbach travelled with a Diplomatic passport), but the story of the personal journey, the doomed love affair, constantly disrupts and reshapes the text. The 'errant ways and despair' manifest themselves in paralysis as Schwarzenbach finds it increasingly difficult to navigate the perilous course of both public and private events.

At one particular moment of crisis, she feels alone, at the end of her wits and strength, as if she is watching 'scenes from the end of the world' (ibid.: 35). At this point, she is visited by an angel, and she confesses to this divine figure that she wishes to die. The angel promises no relief: 'I did not come here to relieve you of anything [. . .] I just wanted to see how you are. I wanted to see if you could now bear the bleakness of my country' (ibid.: 40). It is not a comforting encounter, and she ends up feeling even more alienated and lonely. The angel will return later, when Schwarzenbach is feeling an even deeper despair, knowing that her lover will soon die and she won't be able to see her one last time. The angel responds with a similar lack of comfort, instead describing how he was looking out for her, observing her moving about the landscape. Schwarzenbach is seen as part of the landscape, not as a neutral recorder of a foreign scene. And this awareness, this understanding of her own role not just as perceiver but as perceived, impacts the way she writes her own travel narrative.

Looking back over her journey in the wake of Jalé's death and as she was readying the manuscript for publication, Schwarzenbach describes her trip to Persia as a kind of drifting and reveals her retrospective feelings of 'ignominious defeat'. Such motivations and anxious feelings puts her in the company of many interwar British travellers, as discussed by Fussell. At the same time, however, Schwarzenbach indicts such feelings and the overall desire for escape:

There is talk more than once of deviations, escape routes and errant ways, and those living in a European country today know how few are able to bear such terrible tension – a tension that comes from the personal conflict between a need for calm and a need for decisiveness, or from financial hardship, whether minimal or overpowering, and the most fundamental, most pressing, political questions about our economic, social, and cultural future in which no one gets off lightly. If young people still try to get off lightly – no matter how conscientiously they plan their escape – they bear the mark of Cain's betrayal on their foreheads.

(Ibid.: 4)

Travelling for escape was for Schwarzenbach a betrayal of the urgent necessity of managing the tension of living in the modern world. Through her dialogues and exchanges with the angel, Schwarzenbach suggests that truth emerges not from the authority of vision of the traveller, whose job is to assemble the fragments of culture, but rather from the spaces between, the gaps, the interstices of conversation and dialogue, and in the borderless expanses of foreign terrains and human/divine interaction. Schwarzenbach provides us with an alternative version of the Modernist travel text, one which doesn't rely on the authority of vision, but on the complex imbrication of the personal and the political.

**Conclusion**

Tracing the connections between Modernism and travel writing, beyond either's ability to chronicle anxiety or chart paths of escape, is important for understanding Modernism's legacy and the evolution of the travel narrative throughout the century. There are many recent authors who are indebted to Modernist experimentation and style(s) in their handling of the travel narrative. For instance, W.G. Sebald, whose works fall uneasily into any category, but whose narrative is propelled by the travels and wanderings of its narrator/author. Sebald is writing in the wake of the Holocaust and the allied destruction of German cities. The landscape he traverses is sometimes England, where he had taken up residence, and sometimes Europe, where he was born and raised. But perhaps the landscape most important to him is the landscape of modernity itself. This modernity is both within the reach of his memory but also something that he must tease out of the archives and oral histories of people that he meets. Likewise, the Irish writer Tim Robinson in his _Connemara_ trilogy (2006–2011), perhaps the most significant travel project published since Rebecca West's _Black Lamb and Grey Falcon_ (1941), looks back often to the period of Anglo-Irish Modernism (among other moments of Irish and European history) and how it shaped this region of Ireland, through construction projects, artistic movements, urban planning, and the like. As with Sebald, Robinson travels in the wake of modernity, and for both these authors the travel book seems the only genre capable of containing the compacted and dispersed legacies of both Modernism and modernity. We might think as well of M. NourbeSe Philip's _Zong!_ (2008). In this long, formally experimental poem, Philip recounts the horrors which occurred on the slave ship _Zong_ in 1781, when the captain and crew murdered their entire cargo of African slaves in order to collect the insurance money that they would have lost had the slaves died of natural causes. Philip's poem takes the words of the legal case arising from this atrocity, the only record of these events, breaks them up, rearranges them, and launches them as waves of text. Her method underscores absence and loss, the violence of the law, and the inhumanity of the archive. If the words unleashed in _Zong!_ don't make for actual travel writing, we can nonetheless see in their radical deployment another way of thinking of the connection between travel and modernity, a connection which asks us to think of the material circumstances of whatever journey we are considering, of who is able to travel, who is able to offer testimony, and by what means they offer it. Cendrars, Césaire, and Schwarzenbach speak of these connections in their own ways, as we continue to think not just about disciplinary boundaries or the generic descriptions of the travel book, but the darker history of modernity, the promises and limits of the travel narrative, and the enduring legacies of Modernism.

**Select bibliography**

Burton, S. (2014) _Travel Narrative and the Ends of Modernity_ , New York: Cambridge University Press.

Carr, H. (2002) 'Modernism and Travel (1880–1940)', in P. Hulme and T. Youngs (eds), _The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing_ , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Cendrars, B. (1992) _Complete Poems_ , Berkeley: University of California Press.

Césaire, A. (2001) _Notebook of a Return to the Native Land_ , Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press.

De Amicis, E. (1897) _The Chautauquan_ , 24(6): 701–705.

Farley, D.G. (2010) _Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad_ , Columbia, MO; University of Missouri Press.

Fussell, P. (1980) _Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars_ , New York: Oxford University Press.

Hynes, S. (1976) _The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s_ , London: Bodley Head.

Mao, D. and Walkowitz, R. (2008) 'The New Modernist Studies', _PMLA_ 123(3): 737–748.

Peat, A. (2011) _Travel and Modernist Literature: Sacred and Ethical Journeys_ , New York: Routledge.

Philip, M. N. (2008) _Zong!_ , Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Pound, E. (1928) _Ta Hio: The Great Learning, Newly Rendered into the American Language_ , Seattle: University of Washington Chapbooks.

Schwarzenbach, A. (2013) _Death in Persia_ , New York: Seagull Books.

Schweizer, B. (2001) _Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s_ , Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Smith. S. (2004) 'Burbank with a Baedeker: Modernism's Grand Tours', _Studies in Travel Writing_ 8(1): 1–18.

Youngs, T. (2010) 'Travelling Modernists', in P. Brooker (ed.), _The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms_ , New York: Oxford University Press.

Postmodernizing Travel Writing

_Manfred Pfister_

Three travel books from three different countries, published within less than a decade, are here made to bear witness to what happened to travel writing once it lost its innocence, its belief in its power to faithfully report on other worlds and on the traveller's inner world resonating with those external realities. Bruce Chatwin's _In Patagonia_ (1977), Rolf Dieter Brinkmann's _Rom, Blicke_ ( _Rome, Glimpses_ , 1979), and Antonio Tabucchi's _Notturno indiano_ ( _Indian Nocturne_ , 1984) all take their authors outside their own culture, to South America, Rome, and India respectively, yet they emphasize at the same time the traces of their own culture in the other: the presence of the British Isles, of Europe and the whole world in Patagonia; Goethe's and the German romance with Rome; the English and Portuguese colonial investment in Bombay, Madras, and Goa. All three authors were born during the war years (Chatwin and Brinkmann in 1940, Tabucchi in 1943) and are now dead, in each case dying 'abroad' in a country foreign to them: Brinkman was killed by a car in London in 1975, Chatwin died of AIDS in a Provence hospital in 1989, and Tabucchi, as behoves a passionate Lusitanist, expired in Lisbon in 2012. All three authors were also more than 'mere' travel writers: Chatwin a journalist and novelist, Brinkmann a novelist and poet, and Tabucchi a distinguished literary scholar, critic, and novelist. But it is as travel writers that I consider them here, using the books cited above to explore how travel writing in the second half of the twentieth century – or at least some practitioners of the form – moved in a direction that might be labelled 'postmodern'.

That said, it is not my intention here to prove that these three travelogues are postmodern texts, nor do I believe that such a demonstration would convey upon them some special mark of excellence or relevance. In view of the many rival versions of 'the postmodern' currently contradicting each other and often themselves, the heuristic and descriptive value of such labelling is limited (see Foster 1983 and 1985; Fokkema and Bertens 1986; Hassan 1987; Hutcheon 1988; Pfister 1991; Waugh 1992). With the debate about the 'Postmodern Condition' (Lyotard 1984) having run dry so obviously and so quickly, even the honorific value of the predicate 'postmodern' is minimal. My essay goes as much in fear of totalizing abstractions as of reified concepts; rather than in fixed periods, it is more interested in processes – in 'Postmodern Turn(s)' (Hassan 1987) or 'postmodernization(s)' – and in the way these processes inscribe themselves into particular genres and particular works. I am therefore more interested in the various radical departures of these texts from the fairly stable traditions of previous travel writing than in holding up them up as specimens of postmodernist writing.

For that, I need to sketch briefly what these traditions and conventions are. This in turn requires me to narrow down my field of inquiry from travel writing in general (i.e. from any kind of writing that is about or involves travels or travelling) to the travelogue or 'travel book' as 'the first-person, ostensibly non-fictional narrative of travel' (Thompson 2011: 26). Basic and bare as this definition is, it identifies several structural features from which we can derive heuristic models to help us recognize what is distinctive and different in our three travel books.

**Questionable quests**

Travelogues, to the extent that they go beyond a mere factual report, usually have a plot that perspectivizes the chronological series of events and gives meaning to the locomotion. In the history of travel writing, a number of such plots have been operative across the centuries. These include the journey as, or towards, some ordeal that constitutes a rite of passage; the pilgrimage or quest in search of some totemistic object as its _telos_ ('end' or 'goal'), enshrining a _summum bonum_ ('highest good' or ideal); the journey as a metamorphosis or rebirth of the self, a finding of oneself by losing oneself in the Other; the circular journey, as in Ulysses' _periplous_ circumnavigation of the coasts; or, finally, the homecoming, Homer's _nostos_ , which normally entails a spiral of increased awareness. Even in postmodern travel writing, these traditional models of emplotment are still evident, albeit often in a state of suspension, functioning as a background foil to set off the various deviations from them which destabilize or disrupt their teleology.

Brinkmann's _Rom, Blicke_ , for example, does not quite follow any of these basic plots.1 Its title may suggest to the German reader the great canonical model of German travel writing, Goethe's _Italienische Reise_ ( _Italian Journey_ ) undertaken 1786–88 and published 1816–17; more generally it evokes the long history of German enthusiasm for the treasures of Roman antiquity and Renaissance art, with its wistful yearning ( _Sehnsucht_ ) for Italy as a kind of Promised Land, an alluring Other liberating and transforming the Northern soul in Southern sensuousness and _dolce fa' niente_ ('delicious idleness'). Yet Brinkmann's book denies all that. It is not any desire or yearning of his own that sends him on a Roman quest; rather, he is sent, almost against his own intentions, by a distinguished cultural institution, the Deutsche Akademie Rom, which hosts promising German writers, composers and artists at its splendid Villa Massimo. The programme is conceived in the true Goethean spirit; however, it does not work for Brinkmann. Far from being enchanted with or transformed by Rome, he hates both the ruins of its former splendour and contemporary Rome and the artistic community at Villa Massimo. He avoids as much as possible all traces of Goethe's cultural quests across the Eternal City. The Arcadia which Goethe had been seeking and finding in Rome and Italy appears to him from the first encounter as a 'fairly run-down arcadia and a kind of limbo' (Brinkmann 1979: 16). His trajectories across Rome are fairly random and follow no cultural canon. His urban _periplous_ does not re-visit the glory that was Rome, but places like the banal Piazza Bologna with its noisy traffic, bank buildings, and its enormous and shrill posters, or some sordid side-street along a cemetery where prostitutes serve their clients. The dialogue with Goethe is insistent, yet remains negative throughout, a hatchet job on a great classical model of travel writing. This results in an anti- _Italienische Reise_ , which turns the praise of Italy into a relentless diatribe, and its educational ethos into iconoclastic sarcasm. And when Brinkmann, at the end of his book, leaves Rome, it is not to return home to Cologne enriched by the experience. Rather, he continues further south, to Olevano Romano, the little town high up in the Sabine Mountains. Here, his isolation throws him back upon himself. Drawn increasingly to the Romantic landscape paintings of German artists who, in the early nineteenth century, sought refuge in the town from the malaria-ridden Roman summers, what Brinkmann discovers in these paintings is an anticipation of his own inner vision of bleakness, decay, constriction, and resignation. A homecoming, perhaps, but with what a vengeance!

Chatwin's plot, though, _is_ a quest. This is established in the first of its ninety-seven chapters and frames them, providing the narrative with a _telos_ and the book with a sense of closure. What Chatwin – or rather the 'I' of the narrator–traveller – pursues is some kind of Golden Fleece in a Colchis–Patagonia at the edges of civilization and barbarism. His fleece, however, is not really golden; it is the replacement for a piece of hairy brontosaurus skin brought back from a cave in Patagonia by his grandmother's cousin, 'Charley Milward the Sailor' (a latter-day Sindbad). This family treasure, long since lost, made Patagonia a place of fantasy for the young Chatwin, or so we are told. However, there is a marked downgrading from the mythical heights of the Golden Fleece to a brontosaurus skin, and this downgrading continues when it turns out that the skin can't be that of a brontosaurus but is that of a mylodon or giant sloth. The quest thus becomes steadily more modest. It is, however, undertaken successfully, albeit with some important qualifications. Chatwin ultimately reaches the cave and retrieves some last mylodon remains – their turds! Religious chanting surges over this moment of epiphany or apotheosis – provided by a bunch of nuns on an outing. The topos of questing, the sublime elevation of the moment in which the hero enters the realm of the _summum bonum_ , is thus alluded to and, at the same time, ironically deflated and emptied. There is no concomitant illumination of the quester, no initiation into a more exalted or deeper mode of being; the book peters out in four anti-climactic chapters of death, folly, and disillusion.

The journey in Tabucchi's _Notturno indiano_ also begins as a quest with a seemingly well-defined _telos_. As the story enfolds, however, things become more complicated, as there are actually two destinations and aims to his journey across India from Bombay to Madras and on to Goa. The first to be disclosed is his search for a lost friend, whose traces he follows with the help of letters, personal contacts, maps and a guidebook; a second goal emerges later, in the form of a scholarly project 'to do some research' in 'some archives in Goa' (1988: 57). This project, however, may just be a cover-up for the personal quest. The travelling narrator remains rather reticent about his ultimate aims, and when asked directly if he is on a 'pilgrimage' he denies this but instantly qualifies his statement: 'I said no. Or rather, yes, but not in the religious sense of the word. If anything, it was a private journey, how could I put it, it was only looking for clues' (1988: 35). Both the tracing of the lost friend and the search for historical documents may be no more than a cover-up for yet another aim, vaguely and guardedly hinted at in the last chapter. Here, in conversation with a travelling woman photographer, Tabucchi gives as the rationale for his journey: 'Well, let's suppose I'm writing a book' (1988: 104). The first two quests end inconclusively and abortively; as to the third quest, our sense of whether it was successful or not depends on whether we take the book we have just read as the book referred to by the traveller and thus as the fulfilment of his intention. The volume certainly concludes 'That's it, the book is finished' (1988: 113). But even if we do this it remains unclear whether the intention to produce a book was there from the beginning or whether it emerged as an afterthought in the face of the failure of his initial quests. Either way, the ending does not suggest a successful penetration or initiation into the mystery that is India. Nor does it adumbrate a homecoming enriched by the experience. Like the endings of _Rom, Blicke_ , and _In Patagonia_ , it undermines the marked sense of an ending we have come to expect from traditional travel writing and with that its claims of a conclusive, all-embracing meaning.

**Criss-crossing borders**

Travellers, the protagonists of travelogues, usually cover considerable distances and cross far-away borders. This is true of all our three travellers, though it is perhaps surprising that it is Brinkmann who gives the most vivid and detailed account of actual border crossing. After all, with him the distance to be overcome is the smallest both in terms of geographical miles and cultural difference; a rail journey across the Alps in the early 1970s can hardly be considered as an adventurous challenge. Still, while Chatwin drops his traveller with little ado in Buenos Aires after an introductory chapter set in England and while Tabucchi launches his reader into India from the very first page, Brinkmann describes the rail journey and his arrival in Rome in fulsome detail as part of two long letters. This gives him ample space to show how unimpressed he is with the sublimity of the Alps, which had fired the imagination of generations of Romantic travellers from all over Europe. Thus his journey, from the beginning, defies all expectations of entering a Goethean arcadia, leading him instead deeper and deeper into an Italy marked by a 'general squalidness' (Brinkmann 1979: 14). In a way, Brinkmann never crosses the boundary between the two cultures. He arrives without any knowledge of Italian and soon decides not to bother with learning the language of a people as vulgar and sordid as the Italians. He gets by, as the Romans are used to German tourists making little attempt at communicating with them. And anyway, the Rome he inhabits is framed by German institutions such as the Goethe Institute and the extra-territorial Villa Massimo of the Deutsche Akademie Rom. Out of place in both the Italian and this German Rome, it is a measure of his alienation that almost his only communication is with his wife and three friends back home, as he ventilates his increasing exasperation with the sordidness of Rome and the vulgarity of the Romans in long, diary-like letters and phone-calls. The more devastating his Roman anti-Romance becomes, the more his nostalgia for the North increases, and for his home in Cologne and his birthplace Vechta, a proverbially dull small town in Lower Saxony.

This double displacement gives his account of Italy a Swiftian _saeva indignatio_ ('savage indignation'), as displayed in the rejections both of Goethe's and his Romantic fellow-travellers' Arcadian vision and also of the Italian and Roman realities he glimpses. This uneasy, in-between stance shows also in his reading during these months. Immersing himself in German literature, though nothing with an Italian connection, he returns repeatedly to one German expressionist writer from the North, the Hamburg organist, dramatist, and novelist Hans Henny Jahnn, whose struggle against an ethos of sublimation and sexual inhibitions has a Nordic heroic flavour which empowers Brinkmann's own violent prose. He ignores Italian literature totally – with one exception: the writings of the Renaissance radical friar, poet, and philosopher of infinite worlds Giordano Bruno. Burnt by the Romans in 1600, Bruno was, like Brinkmann, a perpetual outsider and the German accordingly pays homage to him at his monument in Campo de' Fiori.

In _Rom, Blicke_ the traveller crossing, or failing to cross, borders is paramount. In Chatwin's _In Patagonia_ the crossing and criss-crossing of borders is largely delegated to the 'travellees', the long series of Patagonians he encounters on his way, who sidetrack him to tell their stories. There are dozens of such life-stories which, together, make up about two-thirds of this _omnium gatherum_ of 'Patagonica', Chatwin's amazing collection of the unexpected, odd, and bizarre – and bizarre particularly in terms of boundary-straddling, hybrid conjunctions of the heterogeneous. There is for instance Bill Philips, raising Aberdeen Angus with the help of a Basque farmhand, surrounded by Italian neighbours and reading Turgenev's _Sportsman's Sketches_ ; the young pianist Anselmo, of Italian-German descent playing Beethoven's _Pathétique_ and Chopin's mazurkas and accompanying a Welsh community's singing of John Wesley's hymns on a harmonium; there are Boers and Lithuanians and Castilian monarchists, North American bandits and Galician anarchists. Here the traveller's movement is interrupted again and again to the point of disruption; the one story explodes into literally hundreds of stories related to each other through similarity rather than contiguity. Embedded sub-quests intrude everywhere, involving ever new crossings of boundaries such as the trip to Paris to find out about the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia or the investigation into the life and death of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The 'arid wastes' (Chatwin 1977: 6) of Patagonia, for Charles Darwin unaccountably irresistible in their emptiness, in the absence of everything, are anything but empty and monotonous; they are filled with a heterogeneous collection of people, stories, and texts. Chatwin's own journey frequently gives way to the stories of previous travellers in Patagonia: for instance, the stories of, and about, Charley Milward, taken from his unpublished notebooks and writings, and of Thomas Bridges, compiler of a Fuegan Indian dictionary that never got into print. The accounts of early modern voyagers such as John Davis, Thomas Cavendish, Francis Drake, and Magellan are also extensively interwoven, as well as those of nineteenth-century explorers such as Darwin. What most of these stories share is a complex of motifs related to wandering and vagrancy, migration and exile. With few exceptions, they are stories of disillusionment and frustration, of failing to realize dreams, finding a new home, adapting oneself to the natural and political circumstances of Patagonia. Their constant criss-crossing of borders leaves them in a state of in-betweenness and that is also where the traveller and the reader find themselves – never in Patagonia, but always at one and the same time in both Patagonia and the rest of the world. Any stable essence of 'Patagonianness', as often invoked in the texts of previous travellers, is nowhere in sight; the traveller and his reader seem lost in a cabinet of curiosities, a hall of mirrors, and echo-chamber at the margins of the world.

The borderlines in Tabucchi's _Notturno Italiano_ appear to be much clearer, though the musical or painterly metaphor of its title suggests the dissolving boundaries and soft edges of dusk. His traveller's journeys move across multiple bifurcations: between occident and orient, and also between subdivisions in each of these zones. The occident embraces both Italy and Portugal, the provenance, respectively, of the traveller and of the friend whose paths he traces; the oriental Other is an India colonized by both the British (Bombay, Madras) and the Portuguese (Goa). The traveller and author's Italian background, however, is hardly ever highlighted, and the culture with which he chiefly identifies is Portuguese. Thus a long discussion in chapter VI with the Director of the Theosophical Society of Madras about European interest in Indian philosophy and religion mentions Friedrich Schlegel and Hermann Hesse, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Annie Besant, before finally focusing on the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa – the great modernist, on whom Tabucchi's scholarly fame as his editor, translator, and interpreter is based. And when we finally see the traveller at his archival work at the Goan library, he engages with colonial Portuguese travel writing about India.

This Lusitanized Italian criss-crosses India from North to South and East to West in search of Portuguese presences in India, among them – and foremost – his lost Portuguese friend. The further Tabucchi proceeds in this quest, however, the more his friend comes to seem his alter ego or _Doppelgänger_ ; in Conradian terms his secret sharer, in Pessoan terms one of his heteronyms. The India he travels through, though varying considerably from place to place in its historical and religious connotations, takes on an increasingly undifferentiated and blurred identity. Even in the beginning it seems a maze in which one gets easily lost: 'A lot of people lose their way in India', an Indian cardiologist tells Tabucchi: 'it's a country specially made for that' (1988: 13). The India Tabucchi perceives is, as he learns from a Jaim boy, _maya_ , 'only the outward appearance of the world', 'only illusion' (1988: 67), an image falsified and distorted by our literary memories and fantasy. What we end up with is a 'black hole' – though not the Black Hole of Calcutta, but that of modern astronomy (1988: 91). Far from emerging as an integral and comprehensively defined whole, the Other here turns into a void into which the self disappears – quite literally, as we will show later when discussing Tabucchi's highly self-reflective account of the encounter between self and Other.

Thus the protagonists of postmodernist travel writing not only cross but criss-cross borders. This see-saw movement destabilizes not only borderlines in its dialectic of identity and difference, but also the subject position of the traveller which, in Tabucchi's case, even more so than with Brinkmann and Chatwin, is taken to its vanishing point.

**Faction / fiction**

The travelogue or travel book is, we said at the outset, an 'ostensibly non-fictional narrative of travel'. The guarded definition suggests that there is a problem here, that the distinction between fact and fiction is not always a clear-cut one. To what extent is the travel book really non-fictional or only ostensibly so in an attempt to camouflage and make us forget its inescapable fictionality? Or, to change perspective, to what extent and how is its ostentation of non-fictionality a literary device to obscure the art that went into the careful crafting of the literary text? With traditional travelogues, such questions remain in the background to be pondered by literary theorists. For many postmodern texts like ours, however, the fact–fiction divide is foregrounded and showcased, to become a crucial issue or concern for both text and reader.

Brinkmann goes out of his way to foreground the non-fictional status of _Rom, Blicke_. This begins with choosing the classical narrative situation of travel books, that of the first-person narrator who insists on the autobiographical identity of traveller and author. Of all the standard formats of first-person narration in travel writing – the diary, the letter home, the retrospective account – he chooses the one which roots his account most firmly in a manifest and tangible reality. The epistolary form involves a coherent, precisely marked chronology of dates and topography of places; it emphasizes the materiality of the medium, i.e. the writer's writing of the letters in specific situations as part of the story he tells, and gestures towards really existing addressees whose concrete circumstances of life motivate the writing of the letters. In _Rom, Blicke_ , the letters and postcards we read are not only ostensibly, but demonstratively real: spanning 14 November 1972 to 9 January 1973, they coincide in their entirety with those actually written home by Brinkmann.2 The printed book presents these letters with hardly any editorial intervention, and often reproduces them visually, so that the volume becomes like the original letters a montage or collage of texts and images, of cuttings, cut-ups, maps, postcards, tickets, handwritten script, sketches, or photographs taken by the author (see Egger 2006: 129–133). Brinkmann's documentation of his experience of Italy thus has the solid materiality of a _Materialalbum_ or scrapbook; this in turn enhances the emphatic visuality of his prose, which is already highlighted in the title (where _Blicke_ signifies 'glances' or 'glimpses'). Indeed, unpremeditated glimpses are at the centre of many of the letters. He jots them down with a minimal distance between perception and writing in what he calls his 'Sekundenbeschreibungen' or 'descriptions in, and of, seconds' (Brinkmann 1979: 282). The book is a collection of such textual and visual 'single impressions, cut ups' (1979: 94), the result of a photographic gaze, which, Brinkmann feels, makes him 'awake and alert' (1979: 135) while at the same time 'disintegrating all totality and panorama into particulars' (1979: 184). His main model here is the Beat poetry and prose of William S. Burroughs, whom he frequently invokes in his book and whose work he had popularized with young German writers, most prominently in the influential anthology _ACID_ (1969). Brinkmann might, indeed, be considered the German Burroughs (albeit without the drugs and the polymorphous sexuality), pursuing a style of raw immediacy by rejecting everything ostensibly literary and fictional – in his case all the textualized versions of Italy from Goethe onwards with their literary finish and well-made plots, their rituals of celebrating a time-transcending cultural heritage, and their totalizing claims of comprehending the other.

Thus Brinkmann, who had previously published the novel _Keiner weiß mehr_ ( _Nobody Knows Anymore_ , 1968), resolutely frames his new travel book as non-fictional through recurrent meta-narrative reflections, whilst also setting it up as a book which he had never planned to write, but one that writes itself, as it were. Arriving in Rome with the plan to use his Fellowship at Villa Massimo to write fiction or a radio play, he finds himself writing endless letters. More than halfway through the book, it occurs to him that his correspondence has the potential to become something else: 'Surely, a book is offering itself here to be written, with its scenes and insights occasionally to be reshuffled into order' (1979: 274). Later we see him at work with his 'great Rome album, gluing together cover images, postcards, notes' (1979: 308). And it is only towards the end of the narrative that its writer begins to realize what his writing has been all about, 'namely to put myself into words, and not only to describe what is there' (1979: 410). What we witness reading this travel book, therefore, is the performative self-fashioning of a writer in his engagement with an Other that can only appear to him as 'posthistorical' (1979: 392). The effect this has on the reader goes beyond that of the usual autobiographical fictions of travelogues and even beyond the _effet de réel_ of conventional realism: it aims at a new kind of literary hyper-realism.

Chatwin's _In Patagonia_ could not be more different in this respect. Rather than playing down its literary and fictional status, it is a highly complex and self-conscious _mise en scène_ and _mise en abîme_ of the conventional devices of travel writing. Though apparently non-fictional, it is far from ostensibly non-literary. There is, as with Brinkmann, a seemingly autobiographical traveller-narrator. In contrast to Brinkmann's, however, Chatwin's textualized 'I' is far too reticent to insist on his non-fictional status. Little biographical information about the author is given and where it does appear, as in the introductory section, it might as well be part of a fiction. Once the quest is under way, the narrating and travelling 'I' largely recedes into the background. In many chapters he does not feature at all; in others he is present merely as listener and observer, or as a partner in dialogues where his role is reduced to that of drawing out his interlocutor. Nowhere does he ventilate his own opinions the way Brinkmann does so vociferously. He is a pose rather than a subject; his is a brilliant self-stylization rather than the self-reflective depth and emotional richness of subjectivity.

Chatwin also renounces the precise and verifiable chronology of dates that in other travelogues often affirms, or at least suggests, the real-life status of the narration. There is an overall chronological sequence to the ninety-seven sections, but this temporal framework is criss-crossed by the widely divergent chronologies of the embedded Patagonian journeys of the past. Some of these journeys are fictional, being drawn from writers like Homer, Dante, Poe, or Coleridge; others ostensibly real, being taken from Renaissance voyages of discovery, from Darwin's expedition and from more recent personal memoirs. What stands out much more than the chronological sequence of Chatwin's encounters in Patagonia is the art of composition whereby Chatwin creates links of comparison and contrast across different narrative threads. The climax of his intertextual method comes in the numerically central section 49. Here, Bernal Diaz's account of how the Conquistadores in Mexico felt as if they had stepped into the sixteenth-century romance of the _Book of Amadis_ triggers off the parallel hypothesis of Magellan interpreting the lands at the Straits and its inhabitants in the light of another late medieval romance, _Primaleon of Greece_ , with its giant monster the Great Patagon. This leads us, via Richard Eden's Elizabethan translation of Pigafetta's account of Magellan's voyage to Shakespeare's _Tempest_ and its anti-hero Caliban for whom Chatwin now claims a 'Patagonian ancestry'. Such a high degree of intertextuality destabilizes and disperses both the traveller as a subject and the culture he explores in an echo-chamber of texts (see Pfister 1993). It turns him into a reader searching for textual traces – for the traces of Patagonia in the European and North American cultural memory, and for the traces of European and North American cultures in Patagonia. For this reason, later travellers who retrace Chatwin's journey and take him to task for getting things wrong have failed to understand the kind of book they are dealing with – a perfectly crafted work of literary meta-fiction about myth-making, not a non-fictional guide across Patagonia. Those who accuse Chatwin of 'Crimes against Nonfiction' (Allen 2013) similarly wrong an author who, in this work at least, never signed such a contract.

The ambiguities of fact and fiction and the thinness of the dividing line between the two also puzzle the reader of Tabucchi's _Notturno Indiano._ If with Chatwin we move from faction to fiction, here we travel in the opposite direction, as what has been marketed as 'un romanzo', 'a novel' or 'ein Roman' (and turned into a film by Alain Corneau in 1989), makes striking use of the authenticating conventions of the travelogue. This begins with the first-person narrator, who greatly resembles the author or rather what is generally known about him: both are Lusitanized Italians who have travelled to India, both are connoisseurs of travel books (Gumbert 1995: 53, 56f.) and Fernando Pessoa enthusiasts. The apparent non-fictionality of the text is further emphasized in the tabulated 'Index of the Places in this Book', which sometimes gives full addresses, and through reference to the conventional paraphernalia of travelogues, such as the use of a guidebook (in this case, the _Lonely Planet's_ 1981 guide to India, still widely used by travellers). Tabucchi pursues such authenticating strategies even beyond the limits of his book: three years after _Notturno indiano_ he published a West–Eastern philosophical correspondence between himself and the librarian of the Theosophical Society in Madras (Tabucchi 1987). The librarian had appeared in chapter VI of the book and now, having procured himself Tabucchi's book, continues the philosophical debate with the author about the relationship between reality, fiction, and phantasmata. Nameless in the book, he now signs his letters as Xavier Janata Monroy, a name strangely close to the lost friend's name in the book, Xavier Janata Pinto. Tabucchi dovetails his book and the correspondence so neatly, and short-circuits the concessions of fiction and the claims of ostensible truth so perfectly, that the reader remains in a quandary as to the real-life or fictional status of both texts – unless he or she is familiar with the tendency of postmodernist art to showcase the paradoxes of faction and fiction in such self-referential loops that the text becomes an 'impossible object' defying all unequivocal perception (see the incisive reading in Dolfi 1997).

In _Notturno indiano_ these paradoxes become particularly evident in the ending. It keeps in irresolvable suspension whether it is the narrator who traces his lost friend Pinto, or whether the former is actually traced – and written! – by the latter; or indeed, whether the two characters are just mirror images of each other. After all, Pinto is a writer of stories 'about things that didn't work out, about mistakes' (Tabucchi 1988: 20), like the narrator who at the end actually gives to the friend his own name. The indecidability of their identity or difference, within a book playing so ostentatiously with reality and fiction, becomes ultimately an apt metaphor or _mise en abîme_ of the ambiguous status between realist travelogue and fanciful fiction.

The three travel books discussed here are, as we have seen, in some regards very different. Yet for all their striking differences in terms of plot construction, the negotiation of borders, and strategies of authentication or fictionalization, these texts stand together in being even more strikingly different from traditional travelogues. Each book in its own way subverts key conventions of the travelogue by showcasing them and taking them to extremes. Calling these processes 'postmodernization' cannot be more than a mere shorthand term, but it may be useful to take the travel book out of its ghetto and align it more closely to an important current in contemporary aesthetics and aesthetic practices. This current has given a new lease of life to the novel, prematurely proclaimed dead in the 1960s, and it has similarly infused travel writing with a new intellectual vitality and vibrancy.

**Notes**

1 _Rom, Blicke_ is yet to be translated into English; there is, however, a French translation by Martine Rémond, _Rome, Regards_ (Paris, Meudon: Quidam, 2008). Where I have quoted in English from the book, the translation is my own.

2 Only about a hundred lines are deleted for personal or legal reasons; see the publisher's 'Editorische Notiz' at the end of _Rom, Blicke_.

**Select bibliography**

Allen, S. (2013) ' _In Patagonia_ in Patagonia', _The Paris Review Daily_ , 14 May. Online. Available at: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/05/14/in-patagonia-in-patagonia/ (accessed 12 December 2014).

Brinkmann, R.D. (1979) _Rom, Blicke_ , Frankfurt a.M.: Rowohlt.

Chatwin, B. (1977) _In Patagonia_ , London: Jonathan Cape.

Dolfi, A. (1997) 'Tabucchi e il viaggio illusione e specularità', _Italies_ 1: 161–182. Online. Available at: http://italies.revues.org/3436 (accessed 12 December 2014).

Egger, I. (2006) _Italienische Reisen. Wahrnehmung und Literarisierung von Goethe bis Brinkmann_ , München: Fink.

Fokkema, D. and Bertens H. (eds) (1986) _Approaching Postmodernism_ , Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Foster, H. (ed.) (1983) _The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture_ , Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press.

Foster, H. (ed.) (1985) _Postmodern Culture_ , London: Pluto.

Gumpert, C. (1995) _Conversacìones con Antonio Tabucchi_ , Barcelona: Anagrama.

Hassan, I. (1987) _The Postmodern Turn_ , Columbus, Ohio.

Hutcheon, L. (1988) _A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction_ , London: Routledge.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) _The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge_ , trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pfister, M. (1991) 'How Postmodern is Intertextuality?', in H.F. Plett (ed.), _Intertextuality_ , Berlin and New York: Springer.

Pfister, M. (1993) 'Intertextuelles Reisen, oder: Der Reisebericht als Intertext', in H. Foltinek, W. Riehle and W. Zacharasiewicz (eds), _Tales and 'Their Telling Difference'_ , Heidelberg: Winter.

Pfister, M. (1996) 'Bruce Chatwin and the Postmodernization of the Travelogue', _Literature, Interpretation, Theory_ , 7: 253–267.

Tabucchi, A. (1984) _Notturno italiano_ , Palermo: Sellerio.

Tabucchi, A. (1987) 'La frase che segue è falsa, la frase che precede è vera', in _I volatili del Beato Angelico_ , Palermo: Sellerio.

Tabucchi, A. (1988) _Indian Nocturne_ , trans. T. Parks, London: Chatto and Windus.

Thompson, C. (2011) _Travel Writing_ , Abingdon: Routledge.

Waugh, P. (ed.) (1992) _Postmodernism: A Reader_ , London: Edward Arnold.

Travel Blogs

_Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas_

Frequently considered in its relation to genres like the diary or journal, the blog or 'weblog' is a personally orientated and chronologically ordered form of serial online representation. One of the earliest Internet-specific mediums, blogging is now one of the most well- established, recognizable, and diverse genres of online communication (Blood 2000; Rosenberg 2009). A ubiquitous contemporary mode that covers a spectrum of uses from the public and political to the private and personal, blogging is also a diverse media form. Though still recognizably a text-based mode, characterized by discrete entries or 'posts' in which users narrate subjective reflection or commentary, the speed and ease of mobile technologies and the accessibility and prevalence of phone cameras has seen photographs become a central feature of the blog and the video-log, or vlog, has emerged as another distinct branch of the medium. A distinct sub-genre within the larger 'blogosphere', drawing on all the media just outlined, is the travel blog, which enables travellers and tourists to record and communicate their experiences in words and images accessible online. These travel blogs offer an almost limitless archive of travel information with a very broad reach. But this archive may also be extremely fragile and impermanent; like blogs more generally, moreover, travel blogs are often linked to the corporate commercialized functions of the Internet as marketplace.

Jeff Greenwald, a professional travel journalist, claims to have 'uploaded the first travel blog post ever made on the Internet' in 1994. The 1,600-word post written in Oaxaca's rustic _zocalo_ (central square) not only details his observations of an atmospheric Mexican location, but also reflects on the equally exotic experience of uploading to the Internet while 'on the road'. This 'maddening but ultimately successful feat' took three hours over dial-up technology at the local Tourist Bureau. 'It was the beginning of an artform', says Greenwald, 'or obligation, or plague' (Greenwald 2014). However, travel blogs emerged generically, and on a mass scale, only in the very late 1990s, alongside the capacity of travellers to access the mobile Internet and in line with broader cultural shifts that have seen personal, autobiographical self-expression become an increasing feature of communication in online contexts.

The travel blog is part of a larger category of online discourse based around a personal narrative of travel that incorporates and encompasses forms such as the travel diary, but also includes other categories of frequently updated autobiographical representation. The travel blog in this understanding extends to non-typographic modes such as the YouTube video as well as visual, photo-based platforms like Flickr or Instagram and embraces diverse forms such as the travel review or personal essay. Some travellers who narrate travel experiences online might not consider themselves to be actively blogging at all: sites like Tumblr or Facebook, which allow for microblogging (very short forms of blogging – written posts, messages, photos or video shares) can similarly become de facto modes for documenting and sharing travel experience. Many would-be bloggers now use these microblogging sites to satisfy the desire to document and share travel experiences. Given the variety of online modes in this context, the travel blogger is a subject position that can be taken up more or less directly depending on context. The traveller who microblogs on Facebook will have a different sense of what this activity is, and who it is for (for example, an audience of family and friends), than the traveller who actively sets up a dedicated blog account, which may potentially reach a wider readership of both familiar and unknown readers.

Though highly diverse, travel blogs do have a recognizable 'classic' blog form. Early incarnations were limited by the available technology to text-centric narrative, but contemporary blogs incorporate a diversity of media, particularly photography and video: the generic style here is almost always an 'illustrated' account. Because the blog narrative is one that accumulates over time, serialization is also important. Importantly, the travel blog is also a located medium – most travel bloggers post 'on the road' and this immersed aspect of the genre is significant. Much like the travel diarist, the travel blogger is keeping notes for those who may follow this way again, though the capacity of the mobile Internet means such relay now happens much faster, ostensibly in real time. Indeed, time and date tracking as well as location identification are functions that many travel blog hosting sites automate, allowing travellers to focus on content-sharing rather than location specifics. This function of the blog is important because it is also a narrative formed through accretion. Blog posts accumulate over time to form a narrative that might otherwise seem disconnected or fragmented, since its trajectory is structured without the benefit of hindsight. The effect is of a more immediate and 'current' site of engagement for the reader: a key appeal of the blog is its seeming immediacy. For the reader, the prospect here is of entering straight into the blogger's own most recent experience and (in the specific context of the travel blog) connecting to the most recent part of a journey.

The diaristic style is still the most recognizable and popular kind of travel blog. Ultimately, however, the travel blog is less usefully demarcated as a _form_ than as a rhetorical _mode_. Travel bloggers employ a range of media in order to frame a predominantly subjective account of travel experience. That is, the appeal of the travel blog is tied to its authenticity as a first-person, eyewitness account and to the author's persona as an honest autobiographer of their experience. Although professional travel bloggers have an increasingly visible presence online, by and large travel blogging is understood as an amateur activity in which experience is the ultimate authority. In contexts like the travel review, an amateur status is even more desirable, signalling a sought-after 'independent' perspective and circumventing any potential conflicts of interest in the travel blog's account of destinations and services. Ultimately, however, the subjective nature of the account simultaneously both confers and undermines authority, as in travel writing more generally.

In offering this exploration of the travel blog, we consider some of the ways in which travel writing online takes up the personal subjective point of view and what the consequences of this point of view might be. We argue that travel blogging is a sub-genre in constant flux. New media platforms, particularly microblogging modes, have brought significant shifts and new opportunities for writing about travel, particularly for the amateur travel writer who has arguably now become the central figure in this mode.

**Form, audience and professionalization**

In its simplest terms, the travel blog functions as a diary for the contemporary traveller – a method for sharing the experience of travelling that is also an archive in motion. In this, it takes on various recognizable features that link it to the well-established print tradition of the travel journal. However, a blog is not simply a diary, though there are evident discursive links between the forms (Rak 2005). Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd (2004) argue for a conceptualization of the blog based on its 'social action': the blog is best understood in relation to its social, cultural and historical uses and one way in which both critics and users have discussed blogs is as a form of the diary; different mediums, print diaries and blogs share common rhetorical features. Both are forms of contiguous serial representation, claiming a first-person and personal point of view, and accumulating structure (and to a certain degree, meaning) over time. Crucially, the blog as diary offers a representation that is assumed to be autobiographical and that is authorized by claims to authentic experience.

As a form of travel writing, the immediacy of the blog has particular audience appeal. The convention of posting regular 'updates' allows a blogger to correspond in real-time, involving their audience in the rhythm of a travel experience or providing access to the latest and most current information about a location. While immediacy is a key appeal of the blog form, it is also valuable as a public and easily accessible archive. The function of the travel blog as an eyewitness informational resource here references uses of diary in print traditions. Diary scholar Thomas Mallon observes:

The earliest travel diaries were kept less for reasons of sentiment than geography. If you were exploring someplace nobody else had been to, you'd better be able to tell your sovereign how you got there. A diary would be the richest supplement to any maps drawn along the way.

(Mallon 1985: 42)

In terms of its rhetoric, associating the travel blog with the travel diary draws on certain stereotypical assumptions about diaries as private, subjective modes and this has consequences for constructions of this discourse as authentic and honest. However, blogs are also natively digital mediums and they employ registers of representation that have their own conventions within online spaces. For example, blog hosting platforms like Travelblog (Travelblog.org) promote the uploading and sharing of photos and videos, as well as geographical plotting (which is often automated), as key and ubiquitous functions of their site. However, while documentation is an important function of the Travelblog site, it is the interactive context of travel blogging that users and audiences seem most drawn to. Travel blogging is a social activity, one that connects the traveller to an intimate audience – friends and family back home – as well as to a potential audience of fellow, future, or vicarious travellers.

Centralized blogging platforms like Travelblog promote travel blogging as an amateur activity that anyone can participate in, and that anyone can access. Travelblog, for example, promises: 'Even your grandmother can read this journal'. Depending on the blogger, this prospect may be reassuring, or it could be intimidating. A blogger whose sense of audience includes their grandmother might be expected to present a certain iteration of self, one that is sensitive to family propriety or other expectations. The fact that online spaces are available for a performance of self as traveller is relevant to thinking about blogs. However, most users on Travelblog, at least demonstrate a sense of audience that is less likely to include their grandmother and more likely to be directed at fellow or aspirational travellers. There is a construction of community here that is significant for how the mode is practiced and understood.

As hubs for bloggers and their readers, blog hosting sites have a significant role in shaping the expectations of travel blog practice. The functions offered and promoted on these sites – photo and video sharing, location plotting – thus shape the travel blog and influence user expectations as to what it should look like. As a consequence, the template form of many travel blog sites standardizes the ways in which twenty-first-century travellers narrate and display their travel experiences, for all that travel bloggers are usually seen (and see themselves) as valued informants offering 'authentic' accounts of destinations. Moreover, the ubiquitous presence of advertising and commercial interests on these travel blog sites demonstrates the collision of experience and commerce that defines the twenty-first- century travel industry. Mallon's anecdote of the sovereign for whom the travel journal is kept, the instantiation of a surveilling audience, takes on a new dimension in this context. There is a tension between travel blogs that are primarily the personal narrative of independent travellers and travel blogs by freelance writers/travellers for whom blogging is a professional pursuit. The implicit value of the personal travel blog lies in its presentation of an independent, subjective and autobiographical point of view. Audiences who read these blogs are either invested in the author as a friend or family member or are seeking an unaffiliated perspective on what can be extensively marketed travel destinations. Most professional travel bloggers, such as Kate McCulley from _Adventurous Kate_ (http://www.adventurouskate.com/blog), similarly insist that the travel blogger's authority in large part derives from their status as an independent observer. They therefore usually disclose any affiliate status and most explicitly articulate an ethical commitment to disclose if a post has been sponsored in any way. The independent and often amateur status of the blogger thus becomes a key sign of the blog's authenticity and an important aspect of these sites for those interested in seeking out products or destinations free of advertising 'spin'; yet arguably, this apparent authenticity and independence can become a valuable commodity and rhetorical device for corporations.

As travellers have always done historically, contemporary travel bloggers narrate an experience in order to make visible a journey and provide evidence of its detail to others. However, contemporary travellers are rarely lacking in basic facts about even very exotic locations, and so the travel blog serves largely to provide subjective or illustrative detail. What is new here, and what readers seek, is correlation: how well do individual experiences correlate to, for example, a tourist brochure or commercial advertisement? As the form increasingly becomes professionalized, the assumption of the travel blogger as independent persona comes under pressure. One of the key ethical challenges in this context is negotiating the vested interests of travel companies or other organizations that seek to organize the experience of travel bloggers and to influence what and how they write. This is a marketing tactic that can have lucrative rewards for blogger and company alike. Nonetheless, while independence is assumed, a blogger who does not endorse a product or experience may subsequently find it hard to otherwise sustain their travel (McCulley 2012). Moreover, professional travel bloggers are also obliged to produce a certain kind of travel story, one that is inevitably more 'literary' than travel blogs in other contexts might aspire to be. That is, while an audience of some kind is always implied, even for the most diaristic of travel bloggers, the professional blogger must also provide an affective story, one that will either inspire their audiences' own adventure or prove a correlate. Here the emphasis is less on the detail of travel, the logistics and facts, than on the narration of subjective, seemingly 'authentic' experience.

The professional travel blogger thus navigates a fine line between independence and affiliation and this is similar to how other kinds of review experts operate – for example, in food writing. Most professional travel bloggers abide by an unregulated ethical code. The blogger's own desire to preserve and market an independent and unbiased point of view is key here. Conversely, travel companies will market bloggers who promote destinations they want to market. Because user-generated content is so important to corporations (and their customers) who seek to harness the apparent authenticity and authority of voluntary feedback, many professional blog sites veer away from travel literature and into travel reviewing. This aspect of travel blogging is emphasized in the interconnected nature of online narrative, which is implicitly a matter of document and broadcast – blogging now is highly social-networked. The travel blog, then, implicitly functions as a travel review, something advertisers and tourist boards, among others, seek to capitalize on. An example is the highly successful Tourism Australian campaign 'Best Jobs in the World', which has run since 2009. This campaign selects 'ambassadors' for a series of 'dream' Australia-based jobs including 'Taste Master', 'Tassie Devil Wrangler' and 'Chief Funster'. Candidates submit a short video promoting their skills and a shortlist is posted online (www.tourism.australia.com/campaigns/Global-Youth-about-the-campaign). The winners blog their journey on a dedicated 'Best jobs' website, which is photo-rich and comprises a capsule biography of the blogger, their itinerary and various strategic invitations: 'Want to learn more about Queensland?' enquires a sidebar on the Queensland-based 'Park Ranger' blog.

Ultimately, it is the travel blogger's subjective point of view that is both the appeal of these narratives and the source of their authority. Yet the blogger's independence is inevitably often in tension with the kinds of external pressures that come into play when autobiography and marketing co-exist. These tensions are also apparent in the online travel review, a genre which we would argue constitutes another influential and highly visible mode of travel writing in the early twenty-first century.

**Reviewing as travel blogging**

One of the most prolific contemporary modes of travel writing is the online travel review – another mode that puts the non-professional writer and user-generated content centre-stage. These reviews are part of a long tradition of reviewing, occurring across many different cultural domains such as film and literature. Thus travel reviews are anchored within review discourse and owe much to these traditions in terms of information dissemination, critical judgement, descriptive language and attempts at objectivity (although the latter inevitably and unapologetically fall into subjectivity). However, we want to suggest that travel reviewing has also become a new mode of travel blogging. Online travel reviewing now owes much to the styles and methods of microblogging: a tendency towards short, autobiographically-inspired posts drawn from everyday experiences of travel. Reviews are dated and located. The travel review locates the self within the travel site; most reviews are short 'posts' which may be continuous or linked with other posts by the same author. Authors have profiles and these profiles provide a snapshot of all of the author's reviews in one location. When considered together we can read these posts as blog-style, multimedia, interactive texts.

Much has been written about the rise of the amateur reviewer and the potential pitfalls of this development. Some critics have warned that the proliferation and accessibility of non-professional reviews on the Internet would spell the death of professional reviewers (the traditional gatekeepers of culture), thereby resulting in a decline in the availability of culturally sanctioned, 'quality' reviews. Of course, this has not happened. But the availability of Internet and social media platforms for non-professional travel reviews undoubtedly reveals, or indeed incites, a widespread desire to write about travel experiences. And there have been many positives to stem from this practice. For example, the rise of the amateur travel writer has resulted in many more sites offering reviews than was previously possible, a broader demographic of writer, and a much wider style of travel writing being evident. These texts have thus become a significant and intriguing contemporary mode for representing travel.

TripAdvisor – the largest consumer-based travel review website – provides a useful case study. TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com) attracts 41.6 million users a month, and features over 50 million reviews of holiday sites and activities worldwide (Cochrane 2011; Gregory 2011). Anyone can join TripAdvisor and add reviews; entries can be made via the main website or via an app using a mobile device. Reviewers can link reviews to their Facebook profile and can log in via Facebook to see what travel narratives their Facebook friends have been posting. Most reviewers write multiple reviews (gaining 'stars' and 'status' the more reviews completed). Thus reviews, when read together, can form an extended narrative or log documenting a travel experience.

Trip Advisor has been embroiled in several controversies. When the site first appeared, many from the travel industry applauded the exciting new development that would allow so-called 'average' people the chance to engage across the globe and share their travel experiences. TripAdvisor and other travel companies benefitted greatly from the crowdsourcing momentum, and from the free labours of enthusiastic and prolific amateur reviewers who are often very astute and creative. More recently, however, many hoteliers have reported the site for the defamatory comments made about their properties. (It is important to note here that hoteliers and others do have the right of reply on the site and this is often exercised.) Others believe the site has become too powerful and is able to make or break a business; the balance of power is shifting to the consumer. Inevitably the reviews are full of 'bewildering contradictions' (Cochrane 2011), both within and between reviews of the same destinations. Another major concern is the accuracy of the reviews, and the extent to which they reflect the 'real' experience of the author and offer a fair representation of that experience. We might also ask, to what standard ought an author be held in this context?

Contextualizing the travel review as a travel blog is enlightening here, because both are forms of narrative in which the personal point of view is highlighted and in which subjective discourse is foregrounded. The author is not obligated to repeat the 'facts' of the situation, they are narrating the facts as they perceive and/or experience them. The many hoteliers or managers who actively respond to reviews is also interesting here. Overwhelmingly, the tactic is to mediate bad reviews with a counter-narrative. Very few hoteliers respond in the same way, or respond at all, to good reviews.

These are all significant issues which have bearing on how we might read the writing within TripAdvisor. However, given the mandate of this chapter, we focus our discussion on how we might read the review texts as a mode of _travel writing_. How might we consider the textuality of these reviews? What themes and styles emerge? We would argue that travel reviews are often and perhaps inevitably framed autobiographically and thus become a mode of life writing (i.e. a first-person representation of life experiences). These texts foreground the individual self and the personal aspects of travel.

Reviews vary in length from one line to a paragraph or two. Digital photography plays an important role in the reviews. Since the technology allows and promotes the inclusion of photographs, many travel reviewers shape their narratives around these visual images. In 2011 there were estimated to be more than six million photographs on TripAdvisor (Cochrane 2011). When writing a travel review the reviewer (leaving aside questions of truth and veracity) structures the review according to his or her own personal experience. The narratives are commonly relational: the author writes about his or her experience in light of evaluating services provided by others, for example, often naming those who provided a positive experience or service. The narrative's anecdotes owe much to contemporary life-writing traditions: they are often confessional, offering personal disclosures of family life, social experience, fears, tastes, annoyances, likes and so forth. For example, these amateur travel writers commonly offer background or context to establish their authority or at least to locate themselves. This does not always seem necessary to the review, but it shows the development of a genre of writing with associated norms of style and practice.

What motivates people to write reviews on TripAdvisor? Paul John Eakin argues that self-representation is something that that most humans have an 'underlying, even unconscious narrative urge' to do (1999: 139). A decade of life-writing scholarship has posited that the twenty-first century is the first-person era (Eakin 1999; Rak 2013). People are well conditioned and inclined to tell personal stories, to testify to experience and record it (Smith and Watson 2010). Travel reviewing adds another variable. The urge to engage in this mode of autobiographical reportage may stem partly from a notion of good citizenship – a notion that sharing your experience will benefit others. The reviewer may have benefitted from reading the reviews of other contributors so there may be a desire to return the favour. There is also a strong emphasis on 'having your say' in twenty-first-century media culture, which enables narratives like these. There is an impulse to share stories, which perhaps connects more generally to participation in social media. And of course there is a strong readership for these amateur travel narratives, which have come to replace traditional, professionally authored, hard copy guides such as _Fodor_ 's and _Lonely Planet_. Readers may perceive a truthfulness and authenticity behind these unpaid, non-professional, everyday contributors to TripAdvisor which contrasts with their preconceptions of professional reviewers who might have had their trips paid for in return for a review. As an act of autobiography, these review logs draw attention to a growing interest in information produced at the level of the local and personal, and they demonstrate a new premium attached to information deriving from everyday, ordinary locations.

**Travel blogging: new directions**

Perhaps the most significant observation we have made in this chapter is about authorship. Travel blogs are written by professional, semi-professional and non-professional authors, but it is the latter who have influenced the form most significantly in the twenty-first century. So-called everyday people are able to log their experiences of travel in blog and microblog forms. This aspect of the travel blog mimics a condition of contemporary travel more broadly: travel for pleasure has itself become a common and widely shared experience. Moreover, while professional travel writers certainly bring a literary aesthetic to the travel blog as a genre, generally this is of less interest than their ability to formulate and share an apparently authentic and subjective point of view on their individual experience. Indeed, the amateur and non-aligned citizen has a special authority in this context, a phenomenon demonstrated in the massive popularity of travel review sites, where the 'ordinary' traveller has noticeable cachet.

The travel blog resonates with the earliest forms of travel writing where documentation and evidence are the paramount concern. Moreover, in historical travel diaries and journals, the writer is implicitly conscious of an audience 'back home' to whom their narrative is also partly (if not completely) addressed. In the contemporary context, documentation is also a key function of the personal travel narrative and sites like Travelblog make this overt in the templates for representation that they provide. Increasingly there is an emphasis on visual representation here. If this reflects in part rapidly advancing mobile technology, it is simultaneously perhaps a demonstration of a cultural shift to image rather than text as the primary signifier of authentic experience. But it is also of course a familiar trope of the documentary: photographs, particularly the much-discussed 'selfie', function as evidence that 'I was here'. In the world of travel blogging, being there is the only authority required for reviewing, whether observation or critique: the traveller as consumer is a powerful subject position that travel blogging both facilitates and promotes. Yet while the singular voice and individual point of view is highly significant, one of the most fascinating qualities of travel blogging is its potential for collective representation. Travel reviews encapsulate this prospect neatly. Here a chorus of opinion amasses weight and the single author loses power, whether this is a lone dissenter or a careful respondent such as an hotelier responding to customer criticism.

The travel blog is a rapidly evolving site for exploring key questions around authenticity, authority and personal voice. As a form of travel writing, the mode complicates as well as continues certain assumptions of the genre. The travel blogger, like the travel writer historically, draws authority from their ability to document an experience adequately or evocatively. The latter has become even more important given the democratization of travel, a development that has made even the most exotic destinations comparatively accessible. Moreover, as travel has been opened up to greater numbers and greater diversity of people, narratives that might once have been primarily of interest only to family or friends have become attractive to a wider audience. The travel blog is a potential career path for the would-be travel writer, a public apprenticeship that can produce a transition from amateur to professional, but it is also a crowd-sourced guidebook for the ordinary traveller. The once seductive danger often attached to the journey and to the idea of travel as transformative is moderated here as travellers instinctively seek to minimize risk by taking up routes and experiences (accommodations and restaurants, for example) that already mesh with a well-formed identity and established worldview.

Just as travel loses some of the philosophical potential of journey as self-discovery – the exploration of identity brought about by literally reorientating one's self in a new and challenging location – and as once exotic routes become ever more well-worn and accessible, so the travel blog now enacts a pro forma stability that threatens some of the individuality such sites originally traded on. The travel review similarly risks standardization; moreover, as bad reviews (revealing that all is not as advertised, or worse) are quickly countermanded by rebuttal, review sites become a series of well-rehearsed allegations and defences that to some extent risk neutralizing the actual value of the information proffered. Potential travellers must invest in who they believe (making deductions, for example, based on biographical detail, cultural affinity, or racial allegiance), risking that the experience they desire may nonetheless differ from expectation. The elements of danger and uncertainty once considered the integral, crucial or even the most pleasurable part of a travel experience, are now increasingly seen as a liability, to be neutralized through extensive research.

The travel blog represents a site where the enduring fascination of travel is made simultaneously more stable and less exotic, even though travel's appeal has traditionally been based on being the opposite of these things: a way to access difference, variety and excitement. Will the ability of the travel blog to effectively (and sensorially) re-enact or communicate experience lead to the rise of the wholly 'armchair' traveller, whose appetites are more than satiated by the technological possibilities of life and travel in a digital world? The travel blog is a mode in flux, but the questions it raises in regards to authenticity, experience and the ethics of representation have never been more significant.

**Select bibliography**

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Cochrane, K. (2011) 'Why TripAdvisor is Getting a Bad Review', _The Guardian_ , 25 January. Online. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2011/jan/25/tripadvisor-duncan-bannatyne (accessed 30 March 2014).

Eakin, P.J. (1999) _How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Lives_ , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Greenwald, J. (2014) 'The Tale of the World's First Travel Blog, Born 20 Years Ago Today', _Wired_ 6 January. Online. Available at: http://www.wired.com/2014/01/20-years-of-travel-blogs (accessed 9 April 2014).

Gregory, J. (2011) 'Who Advised Your Trip?' _Crikey_ , 19 December. Online. Available at: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/back-in-a-bit/2011/12/19/who-advised-your-trip-reviewing-the-top-travel-review-sites (accessed 30 March 2014).

Mallon, T. (1985) _A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries_ , London: Picador.

McCulley, K. (2012) 'The Reality of Being a Professional Travelblogger', _Adventurous Kate_. Online. Available at: http://www.adventurouskate.com/the-reality-of-being-a-professional-travel-blogger (accessed 8 April 2014).

Miller, C.R. and Shepherd, D. (2004) 'Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog', _Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs_. Online. Available at: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_as_social_action.html (accessed 9 April 2014).

Rak, J. (2005) 'The Digital Queer: Weblogs and Internet Identity', _Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly_ 28(1): 166–82.

Rak, J. (2013) _Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market_ , Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press.

Rosenberg, S. (2009) _Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming and Why It Matters_ , New York: Three Rivers Press.

Smith, S. and Watson, J. (2010) _Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives_ , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tourism Australia (2014) 'The Best Jobs in the World'. Online. Available at: http://www.bestjobs.australia.com (accessed 22 April 2014).

Dark Tourism

_Justin D. Edwards_

Visiting places of death, disaster, destruction and human suffering is often referred to as dark tourism. Such tourist attractions include a wide range of dark places: battlegrounds, sites of atrocities, massacres and genocides, natural and accidental disasters, slave forts and prisons, as well as the locations of murder or violent crime. The Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, Robben Island in South Africa, the coastal slave forts of Ghana, the First World War battlefield in Gallipoli, Ground Zero in New York, and the Jack the Ripper Tour in London are just a few popular destinations that fuel the highly lucrative global industry of dark tourism. Although provision and demand has grown over the last two decades, dark tourism is not a new phenomenon. People have long been drawn, purposely or otherwise, towards sites, attractions and events linked in one way or another with death, suffering, violence or disaster. For instance, the American Civil War site of Gettysburg, where fifty thousand men died in July 1863, attracted many nineteenth-century visitors, particularly after Lincoln's Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the National Cemetery in November of the same year. Likewise, after the First World War the battlefield of Flanders Fields, which had suffered four long years of bloodshed, began playing the Last Post each day at the Menin Gate Memorial (Ypres, Belgium) for the people visiting the site. The darkness of human suffering is also captured in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century 'slum travels' by writers such as Jacob Riis and Jack London: Riis's _How the Other Half Lives_ (1890) documents the extreme poverty in the tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side, and London's _People of the Abyss_ (1903) captures the homelessness, workhouses and squalid living conditions he encountered during journeys through Whitechapel and Shoreditch. These two texts anticipate the twenty-first-century favela tourism of Brazil, the Township tourism of South Africa or the Dharavi slum tourism of Mumbai.

What draws people to dark tourist sites? There is no single answer to this question. The motivations of dark tourists are as diverse as the sites themselves. Some are motivated by sensationalism or titillation, experiencing the visit as a macabre form of entertainment. Others see these places as socially acceptable environments to contemplate death and mortality – thanatological concerns, giving rise to what has been called 'thanatourism' (Seaton 1996) – or to view a specific history of human suffering. Such sites, and the texts about them, are often fraught with political tensions and ethical dilemmas. Who has access to these sites? How should they be presented to the public? And how should they be represented in writing? These are the pressing questions raised by a dark tourist industry that seeks to memorialize and commemorate death and suffering while also managing and marketing these sites for public consumption. For some cultural critics, dark tourism is part of a postmodern condition that commodifies and so exploits trauma; for others, however, it can be a means of prompting wider public knowledge of, and reflection on, dark periods of human history and their complex legacies. Equally, while some commentators suggest that tourism to sites of communal suffering and collective trauma often functions as a form of commemoration or memorialization which reinforces national, ethnic or otherwise sectarian identities, others have argued that they sometimes enable difference and diversity to be set aside and replaced with a unified sense of a larger collective identity.

Travel writing about the experience of dark tourism has been widely published since the late 1990s. A snapshot of this body of travel writing indicates that these texts are diverse and varied. Robert Young Pelton's _The World's Most Dangerous Places_ (1998) is, for instance, an unorthodox guidebook that includes sections on 'Coca Loco Land' in Columbia, 'Cutthroat Politics' in Algeria and 'Tali-Banned, Tali-Bombed' sites in Afghanistan. Dom Joly's _The Dark Tourist: Sightseeing in the World's Most Unlikely Holiday Destinations_ (2010) documents his macabre journeys to purchase Pol Pot's shoes in Cambodia, to play paintball with members of Hezbollah in Lebanon and to see the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine. Visits to environmental disaster areas are recorded in Andrew Blackwell's _Visit to Sunny Chernobyl: Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places_ (2012), which recounts trips to Chernobyl, the oil sands of northern Alberta, deforested regions of the Amazon and the most polluted river in India. In these three cases, the authors offer little commentary on their reasons for travelling to such sites of suffering, and their journeys (and travelogues) thus come to seem somewhat sensationalistic and exploitative. Other travel texts, however, reflect on the motivations of dark tourists and the industry. For instance, Rory Stewart's _The Places In Between_ (2004) is a poetic and politically charged account of his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002. His journey documents the death, suffering and danger in a place caught between hostile nations and competing ideologies, struggling with the US invasion and suffering from over twenty years of war. Complex meditations on political oppression, racial intolerance and genocide are similarly offered in Anna Porter's _Ghosts of Europe: Journeys Through Central Europe's Troubled Past and Uncertain Future_ (2010), a travel text in which Porter journeys to the sites where Jews were expelled from Budapest in the 1940s, the place of a massacre of Polish officers by Soviet troops in 1940 and a neo-Nazi gathering in Prague to mark the 120-year anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth. This list is just a taste of the writing about dark tours that you might find in the Travel Writing section of your local bookshop. But to understand the contemporary popular phenomenon of dark travel texts we must consider the subject's genealogy in its various historical contexts.

**Disaster and dark tourism**

Walkers following the northern section of the Anglesey Coastal Path in North Wales will arrive at a monument commemorating the sinking of the _Royal Charter_ , the 2,719-ton, iron-hulled steam clipper that sunk off the northeast coast of Anglesey on 26 October 1859. To this day the highest death toll of any shipwreck off the Welsh coast, the precise number of dead is uncertain (the passenger list was lost) but it is estimated that the wreck took 459 lives. In early November 1859, Charles Dickens visited the site to witness the death, destruction and disaster of the wreck. The result was an article titled 'Shipwreck', published in the 1860 edition of Dickens's _Uncommercial Traveller_. This mid-nineteenth-century example of dark tourism records fragments of the wreck scattered on the shore, great spars of the lost vessel, and masses of iron twisted by the fury of the sea into the strangest forms, the timber already bleached and the iron already rusted as they washed up onto the sand. Bodies of the dead were still drifting ashore, and Dickens reports that corpses will continue to be thrown up until the north-east winds of the early spring have run their course. Visiting the local church, he witnesses a congregation of the dead: forty-four men and women laid out and awaiting burial, a fraction of the number of corpses carried up to the church after the disaster. The wreckage engenders a speculative response that invokes the image of the ship as a watery coffin and a mass grave at sea: 'a great number of the passengers, and particularly the second-class women-passengers', he writes, 'were known to have been in the middle of the ship when she parted, and thus the collapsing wreck would have fallen upon them after yawning open, and would keep them down' (Dickens 1903: 5).

Dickens describes the experience of standing between life and death, inhabiting an 'in-between' space that lacks a solid position. Faced with the communal experience of death, he is forced to face his own mortality. As a result, this dark tourist text does not just invoke the ghosts of the past; it is also haunted by the future. When faced with death, the course of travel that marks out 'we' and 'you' is not necessarily binarized, and the structure of Dickens's text speaks to this when he turns to the sea of letters from the victims' families thanking the local parish priest for his attempts to identify the bodies and bury the dead. Among this 'shipwreck of papers', Dickens selects several extracts from mothers, fathers, widows and husbands. The bulk of the chosen quotations relate to the Jewish passengers aboard the _Royal Charter_. A 'Jewish gentleman' writes to thank Reverend Hughes for the care with which he exhumed the remains of his drowned brother, whilst 'the office of the Chief Rabbi' expresses gratitude on behalf of the 'Old Hebrew congregation of Liverpool': 'You have, indeed, like Boaz, "not left off your kindness to the living and the dead" ' (ibid.: 8). In this dark travel text, Dickens allows the mourners to speak in their own voices, gesturing to a shared experience of grief and mortality regardless of ethnicity or religious belief. But in selecting the minority voices from the sea of letters, Dickens simultaneously invokes categories of inclusion and exclusion. On the one hand, his 'look-at-what-we-have-done-for-them' discourse is a way of implying difference; on the other hand, when it comes to death, all such differences vanish as the diverse victims are folded into a larger, single community.

There is another haunting presence in Dickens's dark travel text: the spectre of Empire, with its jumble of pride, wealth, destruction and waste. The _Royal Charter_ , the fastest trader and passenger ship of its day and a masterwork of Victorian technology, was an important vehicle in mobilizing the British Empire. On the night of the shipwreck, the _Royal Charter_ was returning to Liverpool from Australia with large quantities of natural resources extracted from the _terra nullius_ of the far-flung British settlement. Its cargo included a consignment of gold, along with many gold miners returning to England after striking it rich in New South Wales. Dickens writes,

The gold found yesterday was some five-and-twenty thousand pounds.And of the three hundred and fifty thousand pounds' worth of gold, three hundred thousand pounds' worth, in round numbers, was at that time recovered.The great bulk of the remainder was surely and steadily coming up.Some loss of sovereigns there would be, of course; indeed, at first sovereigns had drifted in with the sand, and been scattered far and wide over the beach, like sea-shells; but most other golden treasure would be found.

(Ibid.: 4)

This passage highlights the dark history of the Victorian annexation and control of natural resources and nature itself. Power over the land – the power of the mining companies and the power of governance – extends the conceptual map of Victorian Britain and its physical borders to encompass the wealth of the distant, yet strangely familiar, colony. The simultaneously settled and unsettled place of the settler colony – a place that is both 'here' and 'not here', homely and unhomely – conceptualizes an uncanniness that ruptures the binaries of location and dislocation.

Thus Dickens's dark travel text has a political dimension; it is not concerned solely with the psychological experience or the psychic state of the traveller. Like the Jewish minority, the Other is, when faced with destruction and death, accepted into the British community of Empire. For even as Dickens is unsettled by the journey, he attempts to impose a politics of Empire that stresses unity in the wake of the disaster. 'As I rode along', Dickens writes,

I thought of the many people, inhabitants of this mother country, who would make pilgrimages to the little churchyard in the years to come; I thought of the many people in Australia, who would have an interest in such a shipwreck, and would find their way here when they visit the Old World.

(Ibid.: 10)

What is striking here is the imagined community that emphasizes harmony through the familial discourse of mother country, the Old World and the New World. Such discursive unification attempts to erase the political hierarchies of Empire even while imposing them: the matriarch (often embodied in the figure of Queen Victoria) creates and raises the colony in a power dynamic that suggests, in this passage, a nurturing rather than ruling passion. In life, as in death, the logical conclusion of this imaginary narrative has the Australians tied to Britain, an extension of the Empire's terrain and sphere of influence. From this perspective, the dark tourist site is presented as a place of commemoration or memorialization after a collective loss; difference and diversity are set aside and replaced with a unified sense of identity within a larger community, in this case the British Empire.

**Slums and dark tourism**

Jack London's _People of the Abyss_ (1903) is a significant text in the history of dark tourism. Best known as an American novelist and short story writer, London also wrote several travel accounts, including _Through The Rapids On The Way To The Klondike_ (1899) and _The Cruise of the Snark_ (1911). _People of the Abyss_ differs from these other works in that it is a contribution to a body of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts by 'slum travellers'. Reminiscent of texts such as Dorothy Tennant's _London Street Arabs_ (1890) and _Makers of Our Clothes_ (1909) by Clementina Back and Adele Meyer, _People of the Abyss_ documents London's arrival in England and his six-week stay in the poverty-stricken districts of Whitechapel and Shoreditch. Disguised as a stranded American sailor, he lived in cheap tenements with the poor and destitute citizens of the city. The book was popular in the United States, selling 20,000 copies, but the reception in England was less enthusiastic, with one reviewer complaining that London had,

written of the East of London as he wrote about the Klondike, with the same tortured phrase, vehemence of denunciation, splashes of colour, and ferocity of epithet. He has studied it "earnestly and dispassionately" – in two months! It is all very pleasant, very American, and very young.

(quoted in Haley 2011: 154)

Jack London travelled to England with a copy of George Haw's book, _No Room To Live: The Plaint of Overcrowded London_ (1900). This text prepared him for the poverty and misery he would explore in the East End and, during his voyage, he wrote the following in a letter to a friend:

A week from today I shall be in London. I shall then have two days in which to make my arrangements and sink down out of sight in order to view the Coronation from the standpoint of the London beasts. That's all they are – beasts – if they are anything like the slum people of New York.

(quoted in Swafford 2007: 115)

On arrival, London is not disappointed. Entering the East End, he saw what he calls the 'screaming streets', a 'wilderness [. . .] filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance' (London 2007: 7–8). What is striking about this passage is London's language of racial difference, which corresponds to other forms of travel writing whereby the traveller crosses a border into a foreign land and is struck by the physical appearance of the inhabitants. From an early twentieth-century American perspective, it is possible that the language of racial difference was a default mode for articulating class distinctions and abjection. But it is important to note that London also adopts the discourse of the traveller who enters into the mysterious heart of darkness: 'I was plung[ed] into that wilderness of which nobody seemed to know anything' (ibid.: 20). Unknown, enigmatic and strange, the East End of the imperial centre might as well be the 'incomprehensible land' of the colonial periphery.

The guiding principle of London's dark travel narrative is his desire to experience first hand abject poverty – the 'abyss' of the East End – and convey the place and people to his readers in an unmediated way. This is explained in his Preface. 'I went down into the under-world of London', he writes,

with an attitude of mind which I may best liken to that of the explorer. I was open to be convinced by the evidence of my eyes, rather than by the teachings of those who had not seen, or by the words of those who had seen and gone before. Further, I took with me certain simple criteria with which to measure the life of the under-world.

(Ibid.: 4)

Here the evidence of the seeing eye is combined with the language of exploration and discovery. By adopting the persona of the explorer, he legitimizes his potential for revealing the truth and, throughout the text he reminds us that he has explored the harsh terrain of Alaska and lived with the 'Inuit folk', 'a very primitive people' (ibid.: 129). Such claims attempt to establish the authenticity of his journey by foregrounding his working-class credentials, thus distinguishing his text from middle-class slum travellers such as Beatrice Potter (Webb) and Henry Mayhew. Indeed, earlier in his life, London travelled around North America as a tramp, often experiencing the poverty and degradation of the homeless vagrant. This earlier experience enables London to compare poverty in England with that of the United States: 'As a vagrant in the "Hobo" of a California jail', London writes, 'I have been served better food and drink than the London workman receives in his coffee-houses; while as an American labourer I have eaten a breakfast for twelvepence such as the British labourer would not dream of eating' (ibid.: 97).

By claiming this identity, London tries to convince his audience that he can comprehend his subject and empathize with the inhabitants of the East End. Indeed, he describes this area as a vast and deep abyss, 'a huge man-killing machine', where thousands of residents are condemned to a life of debasing grief and despair (London ibid.: 21). The word 'abyss', so often associated with Gothic narratives, is combined with haunting spectres in a monstrous city shrouded in darkness: In the 'black night of London', he writes, the poor move 'like so many ghosts flitting eastward through the gloom, the monster city roaring at their heels' (ibid.: 14). Here, the language of the Gothic merges with dark tourism as London yearns to see the 'shambles at the bottom of the Abyss' and this 'unnatural life for the human', simultaneously mysterious and real. This relationship between mystery and reality is highlighted in the opening chapter, for there is no package tour that he can take through the East End, and this adds to its mystery, an alluring quality, which is emphasized when London enters a Thomas Cook office. He is met with disbelief and incredulity as he explains his project. As he exits the office, he reflects on the irony of the situation: 'O Thomas Cook & Son', he writes,

path-finders and trail-clearers, living sign-posts to all the world, and bestowers of first aid to bewildered travellers – unhesitatingly and instantly, with ease and celerity, could you send me to Deepest Africa or Innermost Thibet, but to the East End of London, barely a stone's throw distant from Ludgate Circus, you know not the way!

(Ibid.: 5)

Not only is he off the beaten track, but the East End is also conveyed as more 'foreign' than the Congo or the Himalayas.

Social status is a significant dimension to Jack London's dark tourism. The history of tourism shows that tourists frequently project their own social status by comparing themselves to others, whether the other is a fellow tourist or a foreigner. In the context of dark tourism, such status may be sought through travelling to places or undertaking forms of travel that are off the beaten track or potentially dangerous for the tourist. _People of the Abyss_ emphasizes the dangers of the East End and London brags about surviving to tell the tale. Yet the danger of his journey is tempered by several factors. He takes care to inform the American consul-general of his project, and he contacts Johnny Upright, 'a detective of thirty-odd years' continuous service in the East End', for advice and protection (ibid.: 11). In fact, contrary to his claims of danger, London hires a 'port of refuge', a respectable lodging on the edge of the East End, where he can retire for clean clothes, collect his mail and return to 'civilization' whenever he wishes. The presence of this 'safe house' – a place where he can return at any time – signals the artifice that creeps into London's claim to live the authentic life of the East Ender. The poor have no such refuge.

London's text illustrates how dark tourism can move in at least two directions at once. On the one hand, it can express an ethically progressive form of social and political reportage that exposes suffering and injustice. On the other hand, it can also include an exaggerated and sensationalist dimension that suggests that dark tourists are as much motivated by fantasies of heroism and risk-taking, as they seek to distinguish themselves from other tourists. This tension between authenticity and artifice is reflected in the conflicting political agendas of London's dark tourist text. In some chapters, he expresses a socialist position that condemns abject poverty in a wealthy country and advocates a redistribution of wealth to reduce suffering and diminish the gap between the wealthy and the poor. In other sections, he puts forward Social Darwinist principles, characterizing the poor as 'feeble, bespotted, and imbecile' people who should not have children (ibid.: 89). Both of these ideologies are combined with an American nationalism that does not erase the poverty of New York's Lower East Side but champions US working conditions, wages, healthy food and wholesome space. His message is clear: the USA is more open and free, and less tied to an oppressive class structure. If travel and tourism are about status, then they are also about hierarchies. And when London compares his native land to what he sees in the East End, he criticizes England for allowing this social abyss to exist within a country that has built up a massive and wealthy Empire. He blames the Victorian class structure for forcing the poor into subhuman conditions, destroying and dehumanizing its citizens and so maintaining this abyss at the centre of an expansive Empire.

**Slavery and dark tourism**

In the late 1990s, the novelist and travel writer Caryl Phillips travelled to the west coast of Ghana and visited the slave forts of Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle. In interviews after his journey, Phillips describes on the one hand how tourists of the African diaspora seek out places of African 'return' in Ghana, and, on the other, how a local tourist industry has sprung up to cater to these African American and Caribbean visitors. 'They showed me where the slaves were kept, the rings on the wall for the chains, and I looked', he admits, but 'I had spent a lot of my emotional capital' in fiction (Schatteman 2009: 157). Indeed, when his colleagues take him to Elmina Castle he is not overwhelmed by emotion – there was no 'chill' running through his body. He remains detached because, as he explains, he had written about the Middle Passage in novels such as _Crossing the River_ (1993) and _Higher Ground_ (1995). It was 'like a strangely familiar place', he writes, a haunted space that was, in a sense, exorcized in earlier writing (Phillips 2000: 101). The acts of imagining and creatively writing about slavery, in other words, gave Phillips the distance from which he could write about the Ghana slave forts as part of a dark tourist industry, examining 'the business side of things' and 'the hardcore reality of making money from this industry in Africa' (Rice 2012a: 365).

In his travelogue _The Atlantic Sound_ (2000), Phillips reflects on the dark tourism he encounters at Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle during the celebration of Panafest. For this occasion, the grounds outside the gates of the Elmina slave fort were transformed into a playground, including a large open tent and a stage to support a free concert by the Western Diamonds, one of Ghana's most popular bands. Here Phillips observes tourists from the United States, Canada, the Caribbean and South Africa as they drink beer and dance to pop music. He also attends an atonement ceremony, where a goat is sacrificed in front of disgusted African Americans who sip Coco-Cola whilst wearing dark sunglasses and sporting clothes with slogans such as 'Africa, Our Aim Unity' and 'Never Forget, Never Forgive' (Phillips 2000: 136). Within this tableau, Phillips illustrates how the slave fort is an integral part of the cultures of performance and consumption, both of which are packaged for the tourists of the diaspora. The significance of the tourist industry is also highlighted when Phillips meets Dr Lee, an African American man who has settled in Ghana. Lee explains the pragmatic capitalism behind the use of slave forts as sites of tourism: 'If they [Ghanaians] can make money out of turning these places [slave forts] into shrines of tourism for Africans of the diaspora to come back and weep and wail and gnash their teeth, then so be it', he explains. 'They're businessmen' (ibid.: 121).

In his descriptions of the slave forts and Panafest, Phillips problematizes the romantic vision of pan-African unity. The slave forts are not just places where Africans and the black diaspora can come together; these sites are also commoditized as part of a dark tourist industry. Thus, we are encouraged to read the title of this chapter – 'Homeward Bound' – as ironic. How is the west coast of Africa, Phillips asks, a 'home' for the Caribbean and African American tourists who live 'comfortable first-world lives'? (ibid.: 122). One response to this question can be found in a psychic answer: some 'people of the diaspora [. . .] expect the continent to solve whatever psychological problems they possess' (ibid.: 172). But Phillips also calls attention to the ways in which the tourist industry in Ghana packages the concept of 'home' for the diasporic tourist: the speakers at the slave fort call for a unification of the 'African family' by imploring people of African descent to 'come home', and an interviewee describes a 'whole infrastructure so that African Americans can return "home" ' (ibid.: 147, 164). Moreover, upon arrival at his Elmina hotel, Phillips is confronted with a 'huge banner that welcomes delegates and participants back to Mother Africa' (ibid.: 133). Home is commodified as part of a tourist package.

From this perspective, the Ghanaian slave forts are significant places for constructing an imagined familial bond that caters to the diasporic traveller. Thus, one motivation for participating in this form of dark tourism is to engage with a conception of Afrocentric identity that stresses unity over difference. This is illustrated during one of Phillips's visits to the Cape Coast Castle, where he witnesses the 'Thru the Door of No Return' ceremony. Here, the slave fort is reconceptualized from the point of departure to a site of return for those Africans who were taken into slavery and shipped to the Americas – the portal through which the diasporic subject 'goes back' to Africa. For some of the root-seeking attendees, the ceremony provides a sense of historical legacy that is part of a spiritual journey or pilgrimage, linking them to an imagined past and ancestral homeland. This reclamation of cultural identity includes a contemplation of suffering and death: the suffering of those who were taken into slavery and the death of those who died on the Middle Passage. Phillips's description of the ceremony begins with a guide, Imahkus, calling up the spirits of the oceanic graveyard, 'those whose bones are at the bottom of the Atlantic' (ibid.: 176). This memorialization and commemoration summons the ancestors and, once present, Imahkus channels their voices and chants, 'The ancestors are receiving us! They are receiving us!' But Phillips is not convinced: 'the ceremony', he concludes, 'is in part a public relations exercise' (ibid.: 176).

Why is Phillips critical of the tourists who visit the slave forts of Ghana? Part of his critique is based on his skepticism about Afrocentrism and pan-Africanism. But a more specific criticism is directed at the diasporic tourists whose economic power funds their trips, as well as the tourists who assume that the local people share a similar relationship to the slave forts. Scholars of tourist studies note that African American tourists to Ghanaian slave forts 'tend to use specialized tourist agencies catering to their specific needs and [. . .] are class-privileged, with more leisure time to travel and more education' (Lelo and Jamal 2013: 31). For many members of the African diaspora, as well as for many Africans, travel of this kind would not be economically conceivable: 'Those left out in such a marketplace', writes Alan Rice on the Elmina slave fort, 'are usually the local disenfranchised Africans who do not have the economic power of the African American tourists' (2012b: 225). Thus, the forts become an extension of the African American landscape, and this appropriation of place is a colonizing gesture that is resented by the Ghanaians who lack the political and economic power of the North American visitors. Moreover, while the tourist industry is a significant source of revenue for west Ghana, the diverse meanings of the forts (sacred places for African Americans, income generation for Ghanaians) has a 'significant cost in terms of cross-cultural empathy and understanding' (ibid.: 226).

It must be noted that Phillips participates in the very dark tourism that he criticizes. But the difference between his travels and the other tourists, he insists, is his critique of these dark tourist sites and their role in pan-African projects. This leads to a significant self-reflection that enables him to distance himself from the other dark tourists. However, this distancing also includes discourses of superiority whereby he sets himself apart from the other tourists who, as he suggests, lack self-reflection or critical engagement with the sites. This leads to a self-imposed hierarchy that places Phillips above his fellow tourists and filters his perspective through a narrow lens that erases the more positive political dimensions of a pan-African agenda.

**Conclusion**

In _Creating Memorials, Building Identities_ (2012b), Alan Rice examines how dark tourism responds to national and cultural agendas of obfuscation and distortion. For Rice, the memorialization found at dark tourist sites often includes a 'malleability of meaning' (ibid.: 26) that can stabilize meaning or destabilize it, reinscribe conservative narratives of the past or challenge them. Dark tourism has the potential to imagine and reimagine social, political and historical lives and influence the politics of memory. Dickens's 'Shipwreck', London's _People of the Abyss_ and Phillips's _Atlantic Sound_ offer three different perspectives on dark tourist literature from the last 150 years. These texts indicate how the notion of dark tourism is open and extensive. In all three, the politics of remembering is framed within a social and cultural context that is tied to either Empire or national identity or racial hierarchies of the past and present. Thus they offer insights into locales associated with dark tourism and the politics and problematics of experiencing those sites.

**Select bibliography**

Dickens, C. (1903) _The Uncommercial Traveller_ , 1860, London: Chapman and Hall.

Haley, J.L. (2011) _Wolf: The Lives of Jack London_ , New York: Basic Books.

Lelo, L. and Jamal, T. (2013) 'African Americans at Sites of Darkness: Root-Seeking, Diasporic Identities and Place Making', in L. White and E. Frew (eds), _Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places_ , New York: Routledge.

Lennon, J. and Foley, M. (2010) _Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster_ , London: Cengage.

London, J. (2007) _People of the Abyss_ , 1903, Middlesex: Echo Library.

Phillips, C. (2000) _The Atlantic Sound_ , London: Vintage.

Porter, A. (2010) _The Ghosts of Europe: Journey's Through Central Europe's Troubled Past and Uncertain Future_ , Vancouver: Dunne Books.

Rice, A. (2012a) 'Caryl Phillips on Slave Forts and Manillas as African Atlantic Sites of Memory', _Atlantic Studies_ 9(3): 363–372.

Rice, A. (2012b) _Creating Memorials, Building Identities_ , Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Riis, J. (2010) _How the Other Half Lives_ , 1890, New York: St Martin's Press.

Ross, E. (ed.) (2007) _Slum Travellers: London and Poverty, 1860–1920_ , Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schatteman, R.T. (ed.) (2009) _Conversations with Caryl Phillips_ , Oxford, MS: University of Mississippi Press.

Seaton, A.V. (1996) 'Guide by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism', _International Journal of Heritage Studies_ 2(4): 234–244.

Sharpley, R. and Stone, R. (eds) (2009) _The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism_ , Bristol: Channel View Publications.

Stone, P. and Sharpley, R. (2008) 'Consuming Dark Tourism: A Thanatological Perspective', _Annals of Tourism Research_ 35: 574–595.

Swafford, K. (2007) _Class in Late-Victorian Britain: The Narrative Concern with Social Hierarchy and Its Representation_ , Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press.

Gay Travel Writing

An Unstable Category?

_Gregory Woods_

In their introduction to _Are You Two . . . Together? A Gay and Lesbian Guide to Europe_ , Lindsy Van Gelder and Pamela Robin Brandt lament 'the scarcity of gay travel writing'. Guidebooks there may be, if mostly catering to gay men on the prowl; but of these 'Even the best ones we've seen have consisted almost entirely of listings, with no travel _writing_. Where was the information about gay culture and gay history? Where were our Jan Morrises, our Bruce Chatwins, our M.F.K. Fishers?' (Van Gelder and Brandt 1992: xiii). That Jan Morris (James Morris as was) and Bruce Chatwin were themselves part of recent gay cultural history and are indeed, therefore, 'our' Morris and Chatwin does not occur to them – presumably because these two fine writers do not foreground their own sexuality in their travel writing. What Van Gelder and Brandt are seeking, and what they seem to be aiming to provide in their own book, is an explicit relationship between gay writer and gay reader, with (what can we call it?) gay information as the cultural currency to be passed between them.

So, while there have been many great travel writers who were what we now call gay or bisexual, they may not have been, to the reader, recognisably so. Indeed, a man's reasons for leaving his homeland and for concealing his sexuality on his return, when writing about his travels, may have been one and the same. When access to sexual fulfilment is prohibited by law, and even access to love is prohibited by the vigilance policing social convention, a man might do well to go elsewhere. G.S. Rousseau speaks of travel as 'a means of coping with homosexual desire, rather than indulging or satisfying it' – although, of course, it may be both (Rousseau 1995: 701). Stephen Wayne Foster distinguishes between travel literature that records observations of same-sex sexual customs in other cultures, and the writings of 'homosexual questers' who are 'in search of some place on earth where the taboos of the Christian West have no validity' (Foster 1990: 1324). Whether for a mere holiday, for an extended, educational Grand Tour, or as permanent exile, a man might travel abroad to alleviate the loneliness or sexual frustration that beset him at home. Indeed, he might be encouraged to venture abroad by the myth one can find in the social history of many cultures, that 'sodomy' is itself an alien perversion, caught like a plague from filthy foreigners. If it came from abroad, surely abroad is where one might go to find more of it. A potential further bonus of such travels might be a corresponding escape from homophobic attitudes and practices at home. You might say that travel would ideally constitute an escape both _from_ and _to_.

The attractions of elsewhere were considerable and varied. For instance, a Briton could escape his nation's harsh legal system by visiting or even moving to a nation under the sway of the much more lenient Napoleonic Code (France, of course, but also Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Poland, etc.). A man from Protestant northern Europe might find in Roman Catholic southern Europe and Muslim North Africa a more relaxed attitude to transgressions of religious law; and where unmarried women were kept in virtual purdah, local men and boys were often not averse to engaging in sexual activity with other males to relieve their own sexual tension. To northerners, the South and the East could signify freedom from restraint.

Being homosexual might make a white, middle-class man sympathetic to people with other subaltern identities (I think of E.M. Forster). But being homosexual, and disgruntled at the potential loss of status that would imply if it were to become public knowledge, a man might just as well be inclined to capitalize on the privilege that came with his maleness, his whiteness and his class, and turn against those who, like women or non-white people, could not hide their subaltern status. Instead of a weakness, the closet could often be wielded as an instrument of power, albeit a risky one. Similarly, a traveller might be scrupulous in his personal relationships with the men he met on his travels (again, I think of Forster); or he might actively manipulate the men and boys he met, exploiting their poverty to his own sexual satisfaction (here, I think of André Gide). Being beyond the pale is no guarantee of sympathetic identification; and being gay does not exempt the travel writer from Orientalist tendencies.

In the famous 'Terminal Essay' to his 1885 translation of _The Arabian Nights_ , Sir Richard Burton proposed the existence of what he calls a 'Sotadic zone' girdling the Earth, an Ourobouros of Orientalism, in which same-sex desire ('Sotadic love') was 'popular and endemic' or 'held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo' (Burton 1970: 159). This zone of relative acceptance included the Mediterranean rim and Asia Minor, extending eastward thence to China and Japan, as well as the pre-Columbian Americas. (Then as now, the reputation of this zone was built as much on its past as its present practices and beliefs.) For most, the near shores of the Mediterranean would be far enough. In an era when boys of the middle and upper classes were invariably educated in the Greek and Roman classics – I am thinking of the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century – the only positive representations of same-sex desire available to them were those in the writings of (e.g.) Theocritus and Plato, Vergil and Tibullus, Catullus and Martial. It stands to reason, then, that educated men came to associate male love with Greece and Italy, and that when the opportunity arose many of them travelled to seek it _in situ_. Or else they might travel in search of the culture and find, as if by accident, the boys.

Times have changed. There is an argument that, at least in Western societies, gay men are now so seamlessly assimilated into the mainstream that the concept of distinct gay cultural production is redundant. 'Gay literature', it is suggested, is a term that no longer carries any useful meaning: there is only literature. The counter-argument is just as simple: given that there is still intense and widespread hostility to lesbians and gay men even in the secular, liberal, Western democracies – let alone in the rest of the world, where religion-prompted homophobic fanaticism is, arguably, becoming more extreme than ever – to be openly gay is often to subject oneself to risk of attack, both mental and physical. While gay people continue to be treated as scandalously different from an imagined norm, the need for gay culture, a vocalization of similarities as well as differences, remains. And so with travel writing; if the experience of travel to any location is a different experience because of the gayness of the traveller, and if the interests of the reader are in any way different because of the gayness of the reader, 'gay travel writing' has some use as a distinct category. But what is it that locates any particular piece of prose in this genre? In this chapter, I first explore some of the complexities attendant on identifying texts as examples of gay gravel writing, before discussing works that seem to me to fall unequivocally into this category. Throughout, I focus on the writings of gay/bisexual men, although the issues I raise in the first section may also apply to the travel writing of lesbian/bisexual women.

**What's the difference?**

Raphael Kadushin's anthology _Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing_ (2004) might be a good place to start. Despite bearing the imprimatur of a university press, the fact that its introduction lacks a definition of 'good', let alone of 'gay travel writing' itself, and the strangely indeterminate air of its list of contents, suggest a broader set of problems. The rear cover blurb describes the featured authors as 'a mix of established gay writers and the best of the new generation'. But, somewhat undermining the latter claim, the editor says in his Acknowledgements, 'The world of gay lit has shrunk down to a very small one, so many of these people are personal friends' (Kadushin 2004: ix). I can make nothing of this, except as an explanation for his having included some items that only partially meet the conditions of the category.

Had readers not been told the sexuality of the chosen authors, they are unlikely to have been able to find anything in Colm Tóibín's contribution that marked it out as being gay. Extracted from his book _Homage to Barcelona_ (1990), this piece is a brief account of festivals in the Catalan towns of Girona and Berga. It contains no references to gay people observed on Tóibín's visits to these towns, and none to his own gayness. If the editor has included him in the anthology because his essay exhibits some specifically gay quality of aesthetic sensibility – not an implausible reason – he does not say so, and I have not identified such a quality in the piece.

The editor asserts that 'some of my favourite pieces in this collection are really as much love stories as travelogues' (Kadushin 2004: 6). He specifies essays by Mack Friedman, Alistair McCartney and Brian Bouldrey. Of these, the first is an account of work experience in Alaska, rendered gay by the author's mooning over a fellow worker in a fish factory. The second consists of its Australian author's letters to his lover in Los Angeles from New York and London, and includes references to sexual encounters with men from elsewhere. And the third is what the editor calls a 'slightly black romantic comedy' (ibid.: 6), an account of dinner with the family of the author's French lover, who is dumping him, in their farm on the pilgrimage route down into Spain. Very little actual travel is involved: the author is away from his home, it's true, but not away from his lover's.

In several essays, the author mentions that he was travelling with his lover, although this is sometimes no more than a brief mention at the beginning and end of the piece. In contrast, Mitch Cullin travels from Tucson to Japan to escape the depression resulting from his lover having left him; but the journey itself is otherwise not identifiably gay in any clear sense. In several items, the gayness of the author offers little more than an isolated reflection on other people's reactions to a travelling gay couple (not an unimportant consideration when planning a holiday). Matthew Link and his partner take a cruise to Antarctica: 'Cheerful Australian, Canadian, and British travelers filled the boat, and I kept repeating "I'm Matt, this is Len." Did we stand out as a couple of gay guys? It was my problem – no one really cared' (ibid.: 200). Similarly, Bruce Shenitz and his partner are accepted in Den Burg on the Dutch island of Texel:

Small as the island is, it apparently is popular enough on the tourist circuit that the young woman working the [hotel reception] desk took it in [her] stride when we told her that one double bed would be just fine.

(Ibid.: 126)

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the superficiality of much of this material _qua_ gay travel writing, the best two items in _Wonderlands_ are extracted from books: chapters 9 and  of Robert Tewdwr Moss's _Cleopatra's Wedding Present: Travels through Syria_ (1997), in which Moss inspects a nocturnal cruising ground in Lattakia and has a long conversation about sexuality with a local sheikh; and the harrowing chapter 19 of Edmund White's autobiographical novel _The Married Man_ (2000), about the days leading up to the AIDS-related death of his lover while they are travelling in the mountains of Morocco. The main quality in both is a profundity of emotional engagement, in a specifically gay context, with both culture and place. I return to both writers in what follows.

**A sense of community**

Edmund White's earlier book _States of Desire: Travels in Gay America_ (1980) was the first post-Stonewall book of specifically gay travel writing. Explicitly gay-liberationist in its aims and ethos, it is an account of visits White, at that time a New Yorker, paid to more than twenty cities in the USA. The aim was to provide a variegated picture of how gay men were constructing their 'lifestyles' at a moment of rapid social change: 'In this book I am trying to describe styles of life that are unique to a city, not those that could be lived in any city equally well' (White 1981: 64). Although the cities are diverse, in their pockets of gay subcultural collectivity White sought to identify what they had in common by way of national gay community.

One consequence of this approach is a tendency to drift into generalization and the recycling of stereotypes associated with each region, state or city. 'Boston is brainy. Whenever [ _sic_ ] you go you overhear serious conversation' (ibid.: 274). 'L.A. has the most beautiful men in the world' (ibid.: 13). 'No one leaves Chicago in the summer' (ibid.: 160). Not only cities, but their typical citizens, can be summed up with a quick pen sketch: 'The typical Denver youth is permanently tan, has long, dirty-blond hair, a black beard growing in[,] and is slender though he's beginning to show signs of a nascent beer belly' (ibid.: 108). At times, White takes such observations to absurd extremes. For instance:

The stereotyped gay resident of Brooklyn Heights has a lover. They have been together for three years and are faithful, if you don't count those quickies on the Promenade or in the subway john. They have two floors and the garden of a brownstone on a quiet, tree-lined street. One of the men is an accountant and the other the production director of a medical textbook firm.

(Ibid.: 243)

And so on for the rest of a paragraph three times this length.

That said, it has to be conceded that White is aware of generalization as a significant strategy in travel writing. 'I have not, of course, described Ft. Lauderdale as it must seem to those gay men who live there; they, like people everywhere, lead varied lives not subject to generalization' (ibid.: 195). Outsiders always make observations about broad groups of people from a narrow range of particular examples. And besides, White is constantly quoting insiders who generalize about other gay men in their city. In some respect, they give him permission to stereotype their fellow citizens.

White was not an ethnologist or a sociologist; his main qualification for the task was that he was gay. The idea for the book was suggested by Chuck Ortleb, the proprietor and editor-in-chief of the New York cultural magazine _Christopher Street_ (named after the location of the Stonewall Inn, epicentre of the June 1969 Stonewall Riots, symbolic launch-pad of gay liberation). Four of the book's chapters first appeared as individual essays in the magazine. Their readership was assumed to be gay, if not exclusively so; and their attitudes to the politics of sexuality liberal. White wrote as one gay man to others, assuming a shared worldview, even while defying homophobic stereotypes by celebrating the breadth of gay subcultures and the variety of gay lifestyles. He belonged to a generation of openly gay (and gay-liberationist) writers who self-consciously wrote about gay men as 'we' rather than 'they' – as previous generations had felt forced to do – and who addressed their work to a readership who either also subscribed to that 'we' or who, even if not gay themselves, were willing to look at the world from a gay point of view.

White addresses each city as a visitor from outside, combining a degree of journalistic objectivity with his own subjective impressions. But he cannot simply be characterized as an outsider observing and interacting with insiders (as is most obviously the case when he visits the Mormons of Salt Lake City). For a start, he is travelling within the bounds of his own nation, even if he does encounter a handful of non-Americans on the way. And, of course, as an openly gay man visiting 'Gay America', he does so as an insider – all the more so on the many occasions he carried letters of introduction to powerful and wealthy individuals he would probably never have met merely by visiting local gay bars or night clubs.

That said, White is a New Yorker (by choice if not by origin) and, as such, an outsider to the communities he is visiting. But so, indeed, are a large proportion of the men he talks to in the cities he visits. Many of them are newcomers to these places, whether exiles from small towns and small-mindedness or simply followers of the labour market. Many are able to be out-of-the-closet precisely because they have moved away from home. Settlers on a new frontier, you might call them pioneers. Even those who have settled seem unlikely to stay for long. Whole cities share in this impermanence: 'Denver is a city of transients' (White 1981: 110), its gay population merely more so. One of White's interlocutors says of Houston, Texas, 'Everyone's new here' (ibid.: 117). The sense that gay men are outsiders to mainstream American society – outsiders and even outlaws – pervades the book. These are people who, generally speaking, have never quite arrived. Many have fled the hostility of small-town communities or of their own families, seeking in larger cities either the anonymity of the crowd or the solidarity of a gay subculture. Idealists, like many a pioneer from the nation's early years, they are often locked into disappointment at the imperfection of where they have ended up.

There is often a sense of perplexed superiority in White's tone, justified by an implication that White and his readers are more up to date than the people he visits and have a superior attitude to sexuality than theirs. Many places in his nation simply do not live up to his standards. In Missouri he comments that 'the Beats, the hippies, the New Left, the war protesters, the sexual liberationists have come and gone without leaving a mark' (ibid.: 146); in Kansas City, he notes that 'bars often refuse to post notices of gay-pride marches on the grounds that such demonstrations are too "controversial" ' (ibid.: 147). By contrast, White argues that New York and San Francisco, being the main centres of gay-liberationist social experimentation in the present, represent the possibilities of the future. However, despite having taken his own sexual opportunities when they arose on his travels, and having celebrated institutions that provided such opportunities to others, White is disturbed by the extent to which post-Stonewall gay identity and the idea of gay liberation itself have been constructed around a quantitative measure of sex. Again and again on his travels, he has asked himself the same sort of question:

San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled – or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact?

(Ibid.: 28)

In the Locker in Houston, Texas: 'I felt awed and overpowered – was this the gay liberation we had had in mind?' (ibid.: 120). Like a number of gay novels from the same period, _States of Desire_ celebrates the liberatory potential of sexual 'promiscuity' at the same time as expressing disappointment at its limitations:

The cry for scorching, multiple orgasms, the drive toward impeccable and virtuoso performance, the belief that only in complete sexual compatibility lies true intimacy, the insistence that sex is the only mode for experiencing thrills, for achieving love, for assessing and demonstrating personal worth – all these projects are absurd. I can picture wiser people in the next century regarding our sexual mania as akin to the religious madness of the Middle Ages – a cooperative delusion.

(Ibid.: 259–260)

One of the things his travels have taught him is that the properly supportive, nationwide gay community which many craved, including White himself, had failed to materialize. It would take the combined struggles against AIDS and AIDS-related homophobia, in the 1980s and 1990s, to effect that miracle.

**Misfits and mavericks**

When Christopher Isherwood wrote about Berlin in the 1930s, he adopted an apparently objective approach ('I am a camera') and concealed his own sexual involvement in the city behind a fictional name and a de-sexualized character who appeared not to be interested in either sex. But times change. The need for discretion has lapsed; arguably, a taste for indiscretion has flourished. It is all very well to travel as a disinterested observer, like an anthropologist collecting data about other people's cultural practices; but what if you become involved? In relation to his sexuality: what if (as in White's case, above) the traveller's genitals become involved? Or even his heart? An extreme example of such engagement occurs in a book by Tobias Schneebaum, _Keep the River on Your Right_ (1969). There is no shock moment of coming out, when the author confides in the reader, 'I am homosexual'. Schneebaum's sexual encounters with groups of Akarama tribesmen in Peru are mentioned as if no more unusual than, but just as interesting as, shared hunting expeditions or meals. He eventually has a more interesting secret to divulge: 'I am a cannibal' (1969: 110). There are degrees of immersive zeal.

A well-known and much admired example of emotionally engaged gay travel writing of the post-Stonewall era is Robert Tewdwr Moss's _Cleopatra's Wedding Present: Travels through Syria_ (1997). During his venture into what remains of Burton's Sotadic zone, both his status as a traveller and his lifestyle as a non-monogamous gay man open to the sexual opportunities afforded by contingency preclude settlement. He is, as it were, a pioneer without a colonising project. Moss is not on the lookout for a boyfriend. As the destination for such a man, Syria might seem unpromising. Rupert, an older gay Englishman familiar with the mores of Hafez al-Assad's Syria, tells Moss:

the point is you're never really alone here. There's always someone watching. Don't ever forget that. On the other hand, there is a lot of understanding, always unexpressed of course, and tolerance, in an odd sort of way. It's a sort of compassion for the plight of the human condition.

(Moss 1997: 34)

Later, Rupert says:

when I arrived here I sort of recognized it. It was the land of the weak. The land of outsiders and outcasts, where I am happiest. I'm at home here, in a strange sort of way. I have a basic core sympathy with the Syrians: doubly outcast because they're Arabs and former Soviet allies.

He adds: 'And, of course, I am homosexual' (ibid.: 46–47).

Moss consults past visitors to Syria when considering his own liking for the place and its culture:

What was the enigma that drew the lonely and detached – [Richard] Burton, [T.E.] Lawrence, Lady Hesther [ _sic_ ] Stanhope, Jane Digby [whose grave and house he is driving to visit], Gertrude Bell, Wilfred Thesiger – to a community that has such strong rules, such cohesion and ultimately such conformism? Perhaps it was the warmth, hospitality and security of that community which appealed to strangers, allied with the special allowance made for the outsider, who would never perhaps be expected to conform in the same way as its own members. Being a foreigner in an alien culture is a way of institutionalizing your aloneness, of going public with it. You are no longer failing to meet the expectations and values of your own world, nor do you have to meet those of your adopted one – or if you do, no one expects you to do it perfectly.

(Ibid.: 100)

This is more convincing as a personal manifesto than as a generalization. It is hard to be entirely convinced by his later claim – and his narrative does not entirely support it – that 'the Middle East is a great place for misfits, people who cannot relate to their own kind' (ibid.: 109). This is self-evidently not true of those whose 'kind' are of the region; it is even dubious in relation to those who travel there. Moss has to be very careful how he behaves in public.

That said, a young man with whom he has an affair passes on what his uncle has just said of Moss: 'He says you English are incredible. First you will suck my penis like a puppy and then you will suck the breasts of a woman like a little calf. You English will have anything' (ibid.: 123). As a curiosity, he is allowed a certain licence that would not be available to a Syrian. He may even be envied his peculiarity. But some of the men Moss meets allow themselves a certain amount of similar licence, and pity those who do not. A man called Mejid says of one of his older brothers, 'You see Ahmed, he very boring man. He straight, married with children. He not know the meaning of Willy Woofter and Gender Bender' (ibid.: 23).

Summarising what he believes he has understood of Syria, Moss makes a crucial distinction between a man who might temporarily enjoy gay sex and another kind of man, for whom Moss falls back on a concept from popular psychology of the 1950s:

Sexual opportunity in the Middle East is highly proscribed, cynical, fleeting, purely reflexive and exploitative. That is why the true homosexual in Arab culture is so desperately lonely – other men see him as nothing more than an opportunity. No wonder that the Arab who has some emotional investment in his homosexuality cannot wait to find a European lover.

(Ibid.: 123)

The 'true homosexual' he refers to is the man born gay, as opposed to the man who has sex with other males for lack of women. Whether that is how such a man characterizes himself is another matter: Moss does not penetrate the society far enough to find out.

Another writer pioneering the openly gay or bisexual travel book in the 1990s was Duncan Fallowell. By this point, Edmund White's rather doctrinaire approach had given way to something much more personal, more maverick. Fallowell does not identify as gay or bisexual: he is beyond all that. He just gets on with enjoying whatever crops up. We see an early sign of this openness to opportunity in _One Hot Summer in St. Petersburg_ (1994), where a long list of the contents of his suitcase includes condoms and KY (Fallowell 1995: 36). This moving and funny book is largely an account of a love affair with a Russian man, made possible by unexpectedly relaxed social conventions. Fallowell contrasts attitudes in Russia with those in Sicily (a journey to which was described in his earlier book, _To Noto_ [1989]): 'this is the North, so one here is never subjected to those bovine obsessions of the South – why aren't you married? don't you want children? don't you want grand-children?' (ibid.: 41). Indeed, he eventually comes to the conclusion that St. Petersburg is 'the sexiest town I've ever been in' (ibid.: 165). Perhaps precisely because it has not had a strong gay movement of the sort espoused by Edmund White in _States of Desire_ , 'In Russia you feel the eroticism of a society at the edge, a society of infinite possibilities' (ibid.: 155). No labels, no box-ticking of identities.

Fallowell's more recent _Going As Far as I Can: The Ultimate Travel Book_ (2008) recounts a journey to New Zealand in pursuit of several goals. In the first place, Fallowell is looking for the theatres (some now unused or even demolished) in which Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh performed during a tour of New Zealand in 1948; second, he is trying to find a good New Zealand rosé wine; and third, not least, he is on the _qui vive_ for erotic opportunities. His first impressions of the local men are of a shabby sexlessness:

New Zealand males seem to have discovered the secret of the cockless crotch. As they walk about in shorts or trousers there is never any suggestion, not even with the faintest shadow, let alone a bulge, that they have anything between their legs. The only other place I've encountered this complete effacement of dong was Austria.

(Fallowell 2008: 59)

Fallowell is not being entirely flippant when affecting to be confused by local men's fashions and attitudes: 'Two fat men are approaching in brand-new stetsons, sunglasses, blue jeans, and their bumfreezer jackets are zipped up, emphasizing huge bellies. One of them sports a bracelet'. In what proves to be a consistently ambiguous culture, to which he is new, he asks the necessary question: 'Would these be Auckland homosexuals? Or country farmers doing the town? It's impossible to tell' (ibid.: 13). The uniforms of sexual and professional identity often overlap, but when one travels away from home, they are likely to be more confusing than ever. For all his levity, Fallowell is no more at ease with sexual uniforms than he is with fixed sexual identities.

A fruitless visit to Dunedin's gay sauna prompts a reflection on the rewards of previous, but still recent, configurations of same-sex desire:

I caught the tail-end of it, all those easy-going bisexual lads in London and Rome and Istanbul. Why is everyone in a category now? It's confusing – the movements for racial equality and sexual liberation have been among the top stories of my times, and at the end of it what happens? You have to tick a box defining your ethnicity and sexual orientation.

(Ibid.: 141)

He makes the mistake of ticking such a box when, in Takaka, he books into 'a gay farm'. At once he finds its insistent gayness oppressive. Muttering an apology, he makes his escape. 'I believe I've just had an attack of homosexual panic, the thing that judges say excuses the murder of gays by violent thugs' (ibid.: 216). More to his taste, because more in line with his looser theorization of transcultural sexualities, are the operations of contingency. If not a gay farm, an ordinary hotel: 'Crikey, I've fallen for the hotel barman. He's cuddly and muscly with a hint of naughtiness. I make a slight reference to one of my adventures in Sicily, so he may deduce my orientation' (ibid.: 148). And so it continues . . .

Writing in 2000, Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan argued that, 'now that homosexuality is no longer intrinsically transgressive in white cultures [ _sic_ ], gay travel has become a field in its own right, connected with guiding gay travelers to favourable locales', apparently blind to the continuing presence of prolific homophobia in Western societies (Holland and Huggan 2000: 134). In fact, as a queer person, to move into any unfamiliar space is still potentially to court risk. Where do you feel safe, flirting with a stranger of the same sex? The migrations outlined in Edmund White's book still occur, even within a nation as small as the UK: lesbians move from small towns like Mansfield to cities like Nottingham to reduce risk. People from Nottingham move to Brighton (say) or London for a more accepting social environment. In the end it comes down to this test: where do you feel safe, holding hands with your same-sex lover? (If you are both thirteen? Or eighty? If you are a mixed-race couple? Or a cross-generational couple? If either is disabled?) Think, then, how much more complicated it must be to travel beyond the familiar risks of your own nation, into a place where nuances of language and behaviour are unclear to you.

For gay travel writing to have meaning as a current genre, it must reflect such complications. It must to some extent recognise the intrinsic relevance of sexuality to travel; must acknowledge the relevance of the reader's sexuality to the practice of reading; and should be addressed to such readers by an author who is open about his own sexuality. The books I discuss in this chapter are immersive accounts of travel in that each author does more than merely observe, with apparent objectivity, the appearances and customs of people in the places he visits. Queerness becomes an issue here, not merely as an identity the traveller carries with him but as a manner of relating to people from elsewhere. It may also offer a way of exploring other configurations of desire in other cultures. The ultimate purpose and value of the category 'gay travel writing' is not simply to tick the boxes of Western identity politics, but to suggest more varied ways of living.

**Select bibliography**

Aldrich, R. (1993) _The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy_ , London: Routledge.

Burton, R. (1970) 'Terminal Essay', in B. Reade (ed.), _Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900_ , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Fallowell, D. (1995) _One Hot Summer in St. Petersburg_ , London: Vintage.

Fallowell, D. (2008) _Going As Far as I Can: The Ultimate Travel Book_ , London: Profile.

Foster, S.W. (1990) 'Travel and Exploration', in W.R. Dynes (ed.), _Encyclopedia of Homosexuality_ , Chicago, IL: St. James Press.

Holland, P. and Huggan, G. (2000) 'Transgression, Performativity, and the Gay Male Traveling Subject', in _Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing_ , Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Kadushin, R. (ed.) (2004) _Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing_ , Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Moss, R.T. (1997) _Cleopatra's Wedding Present: Travels through Syria_ , London: Duckworth.

Rousseau, G.S. (1995) 'Travel Literature', in C.J. Summers (ed.), _The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader's Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present_ , New York: Henry Holt.

Schneebaum, T. (1969) _Keep the River on Your Right_ , New York: Grove.

Van Gelder, L. and Brandt, P.R. (1992) _Are You Two . . . Together? A Gay and Lesbian Guide to Europe_ , London: Virago.

White, E. (1981) _States of Desire: Travels in Gay America_ , New York: Bantam.
Part IV

IMAGINED GEOGRAPHIES

Ultima Thule / The North

_Graham Huggan_

Everyone carries their own idea of north within them.

Peter Davidson, _The Idea of North_

Travel writers have long been fascinated by the north, which is as much an idea as it is a place, and which functions as a synonym for travel as well as writing. To write, says Canadian novelist and poet Robert Kroetsch, is 'in some metaphoric sense, to go North. To go North is, in some metaphoric sense, to write' (quoted in Grace 2001: 19). Ultima Thule functions as a multivalent symbol for both the inherent elusiveness and imaginative freedom of these emotionally febrile northward journeys. Long since a phantasmal traveller's goal, Thule is also a cumulative literary creation, replete with boastful stories claiming to have discovered the northernmost place in the known world. Thule has been an object of considerable dispute since the time of the ancients, with much unseemly squabbling over the authenticity of the Greek navigator Pytheas's now lost accounts of his pioneering northern journeys, seen by some of their later compilers and interpreters as little more than colourful yarns. As Joanna Kavenna reports in her 2005 travelogue _The Ice Museum_ , Thule registered alternately, for both the Romans and the Greeks, either as 'the most remote of all those [northern] lands recorded [to date]' (Kavenna 2006: 3) or a fable concocted by charlatans looking to exploit people's strategic willingness to believe that theirs was the ultimate discovery – or that theirs was the more northerly country in the world. Consequently there are as many tales as there are Thules; so many in fact that Thule has become a composite metaphor for the inexhaustible process of storytelling. One tale generates another, each telling of Thule: as a place of mysteries and wonders, a distillation of northern myths and fantasies, but also, at the same time, a reminder of their imaginative limits – and an implicit warning about the boundaries of knowledge itself. Thulean fables are the stuff of travel writing, presenting mesmerizing journeys of body and mind that consistently blur the lines between 'actual' and 'imaginary' travel, and conjuring up unlikely – if not necessarily disprovable – stories that may present themselves as pure fiction, but are much more likely to play fast and loose with fact.

In what follows, I track some of these stories – these 'Thule tales' – through three recent northern travelogues by the British writers Joanna Kavenna, Gavin Francis, and Peter Davidson. In each case, a journey to the high north (sub-Arctic Europe for Kavenna and Francis, a wide selection of high-latitude locations for Davidson) offers an opportunity to explore northern myths and histories, to contemplate the familiar narratives that contain them and, by association, to reflect upon the imaginatively empowering – restorative and regenerative – capacities of travel writing itself. In this last sense, Davidson's _Idea of North_ (2005), Francis's _True North: Travels in Artic Europe_ (2008), and Kavenna's _Ice Museum_ (2005) may all be read as modern exercises in meta-travel writing although, as I will argue, most contemporary travel writing is defined at least in part by its suitably restless capacity to reflect on itself. More specifically, I argue that recent travel writing often fuses the properties of _cultural history_ and _imaginative geography_. My general hypothesis is that travel writing – at least as it is recognized today – is a more or less systematic combination of cultural history and imaginative geography in which the attributed experience of place is mediated, even conditioned, by previous knowledge; and in which the transcription of that knowledge involves the tracing of a topography both real and imagined, a multi-layered literary as well as historical record of phenomenological (physical, psychological, phantasmatic) encounters with the spirit of place.

**Cultural histories, imaginative geographies**

Cultural historians have long acknowledged the study of travel to be a rich site for the examination of constructivist views of culture (the increasingly normative idea that scholars construct their own objects of study) and performative views of individual and collective identity (the by now equally orthodox notion that identities are made, not given, and are frequently fashioned on the hoof). Travel history, argues Peter Burke in his wide-ranging study _What Is Cultural History_? (2004), has been enjoying a boom since the early 1980s as part of the wider 'cultural turn' in anthropology, geography, political science, and psychology. These disciplines all feed into what Burke dubs the 'New Cultural History' (NCH), a congeries of approaches loosely brought together by their interest in the symbolic and their frequent emphasis on the affective aspects of culture, on specific, historically situated 'mentalities, assumptions or feelings rather than [abstract] ideas or [general] systems of thought' (Burke 2008: 49–50). Heavily influenced by the discourse theory of Michel Foucault, NCH has turned 'culture' into the sum of changing historical _practices_ , often refracted through cultural memory and histories of the body, and generally characterized by discontinuities rather than developments and misunderstandings brought about by radically different, sometimes incommensurable, forms of cultural perception, both of the other and the self.

It is easy to see, even from this desultory list, why historians of the NCH school should be interested in histories of travel, the cultural encounters they instantiate, and the social imaginary they engage with: the broad spectrum of ways in which people and places are imagined through processes of travel, and in which travel writing – in its typically unreliable guise as the subjective inscription of these histories – comes effectively to produce the people and places it purports to represent (Burke 2008; see also Pratt 1992). What is perhaps harder to recognize is that it is not just the _study_ of travel writing that is amenable to cultural history; rather, travel writing is _itself_ a form of cultural history. Travel writing's abiding curiosity for cultural difference; its deep interest in cultural identities, attitudes and values; and, perhaps above all, its overriding concern for cross-cultural _representation_ , for the various means and mechanisms by which distinct cultural practices are translated over time and across space – all of these suggest that it might be seen as a particular if eccentric branch of cultural history, and one which seems to share cultural history's understanding that the narrativization of culture requires a degree of experimentation in narrative voice, narrative perspective, and narrative form (Burke 2008: 123).

To see travel writing as a branch of cultural history is not to condone its frequent _lack_ of historical context or its more-than-occasional propensity for crude forms of cultural essentialism, but it might help guard against hasty dismissals of the genre per se as historically inept and culturally misinforming; against criticisms, too, that it has no feeling for the constitutive ambiguities of culture: hybrid cultural identities, syncretic cultural beliefs, mixed cultural attitudes and values, cross-pollinated cultural forms. On the contrary, travel writing – or at least travel writing at its best – demonstrates great sensitivity to what might be described, NCH-style, as the _contingencies_ of culture as well as to the cognitive _limits_ of its imaginings of different cultures, imaginings discursively fashioned within sets of historical and geographical parameters that are readily acknowledged as having ideological force.

This brings me to the second of my contentions, that travel writing is a self-reflexive exercise in _imaginative geography_. This might seem banal were it not for the fact that imaginative geography remains an under-studied notion, more frequently invoked than properly comprehended. Probably its best-known exposition is in Edward Said's 1978 study _Orientalism_ , which defines imaginative geography in terms of those forms of suppositional knowledge that are used to distinguish one social/cultural group from another by associating putatively intractable differences of _mentality_ with equally unexamined perceptions of bounded _territory_. As Said puts it with his customary clarity:

It is perfectly possible to argue that some distinctive objects are made by the mind, and that these objects, while appearing to exist objectively, have only a fictional reality. A group of people living on a few acres of land will set up boundaries between their land and its immediate surroundings and the territory beyond, which they call 'the land of the barbarians'. In other words, this universal practice of designating in one's mind a familiar space which is 'ours' and an unfamiliar space beyond 'ours' which is 'theirs' is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. I use the word 'arbitrary' here because imaginative geography of the 'our land-barbarian land' variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for 'us' to set up these boundaries in our own minds; 'they' become 'they' accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from 'ours'.

(Said 1978: 56)

Said concludes from this that both modern and 'primitive' societies 'derive a sense of their identities negatively', and that imaginative geography aids and abets that process by making distinctions between the foreign and the familiar in which 'all kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the unfamiliar space outside one's own' (1978: 56). Said then amplifies his point by showing some of the ways in which imaginative geography provides a stage for the playing out of personal and political fantasies, a template for the legitimation of controlling forms of knowledge, and a back-up for the kind of 'textual attitude' that reinforces existing views of the world (1978: 93–4).

This last phrase of Said's ('textual attitude') is worth dwelling on here. As an experienced literary scholar, Said is well attuned to the different ways in which works of imaginative literature can authorize knowledge that is either demonstrably false or empirically unproven. One of his main examples, tellingly enough, is the travel book, which is:

about as 'natural' a text, as logical in [its] imposition and in [its] use, as any book one can think of, precisely because of [the] human tendency to fall back on a text when the uncertainty of travel in strange parts seem to threaten one's equanimity.

(Ibid.: 93)

The guiding function of the travel book lends it an authority it does not necessarily deserve, prompting its readers to attribute an expertise to its author that may be equally unwarranted (ibid.: 93–4). I think Said underestimates the capacity of readers of travel books to sift fact from fiction in a genre that is historically well known for blurring the boundaries between them, but his general point still holds. Texts like travel books that claim to 'contain knowledge about something actual' may end up 'creat[ing] not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe' (ibid.: 94). Through a process Said calls the 'dialectics of reinforcement' (ibid.: 94), people and places conform to what has already been read about them, to the extent that disappointment ensues when reality turns out not to match the textual expectations that have been previously been created of it. As Said suggests, 'many travellers find themselves saying of an experience in a new country that it wasn't what they expected, meaning that it wasn't what the book said it would be' (ibid.: 93).

As previously suggested, one primary medium through which this 'textual attitude' is produced is imaginative geography, which relies on received as much as new knowledge, and is paradoxically _un_ imaginative in the sense that it tends to support what the perceiver thinks he/she already knows. Imaginative geography, however, does not replace the real; it exists alongside and in dialogue with it. As several of Said's critics have pointed out, his work – especially _Orientalism_ – shifts uneasily between apparently incompatible theoretical registers (see Ahmad 1992; Lazarus 2011). One register corresponds to a _conventional_ regime, which holds to the view that places, and the people who inhabit them, are discursively produced via the repeating strategies of dominant systems of representation, e.g. Orientalism; while another is governed by a _realist_ regime, which claims that it is possible for these places and people to be 'truthfully' represented, e.g. by documentary means. Said is vulnerable to this criticism – as Lazarus rightly says, _Orientalism_ never seems quite sure whether or not the Orient actually exists (2011: 196) – but it certainly accords well with the reach of imaginative geography, which is more than capable of accommodating _imagined_ (but real) and _imaginary_ (therefore unreal) topography, and which runs the gamut from places that actually exist, and are imaginatively recreated, to places that have never existed and never will.

However, even the imaginary dimensions of imaginative geography are bound by the limits of a discourse in which foreign places/people are seen through domestic eyes and translated for domestic purposes. Chloe Chard, in her excellent 1999 study of the seventeenth-century Grand Tour, _Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830_ , sees it as one of the tasks of travel writing to translate these 'topographies of the foreign' into a discourse that controls them without diminishing their charming effect on the reader – the discourse of imaginative geography, which she defines (after Christian Jacob) as a set of rhetorical strategies for the mapping out of individual and collective 'aspirations, affective memories, [and] desires' (Jacob, quoted in Chard 1999: 10). Like Said, Chard sees imaginative geography less as a unified discourse than as a rough patchwork of intersecting discourses in which particular modes of travel (the journey, the tour, the adventure) interact with the various aesthetic and cultural regimes (Orientalism, primitivism, the Romantic sublime) that are brought to bear upon them. Also like Said, Chard stresses the formative role of literature in shaping not just the sensibilities but also the experiences of travellers, with the Grand Tour being a conspicuously 'literary' mode of travel in which travelling, writing, and reading all complement one another, and quoting canonical texts is as much part of the performance as visiting approved sites (ibid.: 21).

To see travel writing, as Chard does, as a powerful vehicle for imaginative geography is not to overlook its historical dimensions. On the contrary, travel writing nearly always involves some historical sense of experience of place and some historically informed understanding of how 'topographies of the foreign', and the disparate meanings attributed to them, may change quite dramatically from time to time just as they are interpreted very differently from place to place. Chard's emphasis on topography nevertheless suggests the value of a _phenomenological_ approach to travel writing in which the felt experience of place, heavily mediated though it is through numerous – often literary – sources, comes to take precedence over specific details of itinerary, the plotted journey from one place to another (and back again) that is conventionally understood as being at the centre of the travel book.

**Ideas of North**

Of the three travel books I want to discuss here, Peter Davidson's _The Idea of North_ is the most difficult to assimilate to conventional plot-driven understandings of travel writing. For one thing, it belongs to Reaktion Books' 'Topographics' series, which explicitly announces that it is 'distinct from travel literature' in so far as 'it does not depend on a journey to supply the plot'; instead, its editors suggest, the series aims to 'mingle analysis with anecdote, criticism with original expressive writing, to explore the creative collision between physical space and the human mind' (Davidson 2005: back-cover flap). Moreover, Davidson's text, which admirably matches the series remit, presents itself as a kind of cabinet of curiosities in which that quietly effective counter-image of the traveller, the collector, operates as a guiding metaphor, and in which words and images, treasured as much as people, animals, and objects, all come together in an artfully embellished assortment of juxtaposed exhibits of a real/imagined north.

However, while _The Idea of North_ may not be a travel text in the _literal_ sense, it is certainly one in the _literary_ sense: a powerfully emotive assemblage of disparate textual references, many of them seeking to account for the 'otherness of the diabolic north' (ibid.: 46). The _doubleness_ of the north might be more accurate. For as Davidson's pleasingly diverse selection of literary-historical allusions and anecdotes illustrates, the north is both a _profane_ space, destructive and malign, either cruelly plunged into the dark or insidiously threatened by approaching darkness, and a _sacred_ one, a region in which to clarify and purify the spirit, and a place of beneficent transition in which the high north, in particular, functions as a kind of way station, a bridging territory between the world of the living and the world of the dead (ibid.: 47, 59, 64, 121). The north comprises a vast, internally differentiated realm that includes both all-too-real and preposterously imagined places. This realm simultaneously draws in and casts out the physical/mental traveller. The north may be fascinatingly compulsive, but it is also dangerously deceptive. To go north, Davidson implies, is to go as far as one can, to reach the outer limits of one's physical and imaginative capacities; but it is also to run the risk of over-reaching them, to step into potentially life-threatening territory where 'beyond the fields we know, there may either be horrors or islands of the blest' (ibid.: 25). As unstable descriptor, 'north' may come itself to signal psychological and emotional instability; as precarious territory, it may end up performing the trick of its own light, which is either forcibly withheld from us or blinds our credulous sight (ibid.: 50).

This view of the north is imaginatively expansive rather than geographically specific – at one point, Davidson refers to the Antarctic as an 'honorary north' (ibid.: 19) – but that is not to say it has no referential value. On the contrary, Davidson's ruminations circle round a clearly identified centre, his adopted home county of Aberdeenshire, the affectionate description of which – austerely beautiful, light-deprived, melancholic – lends material substance to the otherwise ephemeral qualities of 'northernness' found elsewhere in the text. Here, the north is not an imagined 'elsewhere or [. . .] receding absolute' (ibid.: 213–14) but a site of experiential authenticity: to live there is to take a daily journey 'into austerity and truth, a journey that leaves illusions behind [and in which] clarity is fostered in the winter light' (ibid.: 240). The winter light, though, fades out to become the last of Davidson's meteorological metaphors. Davidson, asking himself why he has abandoned the south (England) for the north (Scotland), can find no convincing answers; and the book leaves him – and us – peering into the gathering darkness, pondering the 'hieroglyphics of winter' on a weather webcam (ibid.: 254). This final image, like so many of those that have preceded it, is one of recession: the north does not have enough light to read it by; it tantalizes us – or repels us – with its presence, but it always finds some way of escaping from us, of fading from our sight.

**Norths true and false**

For the writer Gavin Francis, another resident of Scotland, the north is both lived and imagined space, conjuring up landscapes of the mind that replay the tropes of the medieval wonder voyage. As in Davidson's work, the north offers a rich repertoire of conjecture, a treasury of tales – many of them assembled around the continuing mystery that is Ultima Thule – which tell of the colourful exploits of generations of travellers who have been irresistibly drawn to the far regions of the north. To a greater degree than Davidson, however, Francis is interested in gauging these tales' often dubious historical value; and although he insists that _True North_ is 'not a history book' (Francis: 2010: xiv), it is certainly animated and shaped by interpretative records of historical events.

In this and other ways, _True North_ is a classic 'footsteps' travel narrative, assiduously following a route through the northern fringes of Europe that numerous European explorers from both modern and pre-modern times had previously taken in search of 'what they once saw as the very limits of the world' (ibid.: xviii). Thule serves as the organizing metaphor for this mimic voyage: the journey thus begins in the Shetland Islands, one ancient candidate for Thule; it ends in Norway, another more recent rival; and it takes in along the way several further, equally speculative contenders for the name, notably Iceland and Greenland. Thule emerges from the trip as both a catalyst for spiritual enlightenment and an incentive for material enrichment: 'Since the time of Pytheas the word Thule has long been held to be the highest honour by those seeking domination in world affairs' (ibid.: 144).

However, Francis is no more interested in pinning down the 'real' Thule than he is in locating the 'true' north of his title; rather, both of these provide structuring fictions for his own hyperactive forays into myths and histories of the European high north. These forays, entertaining though they are, appear at some level to work towards a sombre cautionary tale in which Thule tests cognitive as much as geographical limits. Like other iterations of the north, Thule continually recedes beyond the horizon, persistently frustrating travellers' attempts to possess it and reminding them of the potentially fatal consequences of their own ambitions (like the north for which it stands, Thule is simultaneously a lure and, for those arrogant enough to be unwary of it, a trap). But Francis's material is too interesting to him to allow himself to be serious for long. There are too many stories to recount, too many legends to recall, too many manuscripts to pore over. Like many of his imagined predecessors, Francis is a scholarly traveller; and while he claims that his underlying motive in journeying north is to 'mirror Europe's own discovery' and, hidden within it, some of the grand 'themes that drive human exploration' (ibid.: xix), it seems clear that his overriding passion is for the transverse links between history, geography, and _textuality_. Geographically dispersed manuscripts, themselves often written by travellers, supply original material for literary and historical reworkings; subsequent writers and scholars then 'jump between' these primary and secondary texts (ibid.: 96). _True North_ , in this last sense, enthusiastically compiles the travelling texts of travelling peoples: pilgrims in search of promised lands; migrants in search of different futures; not-so-golden-boys of empire-building exploration; invading barbarian hordes.

While Francis gives attention to each of these groups, he seems particularly – perhaps predictably – drawn to the exploits of the Vikings, embellished accounts of whose legendary conquests make modern-day Iceland seem rather colourless by comparison: 'Reykjavik felt like a ghost town the wet afternoon I arrived: a grid of rain-splashed empty streets and squat functional buildings. The whole town was grey in the fog' (ibid.: 69). Francis's north is Norse; and it is no surprise to find him, during the next stage of his trip in Greenland, in typically energetic search of that country's Norse (not Inuit) ancestry, imaginatively inhabiting the eleventh and twelfth centuries when 'it was a fabled land filled with wonder and sorcery where men could win great wealth in the hunting fields of the north' (ibid.: 155).

Indeed, all the evidence suggests that Francis is most interested in the past and in the multiple opportunities it provides for imaginative geography; the present is largely disappointing to him. The 'end of Europe' (the title of his last chapter) is just that, as his journey peters out in the upper reaches of Scandinavia, where he seems depressed by tourism's a-historical incursions into a landscape that once drew individual explorers romantically in search of the end of the world (ibid.: 276). Tourism is the last stage in Francis's potted history of European exploration, but though he optimistically traces its roots to 'the flowering of Enlightenment and the advent of [modern] history' (ibid.: 248), he can find little solace in this suspiciously colonialist vision of a world fashioned in European interests. Nor can he subscribe to a European expansionist narrative which, 'spinning [its] thread from the Phoenician and Greek explorers of the North through to the twentieth century' (ibid.: xvi), now risks unravelling just as the idea of Europe – one that struggles to reconcile imperial ambition with cosmopolitan broad-mindedness – seems increasingly undone.1

**Thule tales**

This nostalgia for cosmopolitan Europe can also be seen, if in more critical terms, in Joanna Kavenna's more philosophically inclined account of her northern European journey, _The Ice Museum_ (2006). Kavenna's journey, like Francis's, is structured around a modern-day recapitulation of the semi-mythic quests surrounding Thule's various northern European claimants (specifically, Shetland, Iceland, Norway, and Greenland). Also like Francis, Kavenna sees the contending histories of exploration embedded in these destinations as probing cognitive and experiential limits, for 'the acquisition of knowledge and the craze for exploration [nearly always turn out to] have a dark side' (Kavenna 2006: 31). To a greater extent than Francis, however, Kavenna is interested in what might be described, in NCH mode, as the tangled history of the present: the knotted processes by which ancient mythologies of the north were replaced by a modern quest for knowledge that came equipped with powerful – and often powerfully destructive – myths and fantasies of its own. Today's Europeans, Kavenna suggests, live in the shadow of these myths, several of which are in living memory. Thule, she reminds us, gave its name to a Romantic Aryan cult, buoyed on old mythologies of the north, which would feed later into National Socialism, while the 'pollution [of Thule] with war and violence' (ibid.: 167) can also be seen in the coupled stories of Nansen and Quisling – the national hero and his assistant, the national traitor – and in the similar downfall of their (Norwegian) countryman Knut Hamsun, whose deluded nationalism would eventually push him, like Quisling, to side with the Nazis in order to 'defend the ancient grandeur of the Nordic lands' (ibid.: 195).

As Kavenna shows through such exemplary moral tales, there is something _sad_ about Thule, which continues to inspire melancholic reverie and the nostalgic contemplation of former glories, but also something _mad_ about its capacity to unleash preposterous flights of fancy and hyper-imaginative feats. Both aspects are folded into Kavenna's geographically oriented disquisition on the romantic imagination, which she recognizes as simultaneously having the power to transform and the capacity to distort – both qualities that feature in turn in her own travel writing, which ironically reproduces the same romantic–idealist vocabularies it looks enthusiastically to dissect.

Thule, she says, registers 'an interim point between the familiar and the outlandish' (ibid.: 77). It is a vantage from which to reflect both on the limits of travel writing, which is arguably never so outlandish that it ceases to be familiar, and on the shortcomings of imaginative geography, which begins by substituting 'fictional worlds to compensate for ignorance' (ibid.: 37), only to end by using achieved knowledge to create further fictional territories tailored to its own political and ideological aims.

All of this puts _The Ice Museum_ in the modern invented tradition of the Arctic contemplation, a sub-genre of travelogue perhaps best represented in the recent past by Barry Lopez's _Arctic Dreams_ (1986). Although it lacks the spiritual inflection that this sub-genre customarily carries, _The Ice Museum_ otherwise shares its ecological sympathies and philosophical bent, and this contemplative side comes to the fore in the penultimate journey in the book, which takes Kavenna to the far north of Greenland to confront the 'dual personality Thule': superseded US airbase; faded Inuit settlement (Kavenna 2006: 265). Her experience of both turns out, entirely predictably, to be an anti-climax. What interests her instead is the opportunity to reflect on the imaginative possibilities of suspended time; on the imaginative play afforded by arrested movement (what she had earlier attributed to Nansen as 'exploration through compulsory inertia' [2006: 24]). Above all and paradoxically, she focuses on the seemingly inevitable descent into a kind of imaginative paralysis that cannot help but fantasize about its surroundings, but that invariably falls short of the transformative visions it wishes to create. Imagination becomes almost a desperate act in face of a natural world that appears flatly to reject whatever 'northern' visions – utopian or the reverse – are projected onto it. Thule operates here less as the empty vessel to be filled with meaning than as the blank slate that refuses whatever meanings are inscribed upon it, leaving its perceiver to reflect instead on the violence done in the name of symbolic space.

Svalbard, the last of Kavenna's northern destinations, drives this irony home; it also allows for final reflections on the ironies of a genre (travel writing) that forever struggles against its own utopian impulses, a genre continually outflanked – and outlasted – by the places its fervid geographical imagination seeks to re-present. An equal and opposite irony, of course, is that travel writing contributes to the material transformation of the places it often likes to imagine as unchanging (ibid.: 329; see also Holland and Huggan 1998). This brings me to my last point: that travel writing – at least in its modern sense – is a quintessentially _ironic_ form, aware of the impossibility of its own imagined acts of historical recovery, and inevitably frustrated by its repeated attempts to pin down the 'essence' of place. It is perhaps no surprise then that _The Idea of North_ , _True North_ , and _The Ice Museum_ all bear conspicuously ironic titles. The first consciously multiplies ideas, refusing any sense of fixity or uniformity, while the second mischievously spins 'north' – and 'northern' myths of authenticity – into an intricate web of fables and tall tales. The third, finally, rejects curatorial appreciation of the north: the north as managed object of human knowledge. The latest iteration of 'high north' – the latest version of 'Ultima Thule' – might be as a laboratory for predicting the Earth's future (Kavenna 2006: 312), but such predictions, however feasible and necessary, recede against a continually shifting horizon, much like the idea of north itself. We are left with the warning they contain: that imagination can certainly help to create the real, but not necessarily in conditions of its own choosing. Indeed, as Kavenna tells us, one day the idea of a frozen ocean may itself be a fairytale, 'a story from a vanished world' (ibid.: 330).

**Note**

1 There is no space here to trace the significant investment of all three of my primary texts in shifting ideas of Europe. Suffice to say, in each case, that Europe's northern fringes register the _ideological_ as much as the _geographical_ limits of a space that continues to define itself as an evolving 'project' – though a project which, depending on perspective, is either more necessary than ever or appears increasingly to have run its course. For some historical perspectives, see the essays in Pagden (2002); for some contemporary ones, see Balibar (2004), Bauman (2004), Beck and Grande (2007).

**Select bibliography**

Ahmad, A. (1992) _In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures_ , London: Verso.

Balibar, É. (2004) _We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship_ , Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Bauman, Z. (2004) _Europe: An Unfinished Adventure_ , Cambridge: Polity Press.

Beck, U. and Grande, E. (2007) _Cosmopolitan Europe_ , Cambridge: Polity Press.

Burke, P. (2008) _What is Cultural History?,_ 2004, Cambridge: Polity.

Campbell, M.B. (1988) _The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing_ , _400–1600_ , Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Chard, C. (1999) _Pleasure and Guilt: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1800_ , Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Clifford, J. (1992) 'Traveling Cultures', in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P.A. Treichler (eds), _Cultural Studies_ , New York: Routledge.

Clifford, J. (1997) _Routes: Travel and Translation_ , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Davidson, P. (2005) _The Idea of North_ , London: Reaktion.

Francis, G. (2010) _True North: Travels in Arctic Europe_ , 2008, Edinburgh: Birlinn.

Grace, S. (2001) _Canada and the Idea of North_ , Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Holland, P. and Huggan, G. (1998) _Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing_ , Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Kavenna, J. (2006) _The Ice Museum: In_ _S_ _earch of the_ _L_ _ost_ _L_ _and of Thule_ , 2005, London: Penguin.

Lazarus, N. (2011) _The Postcolonial Unconscious_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pagden, A. (ed.) (2002) _The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pratt, M.L. (1992) _Imperial Eyes: Travel and Transculturation_ , New York: Routledge.

Said, E. (1978) _Orientalism_ , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Said, E. (1983) _The World, the Text, and the Critic_ , New York and London: Vintage.

Europe

_Wendy Bracewell_

The idea that Europe is a continent is an old one, as is the belief that it is distinct from Asia. The resulting opposition has long been a defining element in European identity, despite the fact that these two 'continents' actually form part of a single land mass. References to Europe's boundaries, divisions and component parts can seem equally arbitrary, even paradoxical. What does it imply when Greeks, from a country conventionally lauded as 'Europe's cradle', nonetheless write of a journey to Paris or Vienna as 'going to Europe' (Jezernik 2004: 29)? Or when an American journalist ends a tour southwards, from Kaliningrad through post-socialist Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova, by greeting the minarets of Istanbul with relief: 'I was back in the West' (Applebaum 1995: 305)?

Like all imaginative geographies, Europe's symbolic maps are highly contingent, varying according to perspective and purpose as well as changing over time. There is no one unified mental map of Europe, nor are its cultural coordinates – North, South, East, and West – fixed and immutable. Consequently it often makes less sense to ask 'what is Europe?' than ' _whose_ Europe?' Travel accounts, as the products of explicitly situated knowledge, show very clearly that the world looks different when viewed from different starting points.

Edward Said's far-reaching influence not only popularized the phrase 'imaginative geography' but also prompted much work on the mental maps of Europe generated by travellers from centres of political power and cultural authority, whether London, Paris or Vienna. Precisely how far approaches derived from extra-European colonial relations can appropriately be applied _within_ Europe has prompted considerable debate. Still, the postcolonial impetus did much to turn scholars' attention to the power relationships and ideological assumptions framing much metropolitan travel writing, and to the ways these helped shape imaginative geographies of difference within Europe. Earlier works of cultural history collating travels to a particular destination generally assumed a self-evident fit between physical or political geography and cultural constructs, for instance when discussing the Mediterranean or Scandinavia (e.g. Pemble 1987). Later studies asked, more explicitly, how such concepts as Eastern Europe (Wolff 1994), the Balkans (Todorova 1997) or the European South (Dainotto 2007) were brought into being, with an emphasis on their function as Europe's internal Others in the eyes of (predominantly) French or British elites.

There have been trenchant warnings of the danger of reading travel writing as the manifestation of an imperialist consciousness to the exclusion of all else, but imaginative geography does not need to be reduced to grids of power, or the construction of unitary images of 'the Other'. In one of the most original treatments of the subject, Chloe Chard focused on the rhetoric of pleasure and guilt rather than the intersections of knowledge and power in exploring 'what it was possible to say and write' about 'the foreign' (1999: 13) in the context of the Grand Tour. Equally, Maria Todorova distinguished different images of the Balkans, surveying Italian, Habsburg, German, French and Russian 'discoveries' of the region, as well as British and American ones, while Manfred Pfister has demonstrated the 'pluralization of discourses about Italy' (1996: 6) even within a single national tradition, a fact emphasized by his subtitle, 'The Italies of British Travellers'.

However, the scholarly focus on travellers from Europe's political centres has tended to marginalize the practices and perspectives of those from elsewhere, particularly when such people are viewed primarily as the immobile objects of others' observations, or when their positions (e.g. as 'Balkan') are treated as by-products of discourses originating elsewhere. It is clear that not all mental maps carry the same authority, and that Europe's many Others have had to grapple with categories and coordinates not of their own making. Yet this has not stopped them from travelling and writing, nor has it prevented them from locating themselves with reference to these, or other, locally generated projections for their own purposes. Scholarship is only beginning to come to terms with these issues, and with the complexities of power, agency and cultural exchange revealed in such travel accounts.

This survey of European travel writing's imaginative geographies sketches some of the ways Europe has been delineated and divided in travel writing, whether from its centres or its frontiers, over the past several centuries. It adopts two concepts as analytical tools: the _itinerary,_ the set of routes and sites mapped out by particular intersections of travel and writing; and the _zone_ , culturally defined spaces delineated by textually marked boundaries and characteristics (specifically, for the purposes of this chapter, Europe's North, South, East, West and Centre).

**Itineraries**

European travel writing has had many different sub-genres, usually defined thematically (e.g. the Grand Tour account) or in literary-historical terms (the Romantic travel narrative). Many of these sub-genres can be characterized by their itineraries, each having favoured routes, notable sites, blank spaces and destinations – and, in consequence, their own distinctive ways of representing European space. Here I single out only a few widely shared travel genres and their itineraries, asking how each imagined Europe and its divisions.

The pilgrimage account is one such genre. Pilgrims to the Holy Land, whether Catholic, Orthodox, Armenian or Jewish, construed their journey as a devotional practice that linked the point of departure to their ultimate destination, conceived not only as a specific site (the Holy Sepulchre, Temple Mount) but also a point of direct contact with a living past. In effect, these itineraries mapped out a single sacred space that transcended space and time. In practice, however, frontiers feature dramatically in such texts; for example, the tempestuous sea-crossings that so often represent a spiritual trial for the pilgrim to overcome, but that also underline the physical separation of Europe from the Holy Land. Accounts of devotional pilgrimage within Europe follow much the same logic, though along different routes, and implying different though overlapping cartographies of faith: Catholic Europe, the Orthodox ecumene (and indeed, a Protestant Europe defined in part by the _rejection_ of religious pilgrimage).

The prestige of Rome as a pilgrimage destination implied a 'centripetal' map of Europe: all roads led to this ecclesiastical and cultural centre. From the sixteenth century, members of Europe's educated elite shared the ideal of an Italian tour, with Rome as its goal, whether their journeys were made for spiritual purposes or whether they took a more secular form, inspired by reverence for classical antiquity. The 'Grand Tour' of British, French or Germanic travellers was just one aspect of this Europe-wide tradition. Polish Catholics, Czech Protestants and even Orthodox travellers from Russia and the Balkans also left accounts of their journeys to Rome, with their accounts asserting the travellers' participation in a Europe-wide heritage. Such self-affirming journeys to the centre of a shared civilization bound together even the farthest reaches of Europe in a single imagined space.

However, the centripetal pull of Rome or the Orthodox centres of gravity represented by Constantinople or Kiev was counterbalanced by multi-polar accounts of Europe. These were traced by the itineraries of travel accounts that collated information on Europe's diversity, 'methodized' by apodemic manuals that taught the traveller to see and describe Europe as made up of cities, provinces, states and peoples, each with their own characteristic languages, customs, confessions and climates. The 'varieties of Europe', to borrow the title of a seventeenth-century Hungarian travel account, comprised different but comparable units within a single framework. Both these model itineraries, the centripetal and the multi-polar, afforded a cosmopolitan elite from across the continent a secure position from which to assess Europe and its peculiarities. The coordinates of difference they mapped most consistently were relatively static social and confessional ones. These could be mapped spatially (city versus countryside), even according to political geography ( _cuius regio, eius religio_ ), but they didn't contradict the framework of a Europe that was imagined in common.

This began to shift in the eighteenth century. Enlightenment travel writing is associated above all with overseas voyages of discovery, but the same deliberate pursuit of Otherness also guided enlightened travel accounts of Europe and its parts. State-funded initiatives lay behind some such travels (e.g. Peter Simon Pallas in Russia, or Linnaeus in Lapland), but private individuals, too, recounted their European travels as explorations and discoveries, in regions as diverse as Scandinavia, Russia, Greece and the Levant, Dalmatia, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Indeed, a newly minted eighteenth-century cliché characterized parts of Europe as even more 'unknown' than the territories being mapped by overseas expeditions: the _Critical Review_ commented in 1763 that 'the Hottentots themselves, and the Esquimaux of America, are better known [. . .] than the Spanish Nation is at present' (quoted in Bolufer Peruga 2009: 86); and similar claims were often made about regions such as the Scottish Highlands, Lapland and the Balkans. Unknown to _whom_ was rarely asked. Those described knew perfectly well where they were, and occasionally protested the terms in which they were 'discovered', particularly when travellers explained their idiosyncrasies with reference to Hottentots or to bygone ages.

In this way a new imaginative geography emerged, in which Europe was less a matter of physical geography than a qualitative assessment. Travellers regularly depicted places and peoples as more or less European, judging them according to the criteria of 'reason', 'civilization' or 'progress'. These terms were used in the eighteenth century to differentiate Europe from the other parts of the world; they also made an uncontested Europeanness a characteristic of only certain parts of the continent, while others were graded on a scale which distanced them, both spatially and temporally, from the epicentres of modernity. Significantly, the term 'Europeanized', which first came into use in this period, was originally applied to people dwelling _within_ the geographical confines of Europe; its first recorded use in both English and French comes from travellers in Wallachia and Moldavia (Bracewell 2008).

The equation made between Europe and modernity could also be treated critically, as it was by Romantic travellers who deliberately turned their backs on modern urban uniformity and 'sought an itinerary of locales characterized by originality' (Anghelescu 2004: 173). Their travelogues reversed the values of enlightened explorations: the Romantic authentic and picturesque were simply 'backwardness' romanticized. And despite claims to originality, they followed similar itineraries to earlier enlightened travellers in their pursuit of exotic people, uncorrupted nature and a living past: Spain, Sicily, Albania, Greece, Russia, the Caucasus, Scandinavia, Ireland, the Scottish Highlands. These travellers embraced alterity, even dreamed of renewal through encounters with other ways of life, but such dreams required that European difference should continue to exist, usually in stereotyped form – thus the complaints about 'the progressive shrinkage and degradation of the field of the "exotic"' within Europe (Thompson 2012: 162). And the coordinates used by these travellers still located modernity's Others as being somehow non-European, even if the images conveyed aesthetic pleasure or the thrill of exoticism rather than disparagement.

Such Enlightenment and Romantic imaginative geographies may have fit the self- congratulatory or self-critical agendas of French or British travellers very well, but they were scarcely the only ones contributing to mental maps of European difference. Other travellers also found the itinerary through Europe a way of defending a contested modernity or Europeanness at the expense of others. Germans anxious about asserting their rightful place in Europe were not the only ones who oscillated between this sort of 'compensatory Eurocentrism' and various forms of anti-Westernism (Kontje 2004; Milutinović 2011; Malmborg and Strath 2002). Conversely, travellers from Spain, or southern Italy, or the Balkans or Russia could find it useful to emphasize that Europe lay somewhere beyond their own borders, or even to locate their homelands in terms of Asia, Africa or the Orient. Reformers held up 'Europe' as a model and a goal to achieve, attempted to shame their compatriots out of their putatively less-than-European habits, or vented frustration by comparing them to primitive Tatars, American savages or barbarous Hottentots (see, for example, Moe 2002; Offord 2005; Drace-Francis 2009). Alternatively, nationalist or colonialist agendas could be furthered by re-evaluating pluricultural historical legacies in terms of a desirable hybridity or by laying claim to 'strategically essentialist' non-European difference – as in Spanish re-discoveries of their own African, Arab or Gypsy heritage (Martin-Márquez 2008), Hungarian quests for an Asian past (Köves 2013), or Russian semi-European, semi-Asiatic self-imaginings (Lim 2013).

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imaginative geographies of European difference were thus not simply _imposed_ from Europe's centres onto its peripheries. The agents were too multifarious, the purposes too diverse and the geometry too complex. Furthermore, even if political and economic power could be mapped onto states and metropolitan centres, the cultural capital that underwrote the travels and the books was far too mobile and fluid to be understood in terms of 'centre and periphery'. Elite travellers even from the continent's margins were educated in the same cultural heritage. Instead, travel writing and other forms of representation staged oppositions of a normative Europe and various hemi-semi-demi Europes, and projected this imaginary construct onto the continent's physical map.

However, European travel writing's cartography cannot be reduced to a project of mapping degrees of Europeanness. Europe (and indeed, the world) could be imagined very differently, for instance according to a shifting scale of 'fission and fusion' among essentially equivalent units: a 'grammar of segmentation' rather than an 'orientalizing grammar' of binary difference (Baumann and Gingrich 2004). Here the exemplary itineraries are those explicitly plotted according to political criteria. We are accustomed to identify the European political tour with the reportage of the interwar period, fellow travellers' reports from the Soviet Union or Cold War exchanges (Schweizer 2001; Farley 2010). However, from the French Revolution onwards, engaged travel writers had presented their journeys as mapped from 'a political point of view' (Shelley 1844: viii). To be sure, some such commentators divided Europe into stark categories of 'us and them', asserting affinities or antagonisms according to ideological, cultural or historical categories. Others, however, charted different maps. Radical egalitarians tested their visions of a single humanity divided only by forms of government, for example emphasizing pedestrian itineraries in contrast to travel in a carriage, which 'immediately removes one several degrees from ordinary humankind' (Seume 1806: vi). Similarly, accounts of exilic and expatriate travels and sojourns not only connected a cosmopolitan nineteenth-century 'Liberal International', but also helped reinforce an imagined Europe of unity-in-national-diversity (Isabella 2009; Stock 2010).

If travels abroad mapped a more or less transnational 'Europe of nations' in the nineteenth century, the 'home tour' aimed to give substance to the imagined community of the nation. Patriotic travellers justified their domestic itineraries with reference to foreign travels (the home tour was just as revelatory as travel abroad) or foreign travellers (whose calumnies were inappropriate reading for the patriot). These domestic tours serve diverse functions and interests. They variously attempted to define and fix a 'national spirit', claim people or landscapes for the nation, integrate disparate identities or regions into the polity and erase existing frontiers to trace new maps of national community. Travel accounts had the power to reconstitute a nation that no longer existed as a state, as with Poland after the Partitions, or summon up nations such as the Slavs that did not exist on any political map, tracing their extent but also revealing their internal divisions and hierarchies. Some of these itineraries would subsequently be codified by national guidebooks, intended to educate readers not just in what to see, but how to think about it. As with other itineraries, however, convention also bred parody, brilliantly exemplified, for instance, in Heinrich Heine's treatment of earnest patriotic tourism in his 1826 _Die_ _Harzreise_ ( _The Harz Journey_ ).

Other itineraries have been more directly charged with drawing and policing Europe's divisions, but the results have not always been as straightforward as the routes might suggest. Take the Cold War journey across the Iron Curtain, a demarcation line that is supposed to have reproduced an East–West division of Europe already marked out by the Enlightenment _philosophes_ in a project of 'demi-orientalization' (Wolff 1994: 7). Cold War journeys, in either direction, do indeed insist obsessively on the boundary between the two halves of the continent, though by the mid-twentieth century the primary criterion had become ideological rather than cultural (and because cultural, supposedly innate). This had interesting effects. A common strategy, among travellers from both camps, was that of noting East–West political polarization, while simultaneously foregrounding the shared humanity of ordinary citizens across this divide, whether this is framed as 'working-class solidarity' and 'proletarian internationalism' or else as 'universal human nature' manifested in the petty concerns and pleasures of everyday life (Guentcheva 2008). Paradoxically, to this extent at least, the socio-political geography of the Cold War travel account might be said to have _de_ -Orientalized Eastern Europe.

Other itineraries, and other maps, could be multiplied. There were routes across the continent that deviated from the widely shared variants described here, whether these took the form of counter-itineraries, deliberately chosen to contest or subvert dominant regimes of representation, or whether they followed more idiosyncratic signposts. And the traveller's awareness of competing mappings and perspectives could sometimes work to disrupt more conventional geographical understandings, for instance in those diasporic itineraries that oscillate between old and new homelands, blurring the distinction between home and abroad, known and unknown, self and Other (Garrett 2003). Equally, explorations of a multi-ethnic, creolized home in the postcolonial or globalized metropolis have generated alternative mappings of 'domestic' spaces as both familiar _and_ exotic, both here and there (Forsdick 2005).

The widely shared itineraries surveyed here produced strikingly similar imaginative geographies. But we should not forget that when applied, they could produce very different effects. Spanish and French travellers might agree that Andalucia was Oriental and Other, but did so within competing national discourses. Similarly, while a Romanian and a Bosnian could both present a Spanish Orient as disconcertingly _familiar_ , Mihail Kogălniceanu saw in a shared heritage of Islamic rule the possibility of reimagining his own country in a Romantic mode (Tudorică Impey 1997), but Zuko Džumhur (1982) deflated any such direct legacy by instead recognizing in the Alhambra an architectural model imported into Bosnia by nineteenth-century Habsburg Orientalism. The Italian Mario Praz, in his debunking counter-itinerary of 1928, would even paradoxically re-Orientalize his 'unromantic' Spain (monotonous, provincial) by emphasizing the influence of Arabic art (formulaic, repetitive). Viewed across different traditions, what looks like a stable, taken-for-granted imaginative topography of Romantic, Oriental Spain turns out to be far more complex, and this is also true of other maps.

**Zones**

Zones such as Romantic Spain, the Balkans or the Mediterranean are built up through the constant repetition of sites and experiences, and the accretion or sedimentation of standard images. Such zones are cultural and textual constructions, and need to be understood in 'ideological and mythical, rather than merely geographical, terms' (Holland and Huggan 2000: 68). Lisle's complaint that the analysis of such zones reproduces, rather than challenges the 'discourse of modern cartography' misses the point: deconstructing the over-written, over-determined character of such zones both deflates their air of inevitability and highlights the ways travellers deployed them for their own varied agendas. Examining the construction and manipulation of Europe's North, South, East and West reveals these zones, only ostensibly geographical, as anything but 'measurable, divisible, immutable' (Lisle 2006: 187).

To illustrate: large parts of the 'Eastern Europe' of nineteenth-century French or British travellers could at the same time be 'the West' in Russian eyes. While this clash of perspectives encouraged the emergence of 'Central Europe', its periodic existence and its very location have depended on whose interests it was defending, and from what direction the threat came. Perhaps none of this is surprising: after all, East and West are relative coordinates, as are North and South, and the meridian or equatorial division depends on the position and the purposes of the cartographer. However, these coordinates have also been defined in terms of symmetrically opposed cultural attributes, each with its own history, often reaching back to antiquity (e.g. Southern civilization opposed to Northern barbarism – or alternatively, the North's uncorrupted innocence). Europe's geographical 'zoning' is shaped by this logic of binary opposition, but it also has a history which reflects specific circumstances and choices.

Both travellers and historians of Europe have debated where the North, South, East or West begins. Historians, however, have not always paid enough attention to how and when these and similar terms have actually been used. It is not enough to see the concept in operation and to supply the terminology anachronistically. Names matter: they carry their histories with them. A survey shows just how ambiguous these zones could be, while simultaneously exposing the myth of Europe as a separate, self-contained entity. Classical tradition initially positioned the Occident as the opposite of a non-European Orient, though the later division between Latin West and Greek East complicated the continental opposition, given the geographical spread of Byzantium and Orthodoxy in Europe and Asia. It was only gradually, particularly in humanist discourse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that the terminology of 'Europe' succeeded that of 'Christendom', specifically in opposition to the 'Asiatic Turk', though at the same time Ottoman expansion implanted the 'Orient' in Europe's east. From the sixteenth century on, Western travellers saw, or expected to see, the characteristics of the Orient when crossing into 'Turkey in Europe', and the use of the designation 'Oriental' for south-eastern Europe continued into the twentieth century, for instance as _l'_ _Orient européen_ , with rather different connotations from _Europe orientale, Osteuropa_ or Eastern Europe. Little wonder that Greeks and others spoke of travelling to 'Europe'. Simultaneously, Muscovy was both 'northern' and associated with Asia, by association with Tatars and 'Oriental' despotism. However, despite the disparaging language of barbarism used by Western travellers through the eighteenth century for the 'uncultivated' peoples of Europe's eastern marches, and the associations made with Asia and the Orient, 'Eastern Europe' as a generalizing term only came into habitual use in the nineteenth century among French and German observers (Adamovsky 2006); only rarely to be adopted by the peoples so located as self-ascription.

Instead of East and West, from the early modern period through the eighteenth century the more significant zones of geo-cultural demarcation were those of North and South, deriving authority from Classical sources and mapped onto other divisions: the dispute between Ancients and Moderns, the Catholic–Protestant divide, the European balance of power. Though the qualities associated with each zone were symmetrically defined, their valence could be reversed according to perspective and purpose: Northern barbarism or rude liberty versus Southern civilization or decadence. The dividing line between these zones lay where the traveller chose, according to purpose: the Alps, the Romance–Germanic linguistic frontier, climate, or some other criterion. Inconvenient geographical location posed no problem in such generalizing schemes: northern European Catholic Poles could still figure themselves as the civilized South to the Russian North.

Here too, intra-European polarities were not always differentiated from those that opposed Europe to Asia. Thus, when in 1748 Montesquieu theorized the causes of European human diversity in terms of climate, he introduced a striking overlap between South and East, and Europe's internal and external others: asserting the moral superiority, first, of Europe's cold North over its hot South; then, of temperate Europe as a whole over the peoples of the South in the Indies and the peoples of the East in Asia; and then in a final move superimposing the traits associated with the Indies and Asia on those of the European South, which became another internal European Orient (Moe 2002; Dainotto 2007). Just as travellers could locate Russia as both Northern and Asiatic, so too Spain and Italy could be simultaneously Southern, African and Oriental. Victor Hugo seemed to appeal to history and ethnography when he remarked in 1828 that 'Spain is still the Orient: Spain is half African, Africa is half Asiatic' (quoted in Domínguez 2006: 426), but the comment recycled long-standing commonplaces.

A broad eighteenth-century definition of the North, which (depending on the traveller's starting point) could include Britain, the Low Countries, Switzerland and Germany, the Nordic countries, Poland and Russia, only gradually shifted in the nineteenth century to produce a much-reduced North and an Eastern European zone labelled as such, largely as a result of new Slavic and Scandinavian ideologies and the decreasing threat of Ottoman power (Lemberg 1985). The backward, barbarous image associated with the North could now be combined with the Oriental or Asiatic characteristics already associated with Russia and the Balkans and applied to a newly cohesive 'Eastern Europe', while the German and Scandinavian North could be left as sublime, democratic and original. While Eastern Europe and the West (gradually also expanding its reach out of Europe) exerted a powerful influence on the European geographical imagination through the twentieth century, North and South also continued to function as important symbolic zones, to the extent that the concept has now moved back out of Europe to supply the shorthand for post-Cold War divisions of the world: the Global South.

What further complicates the idea of geographical zones in Europe is the fact that the polarities associated with a cultural compass were applied independently of a wider geography. North–South or East–West could be applied fractally, within any given area, repeating the same patterns of explanation on a diminishing scale. Thus both foreign and Italian travellers relied on a wider European North and semi-European South to interpret Italian specificities (and justify their own agendas), producing an Italian South within Europe's South; while Hans Christian Anderson visited Spain as a man of the North seeking Southern authenticity, but then reproduced these distinctions at the Spanish level, differentiating between boringly familiar and up-to-date Barcelona in the North and excitingly Southern and Oriental Andalusia (Cifuentes 2007). Similarly, insiders and outsiders could operate geo-cultural '-isms' as graded or 'nesting' technologies of differentiation: sometimes intensifying degrees of difference with distance (e.g. from a merely 'free' to a 'wild' North); sometimes off-loading difference consecutively onto each neighbouring territory or culture (Bakić-Hayden 1995); sometimes undermining the expectation of difference by its infinite deferral.

An example of this last possibility is found in Hamilton Fish Armstrong's _Where the East Begins_ (1929), in which the Balkan East repeatedly slips just beyond the next border, until it becomes the West – a realization sparked in Istanbul when the music he hears is an American popular hit with its own ironic geo-cultural freight: 'Valencia'. This returns us to Anne Applebaum's return to 'the West' in Istanbul, cited at the beginning of this chapter, and prompts the reader to recognize it too as ironic, though reinforcing rather than undermining the message of essential difference. Such rhetorical manoeuvres, and the varying purposes identified in many of these representations, suggest that it is important not to overestimate the absolute power exerted by imaginative geographies. They reveal the 'common-places' that have shaped a society's or an era's topographical imagination, but they are not the mere reflection of a collective imagination, whether this is understood nationally, socially or in other terms. Like maps and compasses, they helped travellers (and readers) locate themselves with reference to conventional cardinal points, and gave borrowed authority to their perceptions and generalizations. Yet, at the same time, the individuals who used these maps both travelled and wrote for particular purposes: their choices – as well as the constraints on them – helped shape the ways Europe could be imagined.

**Select bibliography**

Adamovsky, E. (2006) _Euro-Orientalism: Liberal Ideology and the Image of Russia in France_ , Oxford: Peter Lang.

Anghelescu, M. (2004) 'Romantic Travel Narratives', inS.P. Sondrup (ed.), _Expanding Borders: Studies in Nonfictional Romantic Prose_ , Amsterdam/Philadelphia:John Benjamins Publishing.

Applebaum, A. (1995) _Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe_ , New York: Pantheon.

Bakić-Hayden, M. (1995) 'NestingOrientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia', _Slavic Review_ 54(4): 917–931.

Baumann, G. and Gingrich, A. (2004) _Grammars of Identity/Alterity:_ _A_ _Structural Approach_ , Oxford: Berghahn.

Bolufer Peruga, M. (2009) 'Between Two Shores: Travellers as Cultural Mediators. The Journey to Spain in the Eighteenth Century', _Acta Histriae_ 17(1–2): 83–102.

Bracewell, W. (2008) 'The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing', in W. Bracewell and A. Drace-Francis (eds), _Under Eastern Eyes:_ _A_ _Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe_. Budapest: CEU Press.

Chard, C. (1999) _Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830_ ,Manchester:Manchester University Press.

Cifuentes, L.F. (2007) 'Southern Exposure: Early Tourism and Spanish National Identity', _Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies_ 13(2–3): 133–148.

Dainotto, R.M. (2007) _Europe (in Theory),_ Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Domínguez, C. (2006), 'The South European Orient: A Comparative Reflection on Space in Literary History', _Modern Language Quarterly_ 67(4): 419–449.

Drace-Francis, A. (2009) 'Dinicu Golescu's "Account of My Travels" (1826): Eurotopia as Manifesto', in W. Bracewell and A. Drace-Francis (eds), _Balkan Departures_ , Oxford and New York: Berghahn.

Džumhur, Z. (1982) _Hodoljublja_ , Zagreb: Znanje.

Farley, D. (2010) _Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad,_ Columbia: Mississippi University Press.

Forsdick, C. (2005) _Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Garrett, L. (2003) _Journeys beyond the Pale:_ _Yiddish Travel Writing in the Modern World_ , Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Guentcheva, R. (2008) 'Images of the West inBulgarian TravelWriting during Socialism (1945–1989)', in W. Bracewell and A. Drace-Francis (eds), _Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe_ , Budapest: CEU Press.

Holland, P. and Huggan, G. (2000) _Touristswith Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing_ , Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Isabella, M. (2009) _Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Emigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jezernik, B. (2004) _WildEurope: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers_ , London: Saqi Books.

Kontje, T. (2004) _German Orientalisms_ , Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Köves, M. (2013), 'Modes of Orientalism in Hungarian letters and learning of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries', in J. Hodkinson, J. Walker, S. Mazumdar and J. Feichtinger (eds), _Deploying Orientalism in European Culture and History: from Germany to Central and Eastern Europe_ ,Rochester and NY: Camden House.

Lemberg, H. (1985) 'Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffe im 19. Jahrhundert. Vom "Norden" zum "Osten" Europas', _Jahrbücher fur Geschichte Ost-Europas_ 33: 48–81.

Lim, S. (2013) _China and Japan in the Russian Imagination, 1685–1922_ , London: Routledge.

Lisle, D. (2006) _The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Malmborg, M. and Strath, B. (eds) (2002) _The Meaning of Europe_ , London: Berg.

Martin-Márquez, S. (2008) _Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism_ _in Africa and the Performance of Identity_ , New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press.

Milutinović, Z. (2011) _Getting Over Europe: The Construction of Europe in Serbian Culture_ , Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Moe, N. (2002) _TheView fromVesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question,_ Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Offord, D. (2005) _Journeysto a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing,_ Dordrecht: Springer.

Pemble, J. (1987) _The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South,_ Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pfister, M. (ed.) (1996) _The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers,_ Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Praz, M. (1929) _Unromantic Spain_ , 1928, New York: A.A. Knopf.

Schweizer,B. (2001) _Radicals on the Road_ _: the Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s_ , Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Seume, J. (1806) _Mein Sommer 1805_ , Leipzig.

Shelley, M. (1844) _Rambles in Germany and Italy_ , London: Edward Moxon.

Stock, P. (2010) _The Shelley–Byron_ _C_ _ircle and the Idea of Europe_ , London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Thompson, C.W. (2012) _French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Todorova, M. (1997) _Imagining the Balkans_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tudorică Impey, O. (1997) 'An Eastern Gate toward the West: Kogălniceanu and Spain', in K. Treptow (ed.), _Romania and Western Civilization_ , Ias¸i: Center for Romanian Studies.

Wolff, L. (1994) _Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment_ , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

North America / USA

_Susan L. Roberson_

From the beginning of European contact, the place called America (and from 1776 the United States) has been not only a geographic, historical location, but also an 'imagined geography'. Since Columbus first wrote back to Spain about what he found in the Indies, ideas of the 'New World' have been shaped by successive explorers, travellers, visitors, each trying to make sense of what they saw and experienced. Through their discursive 'maps', imaginings, and metaphors American travel writers have contributed to national conversations about the geographic, geo-cultural, and geopolitical landscapes of America. The similarities in their expressions attest to what Jonathan Raban observes in his own travelogue: 'Every inhabited landscape is a palimpsest, its original parchment nearly blackened with the cross-hatching of successive generations of authors, claiming this place as their own and imposing their designs on it, as if their temporary interpretations would stand forever' (Raban 2010: loc. 259). America, in a sense, is already 'imagined' for many travel writers by the myths, tales, literature, film, and even music that they carry with them in their travels.

Tales of riches haunted the imaginations of the early explorers Coronado and Cabeza de Vaca, searching for the 'Seven Cities of Cibola' and the gold at Apalache in northern Florida. Thomas Hariot and John Smith, initially captivated by images of wealth, became themselves propagandists for future settlers by enumerating the 'commodities' or natural resources available for the taking. Lured West with promises of land and well-being, diarists of the Overland Trail modelled their journals after the guidebooks that pointed a way already charted. Raban points to the persuasive quality of the promotional materials of the railroad companies advertising 'Farming and Mineral Wealth in Great Profusions for MILLIONS OF PEOPLE!' (Raban 2010: loc. 1485) that stirred the imaginations of immigrants headed for the Pacific Northwest. Thus, the idea of America as a land of plenty has been shaped by travel writers from the beginning of European contact.

In addition to the tales and propaganda that shaped a geographic imaginary of economic well-being, travellers brought with them literary references that informed their own working metaphors for America. Many writers, especially those who venture beyond the Mississippi River, have referenced the 1803–1806 exploratory expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Philip Caputo, writing in 2013, commented that he had travelled with Lewis and Clark, 'sharing vicariously in their hardships, their disappointments, their triumphs, their astonishment at a West whose breadth and beauty exceeded anything they could have imagined' (Caputo 2013: 227). But as Raban reminds us, 'Lewis and Clark had arrived in a country that was already well mapped and travelled' by Indians and traders (Raban 2010: loc. 1171). They were not without their own historical palimpsest, making a comparison to Columbus and Captain Cook as they set off into the wilderness (Bakeless 2002: 129). William Least Heat-Moon took Walt Whitman and Black Elk with him as he travelled the 'blue highways' of America and came to understand from Whitman that 'A vast similitude interlocks all', and from Black Elk that ' _To seek the high concord, a man looks not deeper within—he reaches farther out_ ' (Least Heat-Moon 1982: 250–51). To find his way into the northwestern landscape, Raban read George Vancouver, who 'probed the inlets of Washington and British Columbia' in 1792, Lewis and Clark, Theodore Roethke, and Bernard Malamud (Raban 2012: loc. 422, 451, 482). Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and John Steinbeck, other favourite literary companions, provide some of the 'cross hatching' that colours the narratives and imaginations of subsequent American travel writers.

Nineteenth-century literary travel writers like Margaret Fuller and Washington Irving took with them an education in the classics that influenced their interpretations of Native Americans. Irving compares the Osages with the Romans and the 'gaily' dressed Creek with the 'wild Arab' (Irving 1956: 20–22). Fuller compares the Indians' fate to that of the Romans at the same time that she finds a 'Greek splendour, a Greek sweetness' in the Indian brave who 'might be mistaken for Apollo' (Fuller 1991: 33). Even as her education in the classics influences her reading of the Indians of the Old Northwest and the inevitability of their fate, _Summer on the Lakes_ also evidences her reading of Washington Irving, Anna Jameson, Henry Schoolcraft's _Algic Researches_ , and 'a collection of Indian anecdotes and speeches' (Fuller 1991: 21) as she sought a better understanding of the Native Americans she encountered in 1843.

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Baudrillard reference American cinema in their twentieth-century narratives, originally published in 1954 and 1986 respectively. Films 'helped [Beauvoir] anchor [herself] in America': 'It was through these black-and-white images that I first knew America, and I still think of them as its real substance' (Beauvoir 1998: 83). Whereas Beauvoir uses film to make sense of America, for Baudrillard America _is_ a film: 'The unfolding of the desert is infinitely close to the timelessness of film' (Baudrillard 2010: 1). For him the American West or the American city 'seems to have stepped right out of the movies' (Baudrillard 2010: 58), extending rather than countering the hyper-reality of the simulacrum. For Jack Kerouac and Beauvoir, jazz is the quintessential American music form because its riffs suggest the cacophony and blending of America's cultures at the same time that it 'expresses the moment' (Beauvoir 1998: 263), the restlessness of the American character – 'Jazz America' (Kerouac 1955: 204).

As well as referencing and echoing the sources of their imagination of America, travel writers shape their own imaginaries and metaphors for describing America and their travels around this vast country. Out of the many narratives of travel, a few key 'geographies' or metaphors emerge. Early explorers and settlers constructed Commodified Geographies that cast an economic, imperializing eye on the land and its people. For travel across the landscape, two metaphors emerge, compete with each other, and validate the experience of travel to and across the American continent: Geographies of Hardship and Geographies of Awe and Wonder. In search of 'America' on the 'blue highways' (Least Heat-Moon 1982) to small-town America, travel writers construct Geographies of Character as they meet, interview, and interact with the various personalities that make up the American 'character'. Searching for 'democracy' in America, other writers find instead Paradoxical Geographies of Social and Political America. While these metaphors for America can be isolated here, they appear contrapuntally within individual narratives and across time, demonstrating the complexities of travel writing about America. Just as a single piece of travel writing uses the techniques of several genres – autobiography, ethnography, history, geography, and adventure writing – so too a single piece can articulate several imagined geographies.

**Commodified geographies**

Casting an imperializing eye on America and the 'commodities' the land had to offer up or that could be taken, early travellers created a linguistic space in which they enumerated the benefit or value of place. 'Commodity', the term used by Thomas Hariot to define the resources he found in Virginia from 1584 to 1587, articulates meanings of valuation and exchange that promote a rhetoric of capital and colonization, of economic imperialism and power over native inhabitants and natural resources. In his 1493 letter to Luis de Santangel, Christopher Columbus first made note of the fertile land and its possible value for Europeans, the 'many harbours', the 'large tracts of cultivatable lands', 'mines of metals', and a 'population [. . .] without number' (Baym 1999: 12–13). This set the tone for the colonization of the Americas. Thomas Hariot lists the 'commodities' such as silk, alum, fur, soil, corn, tobacco, and herring that could contribute to the 'trafficke and exchange' (Hariot 1590: loc. 64) with England, and also suggests that despite their strange ways, the Indians could 'be brought to civilitie, and the imbracing of true religion' (Hariot 1590: loc. 390). The Indians themselves become a commodity to be used, colonized, and brought to European standards of 'profit'. In the early nineteenth century, Lewis and Clark reconnoitred the land, the flora and fauna, and the native peoples and similarly catalogued the resources of the West, noting for example '318 fish of different kinds' (Bakeless 2002: 47) and the 'great quantity of game [. . .] buffalo, elk, and goats or antelope' (Bakeless 2002: 141). As Mary Louise Pratt has argued, this kind of 'observing and cataloguing of nature' brings rhetorical order to the natural world in ways that anticipate the economic and political control to come (Pratt 1992: 28).

This rhetoric accompanies the moving line of the frontier, as promises of fortune followed settlers from New England, to Michigan, and on to California and the West Coast. In her own ironic style, Caroline Kirkland reveals this promise of fortune and the role of mapping in constructing a commodified geographic imagination:

When my husband purchased two hundred acres of wild land on the banks of this to-be-celebrated stream, and drew with a piece of chalk on the bar-room table at Danforth's the plan of a village, I little thought I was destined to make myself famous by handing down to posterity a faithful record of the advancing fortunes of that favoured spot.

(Kirkland 1990: 4)

Though Isabella Bird decries the devastation to the land caused by 'hard greed, and the exclusive pursuit of gain' (Bird 1879: 23) in the form of mining with 'its destruction and devastation, its digging, burrowing, gulching, and sluicing' (ibid.: 85), the lure of wealth to be extracted from the land, of caches of gold in southwestern mountains (McGrath 1995: loc. 2500–90) continues as a theme of American travel writing. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, 'Fortune has been promised to them somewhere in the West, and to the West they go to find it' (1956: 130).

**Geographies of hardship**

Travel across America, however, did not come without its hardships, as Kirkland attests when she delineates the difficulties of navigating through the mud and bogs of Michigan territory in the early nineteenth century. Though she treats her encounters with the 'Michigan mud-hole' in a humorous vein, the dangers of travel for many were real and dire (Kirkland 1990: 5). The early explorers and settlers certainly met with a harsh landscape and hostile natives. Cabeza de Vaca's sixteenth-century narrative is one of loss, wandering, starvation, and nakedness. He begins by giving an account to King Charles V of Spain 'of the nine years I wandered through many very strange lands, lost and naked' (Cabeza de Vaca 2002: 3). What follows is one ordeal after another, ordeals of 'danger, hunger, storms, and frost' (Cabeza de Vaca 2002: 43), of bad treatment by the Indians, of starvation and deprivation until finally he became a revered healer and then 'rescued' by a band of Spanish soldiers. The Pilgrim writer William Bradford relates the hardships of travel in 'a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men', where he and his companions had 'no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies: no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor' (Baym 1999: 91). While Bradford has religious reasons for recounting the Pilgrims' suffering, he sets up a rhetoric that resounds in American travel writing: the enumeration of negatives, of things not available to the traveller. In Cabeza de Vaca and Bradford, we find two threads that recur in the geographies of hardship: the force of the natural landscape and the trials of travel.

The formidable landscapes of America, its deserts and mountains, canyons, and rivers, present challenges to even the most intrepid travellers. The English traveller Isabella Bird peppers her tale of life in the Rocky Mountains with near-disastrous rides through the wintery terrain. In one episode she tells of being lost in a snow storm: 'The storm was very severe, and the landmarks being blotted out, I lost my way in the snow' (Bird 1879: 91). John Wesley Powell, who surveyed the Colorado River in 1869, not only literally maps the terrain but maps out the dangers of travel down the Green and Colorado Rivers. Having plunged through the rapids of the great rivers and escaped the formidable granite cliffs of the canyon, Powell reflects, 'Ever before us had been an unknown danger, heavier than immediate peril. Every waking hour passed in the Grand Canyon has been one of toil' (Powell 1895: 187). Other travellers were not as fortunate. Sarah Beavis (1783) writes of starvation and near cannibalization on the voyage down the Mississippi River in 1780 after escaping the deprivations by the Indians in Kentucky. Pioneers going west on the Overland Trail counted their progress in part by the number of graves they passed; death was an omnipresent companion in the form of accidents and illness, especially the cholera epidemic that haunted their tracks. One pioneer woman writes that she 'saw a large rattlesnake lying in a bush' and a 'grave dug up by the wolves', from which a rib protruded; grim reminders of the hardships of the terrain (Roberson 1998: 38). And if we consider slave narratives as a subgenre of travel writing, then they are fraught with danger from human slave catchers as well as the natural world as the narrator endeavours to escape slavery and seek safety in the north. Certainly, writing about travel in the American natural world is replete with accounts of the dangers posed by grizzly bears, stampeding buffalo, flooded rivers, inclement weather, worn-out horses, and vanishing food supplies, as well as threats posed by the Indians, desperadoes, and unsavoury types. But they also work to construct an imagined geography of America as a place of adventure, of testing and trials overcome – the quintessential travel narrative becoming the quintessential American story.

The other motif that runs through Geographies of Hardship describes the road itself and travel upon it. As Bradford's complaint indicates, many early visitors were not afforded the comforts of travel to which they were accustomed. Charles Dickens relates his stagecoach trip through Virginia:

The first half-mile of the road is over bridges made of loose planks laid across two parallel poles, which tilt up as the wheels roll over them; and IN the river. The river has a clayey bottom and is full of holes, so that half a horse is constantly disappearing unexpectedly, and can't be found again for some time

(Dickens 1850: loc. 2660–70)

Not only was road travel difficult for nineteenth-century visitors, but accommodations were often rustic, to put it mildly. During her travel through the South, Harriet Martineau learned to catch a bit of sleep as meals were being prepared along the stage route; sometimes she would 'wrap [herself] in [her] cloak, and make a pillow on the floor of my carpet-bag' (Martineau 1838: loc. 3338). After slogging through the mud-holes of Michigan, Kirkland finds that her 'Hotel' was a log cabin and that she had to reach her 'sleeping apartment' by climbing 'a steep and narrow stick-ladder' up to the attic space of the house (Kirkland 1990: 8–9). It is understandable that at a time before efficient transportation systems and interstate highways, before motel chains and fast-food franchises, travel writers would point to the hardships of the road, but it is also interesting that contemporary writers continue the motif.

These writers tell about the quaint places they stayed, the food they ate, troubles with automobiles, and conditions of the road, even the lack of internet access in remote areas. Melanie McGrath tells of engine trouble on Highway 666 somewhere in northwestern New Mexico: 'Driving alone across the void is one thing, breaking down in the void feels significantly different' (McGrath 1995: loc. 1420). Least Heat-Moon reflects on the dangers of the road when he comes upon the Vermillion Cliffs that tested the 1776 Escalante expedition: 'Escalante's struggles gave perspective to the easy passage I'd enjoyed across six thousand miles of America' (Least Heat-Moon 1982: 184). He then relates the most dangerous episode of his journey when he drove into a snow, sleet, and ice storm on a road 'IMPASSIBLE DURING WINTER MONTHS' (Least Heat-Moon 1982: 185–87). Chet Fuller, an African American journalist driving through the South in the late 1970s, relates, 'I did not feel safe travelling in a car in my native region. And no other black person I knew felt any better' (Fuller 1981: 35). For him the dangers of travel are of a human rather than a natural kind. Bill Bryson echoes, rather ironically, the rhetoric of negatives as he looks for small-town America. Of Carbondale he writes, 'But here there was no square to stroll to, no Betty's, no blue-plate specials, no Vern's Midnite Tavern, no movie theater, no bowling alley' (Bryson 1990: 46). Travelling with a Vintage Airstream, named Ethel, which is pulled by a pick-up, named Fred (it seems writers like to name their vehicles, an allusion perhaps to Don Quixote's Rosinante), Caputo notes that 'Beyond the chance of being blown off the road by a passing semitrailer, there were no dangers; [. . .] instead of hardships, we experienced mere inconveniences' (Caputo 2013: 252), which he nonetheless relates to the reader. Much of the adventure of travel is in the going, in the journey itself, the challenge of getting there. If getting there were easy, it would not contain the imaginative value of the journey that challenges and tests the self.

**Geographies of wonder**

Not only a source of danger and hardship, and a site of economic exploitation, the natural world also gives rise to wonder, awe and spiritual reflection. As Yi-Fu Tuan has written, landscape is a 'construct of the mind and of feeling' that 'can take place only in the mind's eye' (quoted in Stowe 2009: 26). One sees what one wants to see, and as Cecilia Tichi posits, 'Americans from poets to songwriters increasingly made the particulars of North American geography into places with spiritual significance', leading inevitably 'to a spiritualizing of American space' (Tichi 1994: 175). Indeed, a recurrent imaginary in American travel writing is that of the other-worldliness to be found in the journey into America and its wilderness. Melanie McGrath travels explicitly in search of spiritual meaning, meeting New Age tourists and spiritual seekers but also finding the 'allure of an awesome, transcendent, inhuman landscape' in the Southwest desert (McGrath 1995: loc. 2449). For other writers, the spiritual moments came unexpectedly and often in the midst of danger. Using the language of the sublime, writers turn the landscape, at least momentarily, into a space of symbolic, emotional meaning. Viewing a star-lit sky, Washington Irving feels 'an exhilarating buoyancy of spirit' and 'ecstasy of mind' (Irving 1956: 200). Meriwether Lewis describes the snow-covered Rocky Mountains as an 'august spectacle' (Bakeless 2002: 177), the Great Falls of the Missouri as a 'sublimely grand spectacle' (ibid.: 178), and wishes that he could better paint 'this truly magnificent and sublimely grand object which has [. . .] been concealed from the view of civilized man' (ibid.: 180). Making more explicit the religious feeling she gets from nature, Isabella Bird writes of the Rocky Mountains, 'this scenery satisfies my soul' (Bird 1879: 27), later adding, 'surely "the Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands!"' (ibid.: 42). Even as he objectively surveys rivers and canyons, John Wesley Powell imagines that he sees 'ledges from which the gods might quarry mountains' (Powell 1895: 128). When the fog lifted at the Grand Canyon and he could see the immensity of it, Bill Bryson and the other visitors at the rim cried out, 'Jesus! [. . .] And then for many moments all was silence [. . .] because out there in front of us was the most awesome, most silencing sight that exists on earth' (Bryson 1990: 237). While McGrath complains that the Grand Canyon was spoiled for her by commercialization, for Bryson it was awe-inspiring. Like McGrath, Beauvoir had been conditioned about what to expect, but when she saw the Grand Canyon she says, 'My imagination was incapable of inventing such splendour' (Beauvoir 1998: 180). Although Bryson's call to Jesus is more expletory than religious, his language imbues the scene with sublime and spiritual meaning. Even the postmodern Baudrillard concedes that there is 'something mysterious about Death Valley _in itself_ [. . .] something sublime [. . .] the high mountain chains surrounding it, making it a kind of inner sanctuary' (Baudrillard 2010: 71). There is something about the American landscape with its immensity, grandeur, and danger that evokes emotions of awe and wonder and demands a language of spirituality and sublimity.

**Geographies of character**

Philip Caputo begins his recent travelogue with the question: '[W]hat holds us together?' (Caputo 2013: 11). Given the geographic, political, and cultural diversity of a country that extends from Key West to the Arctic Ocean (the route of his trip), Caputo wants to see what keeps this large and diverse country from fracturing. To answer his question he hits the road and introduces readers to characters he meets along the way. As Said recognizes, a geographic imaginary includes the 'social, ethnic, and cultural' boundaries of a location (Said 1978: 54). Since Hector St John de Crèvecoeur asked, 'What Is an American' (Baym 1999: 293) an imaginary of difference has characterized writing about the country. As a way of understanding that diversity, travellers have looked to the 'characters', the unique and quaint individuals they meet on the road, as representative Americans.

Harriet Martineau and Simone de Beauvoir tell us about the famous personalities they meet, the writers, politicians, intellectuals, and artists that populate their American imaginary. Martineau writes, 'Our pleasantest evenings were some spent in the society of the highest order' (Martineau 1838: loc. 2302) and gives character sketches of such personages as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, and other politicians she met in Washington, DC. During her travels around America giving lectures at elite universities, Beauvoir meets Bernard Wolfe in New York, Nelson Algren in Chicago, filmmakers in Hollywood, and renews her friendship with author Richard Wright. She relates the evenings out with her circle of friends, drinking whiskey, listening to jazz, and discussing American literature and politics.

Forged by the frontier, another group of personalities illustrates the force of the geography on human identity. Washington Irving, who went to the Oklahoma prairie in 1832 describes Beatte, half-French and half-Indian, but 'more of an Indian in his tastes' as a 'living monument of the hardships of the frontier' (Irving 1956: 160–62). Lewis and Clark had their Charbonneau and his wife Sacagewea, but more generally early travel writers represented Native Americans as part of the landscape or as either hostile or friendly, such as the Mandans who give refuge to the Corps of Discovery or the Pawnees who threaten the Corps of Rangers to which Irving attached himself. Kirkland paints a picture of 'one class of settlers' represented by the Newland clan, who 'seem to work hard, to dress wretchedly, and to live in the most uncomfortable style' (Kirkland 1990: 107). Another type of western character, the desperado, is introduced by Isabella Bird: 'one of the famous scouts of the Plains' and the basis of 'daring portraits in fiction concerning Indian warfare' (Bird 1879: 38), Rocky Mountain Jim was a gentlemanly ruffian.

But it is the people met along the way who enliven many travelogues. William Least Heat-Moon found it easiest to meet and talk to people in bars and cafés (this may be why a sub-motif of these narratives is food and drink). Travelling the back roads of America, he tells the stories of characters he meets: the Watts family of Nameless, Tennessee; Barbara Pierre of Lafayette, Louisiana; Porfirio Sanchez of Texas; Alice Venable Middleton of Smith Island, Maryland. These people come from the working classes and have stories of times past and the effect of history on their lives. Bill Bryson, in search of 'small-town America', has an ear for dialect as he renders conversations ('Hah doo lack Miss Hippy?' – 'How do you like Mississippi?'), and draws quick sketches of characters like the farmers sitting at the café counter 'teasing the waitress in a half-assed sort of way' (Bryson 1990: 58, 33). Caputo tells the stories of such folk as Kenny Brown, who describes Florida's shell mounds; Ansel Woodenknife, who went 'from the reservation to the Food Channel' (Caputo 2013: 156); and Glenn and Tangerine, who are guarding a 'Thing' owned by the Imperial Oil Company from protesters outside Butte, Montana. Melanie McGrath introduces her readers to New Age spiritualists Sakina and Santara, who believe in extra-terrestrial and infinite life, as well 'cowboy Plum', who rescues her on Highway 666. Some of these characters could be classified as odd-balls; some are regional stereotypes; certainly they all make for entertaining reading. But one wonders to what extent these unique and unusual characters really represent America. Whether or not they are representative characters of America, they are representatives of the road the author chooses to travel. Like the other imagined geographies, these human representatives, poetically endowed with 'an imaginative or figurative value' (Said 1978: 55), are constructions of a human geography created by their authors.

**Paradoxical geographies of the social and political**

Finally, what America means beyond its landscape of mountains and deserts, beyond its variety of curious characters, is the idea of democracy, freedom, and equality. And so visitors like Tocqueville, Dickens, Martineau, and Beauvoir poke their heads into American institutions to find out what makes America tick. As Dean MacCannell has argued, social structures constitute touristic sites that provide opportunities for moral involvement and judgements (MacCannell 2001: 14). Just so, an investigation of America's social institutions provides the basis for judgements about the American character. While Tocqueville proclaims that 'the social condition of the Americans is eminently democratic', he also finds that in fact 'there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America' (Tocqueville 1956: 49, 117). He places the blame for this paradoxical political landscape on the press, a religion inherited from the Puritans, materialism, and the tyranny of the masses. Dickens visits the Perkins Institution for the Blind, prisons, and the factories in Lowell, Massachusetts and finds them to be 'nearly perfect' because they are 'emphatically the people's' rather than private charities (Dickens 1850: loc. 432). Martineau makes similar visits to prisons and orphanages but focuses much of her attention on the Washington political institutions and society, visiting the Capitol, the Senate Chamber and the Supreme Court and so gaining 'no little knowledge of the state, political or other, of various parts of the country' (Martineau 1838: loc. 2843).

But when these nineteenth-century visitors go South and take a look at the peculiar institution of slavery, they witness the stark 'inequality of condition' (Tocqueville 1956: 268) and 'air of ruin and decay' (Dickens 1850: loc. 2103) it causes. Dickens and Martineau each devote a chapter to denouncing slavery and the hypocrisy that leads a democratic country to treat humans as if they were 'cattle' (Dickens 1850: loc. 3550). Martineau visits a slave market and denounces the 'evil' she witnesses as a mother and child are separated (Martineau 1838: loc. 3775). The materialism and racism that supported slavery continued to be observed by modern travellers. Visiting Selma, Alabama in the late 1970s to assess the effect of the Selma march, Least Heat-Moon was told, ' "Ain't nothin' changed" ' (Least Heat-Moon 1982: 101). Chet Fuller also toured the 'New South' and witnessed the hard lives of poor blacks, being told: 'it's some nasty shit going down here' (Fuller 1981: 84). Beauvoir visited Harlem, where she learned from Richard Wright that a black person 'can never forget that he is black', then in the South discovered the paradox of 'a paternalistic economy in the midst of a modern capitalist society' where 'hatred and rage [are] in the air' (Beauvoir 1998: 67, 211, 234).

While slavery and racism provided the starkest picture of inequality within a democratic nation, feminists like Fuller and Beauvoir also point to the situation of women. For Fuller, the lives of pioneer women were 'confined to a comfortless and laborious indoor life' while men enjoyed the 'country in hunting or fishing' (Fuller 1991: 140). As Beauvoir visited American universities, she developed a picture of female students who rather than take advantage of their elite educations, instead conformed to gender and class expectations by grooming themselves for marriage: 'A woman's social success is closely tied to how luxurious she looks; this is a terrible burden for the poor' (Beauvoir 1998: 59). Beauvoir extends Fuller's critique of the situation of women when she adds class difference to the equation, the burden on the poor of trying to conform to images of success beyond their means. Hers is a point that Chet Fuller echoes when he says, 'Without a job in America [. . .] you are nothing. Absolutely nothing' (Fuller 1981: 88).

Like Tocqueville, Beauvoir is struck by the 'fatalism of the "masses" ' (Beauvoir 1998: 305) and the stifling effect of materialism and conformity on individuality. The geography of commodification that lay at the foundation of the American imaginary grates against the ideology of equality and creates what Baudrillard calls a paradoxical space of ' _equality, banality, and indifference_ ' (Baudrillard 2010: 97). Confronted with these contrasts between the idea of America and its realities, travel writers create paradoxical spaces in their narratives that reflect the conflicting political and social spaces they find in America. As they celebrate American energy, freedom, and liberty they also criticize its inertia, conformity, and materialism in texts that try to capture the essence of 'America'.

**Select bibliography**

Bakeless, J. (ed.) (2002) _The Journals of Lewis and Clark_ , New York: Signet.

Baudrillard, J. (2010) _America_ , 1986, trans. C. Turner, London: Verso.

Beauvoir, S. (1998) _America Day by Day_ , 1954, trans. C. Cosman, London: Phoenix.

Beavis, S. (1783) _Sarah Beavis her Pamphlet: James Beavis her Brother and Ann Beavis her Sister_ , Newberry Library.

Bird, I. (1879) _A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains_ , Reno: University of Nevada. (Kindle) Available at amazon.com (accessed 5 January 2014).

Bryson, B. (1990) _The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America_ , New York: Harper Perennial.

Baym, N. (ed.) (1999) _The Norton Anthology of American Literature_ , 5th edn, New York: W.W. Norton.

Cabeza de Vaca, A. (2002) _Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition_ , 1542, trans. F. Bandelier, rev. H. Augenbraum, New York: Penguin.

Caputo, P. (2013) _The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean_ , New York: Henry Holt.

Dickens, C. (1850) _American Notes_ , NP: Almost Sunday Publishing. (Kindle) Available at amazon.com (accessed 5 January 2014).

Fuller, C. (1981) _I Hear Them Calling My Name: A Journey through the New South_ , Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Fuller, M. (1991) _Summer on the Lakes, in 1843_ , 1844, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hariot, T. (1590) _A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia_. (Kindle) Available at amazon.com (accessed 5 January 2014).

Irving, W. (1956) _A Tour on the Prairies_ , 1859, ed. J. McDermott, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Kirkland, C. (1990) _A New Home, Who'll Follow?_ 1839, ed. S. Zagarell, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Kerouac, J. (1955) _On the Road_ , New York: Penguin.

Least Heat-Moon, W. (1982) _Blue Highways: A Journey into America_ , New York: Fawcett Crest.

MacCannell, D. (2001) 'Sightseeing and Social Structure', in S. Roberson (ed.), _Defining Travel: Diverse Visions_ , Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

McGrath, M. (1995) _Hotel Nirvana_ , London: HarperPress. (Kindle) Available at amazon.com (accessed 5 January 2014).

Martineau, H. (1838) _Retrospect of Western Travel, Vol. 1_ , London: Saunders and Otley; New York: Harper and Brothers. (Kindle) Available at amazon.com (accessed 5 January 2014).

Powell, J.W. (1895) _The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons_ , Washington, DC: National Geographic.

Pratt, M.L. (1992) _Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation_ , New York: Routledge.

Raban, J. (2010) _Driving Home: An American Journey_ , Seattle, WA: Sasquatch Books. (Kindle) Available at amazon.com (accessed 5 January 2014).

Roberson, S. (1998) ' "With the Wind Rocking the Wagon": Women's Narratives of the Way West', in S. Roberson (ed.), _Women, America, and Movement: Narratives of Relocation_ , Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Said, E. (1978) _Orientalism_ , New York: Vintage Books.

Stowe, W. (2009) ' "Property in the Horizon": Landscape and American Travel Writing', in A. Bendixen and J. Hamera (eds), _The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tichi, C. (1994) _High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music_ , Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Tocqueville, A. (1956) _Democracy in America_ , 1835, ed. R. Heffner, New York: New American Library.

Winship, G.P. (1990) _The Journey of Coronado, 1540–1542_ , ed. and trans. G.P. Winship, Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing.

Latin America

_Jennifer Hayward_

Travel writing about the Americas has always traded in hyperbole. In the Age of Exploration, Europeans depicted Latin America as a space of unparalleled natural beauty and overwhelming danger. From the brave new worlds and imagined monsters of the first European explorers to the yoga retreats and drug cartels of contemporary travellers, these tropes have shaped the Euro-American cultural imaginary.

Latin America, often referred to as a clearly defined region, is more accurately an imagined geography encompassing at least twenty countries, two languages, and widely divergent histories, political systems, and cultures. The concept of a 'Latin America' was developed by French traveller and author Michel Chevalier in the 1830s as he sought to strengthen alliances between Spanish and Portuguese-settled territories in the Americas and what he called 'Latin Europe'. The term 'Latin America' now generally designates regions of the Americas speaking Romance languages: Spanish, Portuguese, and (sometimes) French. I use the term in this sense, though I do not survey travel in French-speaking territories.1

Jason Wilson sums up the unspoken assumptions underlying much scholarship on this region when he asserts,

In complex ways Latin America is the creation of foreigners writing about the New World, from the earliest chroniclers like Bernal Díaz, to scientific travellers like Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, to later literary explorers such as D. H. Lawrence and Graham Greene.

(Wilson 1997: 803)

However, while Wilson rightly emphasizes the powerful shaping force of travellers' constructions, his implication that the region owes its identity to outsiders highlights outdated assumptions about the centrality of Europe to Latin American national identities. To counter this tendency, the present chapter begins by tracing key themes and tropes in travel writing's representations of the New World, from discovery through to the twenty-first century, but ends with an overview of Latin American travel writers as they work to repossess the gaze.

**Discovery**

The earliest descriptions of the Americas were written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the first Spanish explorers, for whom the region was an exotic locale onto which they projected fantasies of an uninhabited continent. The Americas were depicted as rife with contradictions: simultaneously primitive and brand-new, degenerate and innocent, site of both unimaginable danger and unimagined possibilities. The four voyages of Christopher Columbus between 1492 and 1504 launched the Age of Exploration; notable figures include the Italian cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, who in 1499–1502 sailed down the coast of Brazil to demonstrate that South America was a distinct continent, and the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who in 1519 led the first successful circumnavigation of the globe. Influential mid-century explorers include Spaniards Cabeza de Vaca (1542), Francisco López de Gómara (1552), and conquistador and colonist Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1632). Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the English explorer Francis Drake followed Magellan in circumnavigating the globe (1577–80), while Walter Ralegh's two voyages to the Americas in 1596 and 1616 were intended to establish colonies and locate El Dorado, the mythical lost city of gold. Key authors of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries include French explorer Jean de Léry (1578); Spanish Jesuit missionary and naturalist José de Acosta (1590); and Spanish Jesuit missionary and explorer Cristóbal de Acuña (1641) (Ledford-Miller 2003; Gurría Quintana 2003).

As Europeans returned home with tales of wonders seen and riches gained, myths of El Dorado fed a growing appetite for early imperial opportunities. A few travellers challenged dominant depictions of the New World: Spanish bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas exposed Spanish atrocities against indigenous peoples in _A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies_ (1552), drawing European attention to the moral abuses of colonization and helping to launch the Black Legend of Spanish imperial cruelty. Alonso de Ercilla's epic poem, _La Araucana_ (1569–89), traced the Spanish conquest of Chile from a perspective quite sympathetic to the Araucanian Indians, though Ercilla also fed the myth of the Noble Savage.

By the close of this first phase of Euro-American contact, key themes in travel texts included the myth of El Dorado and other sources of immense wealth; primitive Nature set against European Culture; and savage inhabitants awaiting the civilizing force of Europeans. More broadly, irreconcilable binaries continued to shape New World travel texts: on the one hand, authors depicted the Americas as unspoiled, fertile, Edenic spaces of limitless possibility; on the other, they damned the Americas as degenerate, sterile, purgatorial zones of untold misery and danger.

By the end of the seventeenth century, the thrill of discovery had subsided. Global networks of trade and exploration produced what Mary Louise Pratt has called the 'contact zone' (1992: 6) of relations between two cultures; each would be transformed by engagement with the other. Travel writing served as a central conduit of knowledge by providing rare first-hand accounts, advancing imperial ambitions, and mapping the Americas; as a result, travel both reflected and helped to produce major epistemological shifts in the landscape of European thought, establishing discourses that would shape expectations and experiences of the New World.

Imperial and scientific advancement became dominant themes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century narratives; these themes intertwined as geographical, geological, botanical, mineralogical and other discoveries spurred imperial advances. While some travellers still claimed to describe 'undiscovered' territory, especially in the Amazon and other relatively impassible regions, most now arrived as administrators of Spanish colonial or religious power. Their texts changed in tone accordingly, from descriptive to prescriptive (Whitehead 2002).

Although the Americas continued to capture the public imagination, Latin America appears far less frequently in the great wave of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel writing than continents like India and Africa and regions like the Middle East. Trade restrictions imposed by Spanish and Portuguese colonial policy meant that foreigners were forbidden to travel in Iberian possessions; at the same time, to safeguard New World riches, Spain discouraged even Spanish travellers from publishing their accounts. A dearth of factual information spurred ever wilder legends of metaphorical and actual El Dorados.

Among the few scientific expeditions permitted by the Spanish Crown was the French Académie des Sciences voyage led by geographer Charles-Marie de la Condamine, mathematician Jean Godin des Odonais, and geophysicist Pierre Bouguer, who explored Ecuador from 1735 to 1744 to determine the curvature of the globe and catalogue the region's wildlife. One of the few Spanish authors who managed to publish detailed accounts despite the Crown's opposition was Alonso Carrió de la Vandera (alias Concolorcorvo), who produced a travel guide to central South America (1773).

More commonly, however, European accounts of South America prior to the years of independence were produced by travellers who merely stopped in South or Central American ports en route to other locations; by buccaneers patrolling the coastline in search of Spanish ships to plunder; or, more rarely, by scientific travellers. British accounts, generally peripatetic rather than focused on a single locale, include those by courtier Richard Flecknoe (1654); privateer-explorer William Dampier (1697), whose circumnavigations of the world became the stuff of legend; privateer and Governor of the Bahamas, Woodes Rogers (1712), who with Dampier rescued Alexander Selkirk; Commodore John Byron, whose account of his 1741 shipwreck off the coast of Chile inspired Patrick O'Brian's novel _The Unknown Shore_ (1959); and Scottish naturalist Sydney Parkinson, botanical illustrator for James Cook's voyage to the Pacific (1784). Despite their varied expertise and interests, all these accounts provide rare first-hand testimony of the geocultural riches of the Americas.

A few foreigners managed to publish more substantive accounts despite the Spanish prohibition. Thomas Gage, an Englishman, joined a Spanish Dominican mission to Central America and Mexico in 1625; his detailed survey of the region, published in 1648, advanced Gage's pro-English imperial agenda (Dalal 2003: 791). John Gabriel Stedman's _Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam_ (1796), with engravings by William Blake, describes the Dutch army's brutal suppression of the revolt; Stedman details the cruelties of slave owners and attests to the humanity of slaves, and his book became a key abolitionist text.

By the late eighteenth century, revolutionary fervour transformed both European and New World political landscapes. Influential theories of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly William Robertson's stadial theory and Adam Smith's free-market economics, developed in part to account for the importance of the New World in shaping European national identities. Meanwhile, historians like Cornelius du Pauw, Guillaume Raynal, and William Robertson contributed to what Antonello Gerbi (1973) has characterized as the Dispute of the New World, a polemic pushing the binaries constructed during Discovery to their logical conclusion: were the Americas a brave new world of natural riches and sublime landscapes, or simply a degenerated and inferior version of the Old World? This debate crystallized contradictory constructions of the Old World versus the New even as it advanced incipient nationalist agendas.

**American epistemologies**

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment epistemologies reimagined the New World. In his encyclopedic thirty-six-volume _Natural History_ (1707–88), naturalist Comte de Buffon proposed the monogeistic, or single-origin, theory of America as an inferior continent where all life – plant, animal, and human – had degenerated from their original Old World forms. Dugald Stewart's and others' theory of stadial development conjectured that the New World's indigenous peoples represented primitive stages of civilization. Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed a competing view: that 'natural man' (a concept that eventually led to the stereotype of the Noble Savage) embodied a healthier state of society than did the highly civilized European. All these theories drew extensively on New World travel writing for support.

In 1798, Alexander von Humboldt was granted permission to make the first extensive scientific exploration of Spanish territory. Building on Enlightenment rationality and empiricism as well as Romantic-era tropes of mobility and subjectivity, his _Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799–1804_ (with Aimé Bonpland) shattered the embargo on information and shaped representations of South and Central America for the next century and beyond. In Britain, after Helen Maria Williams' Romantic-era translation, readers and travellers alike fell in thrall to his vision of the New World. Humboldt depicted New World climates, geographies, and flora and fauna as simultaneously more varied and dramatic, and less stable, than those of temperate zones, establishing what would become the conventional contrast between the 'humidity, heat, extravagance and superfluity of the Torrid Zone', on the one hand, and European 'temperateness, control, hard work and thriftiness' on the other (Stepan 2001: 36–37).

Even while intensifying traditional representations of the Americas, however, Humboldt also complicated them, sharply critiquing degenerative theory as advanced by influential historians like Buffon and Robertson: 'We cannot accept these sharp distinctions into barbaric and civilized nations' (quoted in Gerbi 1973: 415). As Nigel Leask demonstrates, Humboldt's nuanced and encyclopedic vision of the New World shaped conventions for representing the region, paving the way for the century of scientific, anthropological, and aesthetic discovery while confirming the post-Enlightenment concept of a transcendental self (Leask 2002). Thea Pitman further emphasizes Humboldt's impact on Latin American independence movements: his works, she suggests, 'helped Mexicans free themselves from the shackles of the Spanish Empire by proving their suitability for independence' (Pitman 2008: 16).

**Independence and after**

Travel to Latin America increased dramatically in the first decades of the nineteenth century during the long struggle for independence. Fighting to retain control of their colonies, the Spanish could no longer patrol the coasts. Britain's close relationship with Portugal gave it unique opportunities for trade in Brazil, while its centuries-long battle for naval supremacy against Spain and its rising imperial ambitions positioned British sailors and politicians to seize their opportunity; as a consequence, the majority of nineteenth-century New World travel writers were British. In 1824, British foreign secretary George Canning exulted, 'Spanish America is free, and if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly, she is _English_ ' (quoted in Bethell 1985: 217). At the same time, Britain initiated a 'Special Relationship' with the United States by tacitly agreeing with, and actively enforcing, the Monroe Doctrine's policy of forestalling other European countries' colonial ambitions in the Americas.

Building on Romantic-era paradigms, early nineteenth-century texts constructed the New World as a space of sublime danger as well as revolutionary possibilities. Just as the Age of Exploration coincided with the rise of publishing, so the Age of Empire coincided with a revolution in print culture, along with new technologies of travel. In addition to Independence, the great forces shaping travel over the course of the nineteenth century were the continuation of scientific and imperial advances and the rise of global capitalism. Combined, these forces spurred scientific and technological developments; founded colonies of Europeans throughout the Americas; and developed mining, farming and other industries.

The first great wave of nineteenth-century travel writers in the Americas was mostly male and journeyed for some combination of scientific, imperial, or business interests. Paving the way for the European capitalist investment in the New World now characterized as 'informal empire', early emissaries included Alexander Caldcleugh (1825), John Miers (1826), Peter Schmidtmeyer (1824), Joseph Andrews (1827), and Samuel Haigh (1831).

The most famous scientist-traveller in the wake of Humboldt was, of course, Charles Darwin, who set sail for South America in 1831. Throughout his 1839 _Voyage of the Beagle_ , Darwin pays homage to his great predecessor, acknowledging Humboldt as the source of his preconceived ideas about the continent (Schmitt 2009: 13). Other influential travellers of the nineteenth century include French botanist August de Saint Hilaire (1830 to 1851); Swiss naturalist and amateur anthropologist Jakob von Tschudi (1857 to 1868); Swiss naturalist and geologist Louis Agassiz and his American wife Elizabeth Agassiz (1867); German explorer Moritz Wagner (1856); and Austrian Karl Scherzer (1857).

For larger political ends that integrated with imperial ambitions, nineteenth-century travellers also sought archeological and/or anthropological knowledge. American travel writer John Lloyd Stephens, appointed 'Special Ambassador' to Central America by President van Buren, travelled with British archaeological artist Frederick Catherwood to document, and if possible seize, ancient Mayan sites in order to found a museum of American antiquities on par with the great European archeological collections. Even as Stephens worked to legitimize New World history, however, he simultaneously perpetuated the myth of the passive Mexican – a reassuring portrait for North Americans with imperialist ambitions. Little wonder that Stephens' book, along with Frances Calderón de la Barca's, was used as a guide during the USA's annexation of Texas and the Mexican–American War of 1846–48.

While seeking to advance Anglo-European commercial, scientific, and imperial agendas, travel writing also navigated the moral debates of the age. In Brazil, where slavery was not entirely abolished until 1888, Rio de Janeiro became the central conduit of nineteenth-century slave trafficking; the complex economic, political, and moral territory of slavery necessarily became either a central theme or a haunted silence in travel texts of the period. Mineralogist John Mawe (1812) and textile industrialist John Luccok (1820), pursuing trade interests, were silent on slavery. By contrast, Maria Graham included abolitionist 'set pieces' of slave markets and slaves being abused in her 1824 travelogue, while Henry Koster confounded the racial hierarchies of his time by arguing that slave-owning would have made him 'a lover of a half savage life', unable to discern 'what is rational and to be desired in this world' (Koster 1816: 334). Travel writers were conscious of the public impact and moral weight of their eyewitness accounts, and some, like Graham and Koster, chose to use their texts to advance the abolitionist cause.

From the 1840s on, the travel genre both expanded and became increasingly differentiated as guidebooks, emigrants' manuals, and travelogues arose to supplement more 'literary' travel narratives. By contrast with Romantic-era texts focusing on subjectivity, Victorian texts often emphasized opportunities for tourism, investment, and colonization. Since the major travel guides of the day, Murray's and Baedeker's, did not include Latin America (beyond brief tours of Cuba and Mexico in Baedeker's guide to the United States), a number of writers included practical information in their travel narratives. Examples include British Annie Brassey's _Around the World in the Yacht 'Sunbeam'_ (1879) and American authors Mary Blake and Margaret Sullivan's _Mexico: Picturesque, Political, Progressive_ (1888).

Exceptions to the more practical focus of later Victorian travel texts include those promising new information or an unusual approach to the genre. For example, Edmond Reuel Smith explained (perhaps with an eye to the success of Stephens and Catherwood) that strong interest in 'the aboriginal races of America' justified his _Araucanians; or Notes of a Tour among the Indian Tribes of Southern Chili_ (1855). William Henry Hudson's _The Purple Land that England Lost_ : _Travels and Adventures in the Banda Oriental_ (1885) combines the travel and adventure genres in its conventions. And finally, Lady Florence Dixie's horseback ride across Patagonia (1880) broke new ground in many ways, including its author's class, gender, mode of transportation, and destination.

Gender became central to the generic development of Latin American travel writing in the years following Independence. Women travellers were still rare at the beginning of the nineteenth century, generally accompanying male relatives on diplomatic, military, religious, or commercial missions, but from mid-century, women increasingly travelled on their own, often producing accounts that revised male scripts and strategies and forged new narrative possibilities for the female traveller.

Among the first European women to describe South America was Maria Graham (1824), whose two travelogues on Brazil and Chile both echo and counter traditional depictions, emphasizing New World landscape aesthetics and other traditional topics but also investigating the region's own culture, communities, and commerce. Frances Calderón de la Barca (1843) adapts the masculine subject position Pratt dubs 'monarch of all I survey' when she parallels her own first glimpse of Mexico City to 'the great panorama that burst upon the eye of Cortes', but she also charts her increasing appreciation of Mexico and the Mexicans as her linguistic and cultural understanding grows (Calderon de la Barca 1843: 73). In different ways, both worked to inscribe new subject positions for the woman traveller, such as the role Pratt characterizes as the 'exploratrice sociale', or explorer of society (Pratt 1992: 160). Other well-known women travellers in the later nineteenth century include the French writer Flora Tristan (1838); English writers Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley (1851) and Annie Allnutt Brassey (1879); American Elizabeth Agassiz (1867); and Scottish Florence Dixie (1880).

A final, overarching theme in nineteenth-century travel in Latin America is that travellers became more conscious of the interactions between self and other, resulting in closer connections between travellers and the cultures they described. Building on the Romantic-era trope of external journeys as both reflecting and shaping an interior landscape, Henry Koster, Maria Graham and Frances Calderón de la Barca all articulate personal transformations resulting from their encounters in the contact zone. Cannon Schmitt argues that change becomes a key theme in the Victorian encounter with Latin America, since 'such encounters shake their sense of themselves, implicate them, change them'. And he adds, playing on Pratt's iconic phrase, that 'rarely masters of all they survey gazing down on marvelous possessions with imperial eyes, these travellers more often find themselves enmeshed in and overawed by their surroundings' (Schmitt 2009: 10).

**Unearthly tidings**

Rarely as openly imperialistic or as generically conventional as nineteenth-century texts, twentieth- and twenty-first-century travel writing plays self-consciously with genre, even while conforming to tradition in echoing themes of Discovery. As Angel Gurría Quintana puts it, a continued obsession with New World riches is 'proof that, despite the failure of the enterprises it had inspired, the myth of El Dorado survived well into the twentieth century' (2003: 1105). In fact, the dualities of the Discovery era intensified as Europe and the US became increasingly industrialized: Latin America is now both idealized and condemned, represented as either an Edenic retreat from the pressures of civilization, or an archaic space of violence and danger. As an imagined geography free from the conformism and materialism of twentieth-century Euro-American society, Latin America became an escape for the disaffected, as when Theodore Roosevelt fled to Brazil as a refugee after his failed bid for a second term as US President in 1912, publishing _Through the Brazilian Wilderness_ in 1914.

Mexico became especially attractive as a location for literary travel in the first half of the century due to its political upheavals, cheap cost of living, and proximity to the United States – so popular, in fact, that Bruce Chatwin notes the country acquired a reputation as 'that most intractable of subjects [. . .] where so many literary reputations come to grief' (Chatwin 1986: ix). In the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), radical American writers like Katherine Anne Porter and John Dos Passos sought inspiration in Mexico's dizzying social reform. British novelist D.H. Lawrence's travel collection _Mornings in Mexico_ (1927), with its vivid descriptions and musings on cross-cultural misconstructions, provides a far better account of the country than his much-ridiculed novel _The Plumed Serpent_ (1926), with its primitivist vision of an essentialized Mexico.

Although many Anglo-American writers in Mexico spoke little or no Spanish and stayed only a few weeks, or at most months, they did not hesitate to pronounce on complex political and religious questions. Evelyn Waugh's _Robbery under Law_ (1939), a damning critique of Mexican President Enrique Cárdenas's nationalization of the oil industry, was written after a three-month jaunt funded by a British oil producer. Graham Greene's travelogue _The Lawless Roads_ (1939) condemns Mexico's prosecution of Catholicism; by contrast, his novel _The Power and the Glory_ (1940) transforms _The Lawless Roads_ ' contemptuous and narrow perspective into a far more nuanced account of Mexican religious and political turmoil in the 1930s. Among the best of the British accounts, Sybille Bedford's 1953 _A Visit to Don Otavio_ combines humor with sharp insight, not only into the lives of the Mexican well-heeled in decline, but into Euro-American motivations for travel as well, acknowledging that she chose Mexico for stereotypical reasons: she wanted 'to be in a country with a long nasty history in the past, and as little present history as possible' (2003: 10).

American Beat Generation writers also began to drift down into Mexico in the 1950s, seeking escape from American conformity (or, alternatively, from legal prosecution). A key scene of Jack Kerouac's novel _On the Road_ (1957) takes place in Mexico; his novel _Tristessa_ (1960) focuses on Mexico City; however, his only true 'travel' text, a compilation of journal entries and sketches that includes selections on Mexico, is _Lonesome Traveller_ (1960).

As the literary travel narrative sought to distinguish itself from the now thoroughly established genre of the guidebook, subfields of twentieth-century Latin American travel literature included adventure, picaresque-style road narratives, pilgrimages of one kind or another, and travel as allegory for a journey within. At mid-century, one text redefined both travel and anthropology: Claude Lévi-Strauss's _TristesTropiques_ (1955). The book's first sentence sets the stage for the generic challenge to come: 'I hate travelling and explorers' (1955: 1). Ostensibly a travel narrative set principally in Brazil, Lévi-Strauss's text deftly interweaves anthropology, ethnography, and philosophical musings into the day-by-day account of his journey. Formally and thematically innovative, this text revised traditional hierarchies of self and other while acknowledging the impossibility of the travelling subject as detached observer.

The longstanding metaphorical parallel between internal and external explorations dominated the second half of the twentieth century: travel to Latin America became a code for self-discovery, and a significant subgenre of travel writing takes this unfortunate form. By contrast, the best travel books penetrate beyond imagined geographies to reveal something unexpected about both place and author. Bruce Chatwin's _In Patagonia_ (1977) established a new voice that punctured travel's self-importance, charting the author's fascination with this 'far end of the world' (1977: 1) in an elliptical, iconoclastic text. Although it met with resistance – Paul Theroux famously complained that Chatwin never explained how he got from one place to another, and Chatwin's tendency to invent sources and conversations caused controversy – Chatwin's book also redefined the genre.

More traditionally chronological in structure, Sara Wheeler's 1995 _Travels in a Thin Country_ follows Chatwin in interweaving historical analysis, incisive cultural commentary, and elliptical self-reflexivity – as when she dreams of a friend saying, 'She's not going to South America really. It's all a joke. She's only going on a journey inside her own head' (1995: 13).

In the later twentieth century, travelogues on the Americas often seek to untangle the polarized politics of specific countries (e.g. Tony Gould's _Death in Chile_ , 1992); interweave historical, anthropological and/or archeological information in a loosely-structured travel account (e.g. Ronald Wright's _Cut Stones and Cross Roads: A Journey in Peru_ , 1984, and _Time Among the Maya: Travels in Belize, Guatemala and Mexico_ , 1989; and Peter Ford's _Around the Edge_ , 1991); or emphasize environmental catastrophes and the plight of indigenous peoples, often in tandem with an interior journey of self-awareness (e.g. Mortiz Thomsen's _The Farm on the River of Emeralds_ , 1978, and _The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey on Two Rivers_ , 1990; and Stephen Nugent's _Big Mouth: The Amazon Speaks_ , 1990).

From the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, then, Latin America continued to play a crucial ideological role in the Euro-American imaginary. Writing of nineteenth-century British naturalists' travels in South America, Cannon Schmitt identifies a

savage mnemonics: a form of memory that redefines what it means to be human (as well as modern, civilized, and British) in relation to the past, and specifically those pasts – historical, cultural, personal, and above all evolutionary – conceived of as savage.

(2009: 3)

In the twentieth century, this stadial focus often doubles in on itself, fixating on what European and North American travellers can learn about _themselves_ or their nation from a journey either into a mythical 'past' (as represented by Latin America's natural abundance and traditional communities) or into the dark double of Western industrial society (as represented by Latin America's violent excesses).

**El Ojo Patrio: reclaiming the gaze**

Gabriel García Márquez quips that 'to the Europeans, South America is a man with a moustache, a guitar, and a gun' (1996: 22). Latin American travel writers face a daunting task in reinscribing national identities shaped by these centuries-long representations. As Claire Lindsay observes, 'the journey "at home" in Latin America is [. . .] complicated by the fact that, thanks to the long tradition of imperialist travel writing [. . .] it might also appear to be always-already written' (2010: 7). An additional disincentive to writing travel in Latin America is that the proliferation and popularity of travel texts published by the nineteenth-century 'capitalist vanguard' leads some nations 'to view foreign travel writing as the genre _par excellence_ that accompanies imperialist exploitation' (Pitman 2008: 18). Finally, writers must fight the critical perception that, as Jason Wilson confidently asserts, 'There is not a strong tradition of Latin American empirical observation or of Latin American travel writing, and even less of travelling within the Latin American continent' (quoted in Lindsay 2010: 9).

In fact, Latin American travel writing is on the increase as Latin Americans themselves 'write back', recapturing the centre in the face of a centuries-long tradition that relegated them to the margins, and expanding the genre of travel writing in the process (see Pitman 2008; Tuninetti 2001; Lindsay 2010). Ironically enough, given the longstanding critical neglect of women's travel writing, women's travel tales were among the earliest Latin American-authored travels to be rediscovered, due to the broader increase of interest in women's travel from the 1990s onward (see Hahner 1998; Szurmuk 2000; Spicer-Escalante 2006; Méndez Rodenas 2013).

Latin American-authored travel texts often seek to renew or reclaim a national identity in the face of foreign threats or historical challenges. Recent decades have seen Argentinean writers recreate nineteenth-century journeys to their country's interior in order to counter the pressures of contemporary globalization, while Chilean writers reclaim a past rendered invisible by the Pinochet regime.

In the early years of Independence, travel texts by Latin American authors were few; notable writers include Chileans Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, José Victorino Lastarria, and Vicente Pérez Rosales, and Argentinians Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Santiago de Estrada. As Ángel Tuninetti notes, these mid-century travellers took as their models the European – and primarily British – texts published about their countries, often emphasizing scientific and economic surveys (2001: 104). Like Anglo-European writers, too, Latin American writers may respond, implicitly or explicitly, to the long shadows cast by Humboldt and Darwin.

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American writers are strongly influenced by contemporary literature; for example, the road genre shaped Ernesto Che Guevara's _The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey Around South America_ (1993), which parallels medical student Guevara's tour of the continent with his growing political investment. The Brazilian Modernist movement inspired groundbreaking travel texts like Plínio Salgado's _Geographia sentimental_ (1937) and Mário de Andrade's _O turista aprendiz_ ( _The Apprentice Tourist_ , 1976), which charts Andrade's ethnographic journey into Brazil's heartland.

Postmodern literary strategies and identity theory inform the genre Thea Pitman dubs the 'postmodernist Mexican travel chronicle' (2008: 98–99). For Pitman, these texts redefine both form (often by disrupting the traditional chronology of the journey) and subjectivity (by destabilizing identity and challenging travel's tendency to essentialize and exoticize the other). Examples include Juan Villoro's _Palmeras de la brisa rápida: un viaje a Yucatán_ ( _Palm Trees in a Passing Breeze: A Journey to Yucatan_ , 1989), simultaneously a meditation on the local effects of Yucatan tourism and a metatextual reflection on the travel genre; and Fernando Solano Olivares's _Oaxaca:_ _C_ _rónicas_ _S_ _onámbulas_ ( _Oaxaca: Sleepwalking Chronicles_ , 1994).

Despite the progress Latin American travel writers have made towards revising and reclaiming the representation of their nations, they often comment on their sense of belatedness: the impossibility of ignoring the centuries-long palimpsest of existing representations. In _El interior_ , his travel narrative on Argentinian national identity, Martín Caparrós muses on the difficulties South American travellers encounter as they seek to map their own terrain:

If I were American, for example, it would be easier to travel. I would have, for one, a way to look at the world [. . .] being American is a strong concept everywhere, it means something, it conditions what is seen. Even if I were English: there is no place in the world that has not been read by the English, and I could gaze confidently upon my surroundings as if my presence on that beach were a remake of a trip made by a probable great-grandfather, founder of an empire [. . .] But I am almost-Argentine,and that means that there is no given way: I have to invent the ways of the gaze, I have to look upon the world alone, without real or imaginary company [. . .] Argentina is an invention, an abstraction [. . .] Argentina is the only country to which I never arrived.

(Quoted in Tuninetti 2001: 5)

As Tuninetti emphasizes, travel writing has long shaped the way we see the world; dominant representations of a specific place circumscribe and colour the ways that place can be perceived. Looking towards the future, a stronger and clearer understanding of the imagined geographies of Latin America since the Age of Discovery can help us to re-map those spaces – or at least, like the descendents of the obsessive cartographers in Jorge Luis Borges's short story 'Del rigor en la ciencia' ('On Exactitude in Science'), to perceive the suffocating limitations of the standard map.

**Note**

1 For help with translations, I am indebted to Carmen Tovar and Brian Cope.

**Select bibliography**

Bedford, S. (2003) _A Visit to Don Otavio_ , 3rd edn, New York: Counterpoint.

Bethell, L. (ed.) (1985) _The Cambridge History of Latin America, Vol. III_ , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Calderón de la Barca, F. (1843) _Life in Mexico during a Residence of Two Years in That Country_ , Boston, MA: Little Brown.

Caparrós, M. (2006) _El_ _I_ _nterior_ , Buenos Aires: Planeta.

Chatwin, B. (1977) _In Patagonia_ , London: Jonathan Cape.

Chatwin, B. (1986) 'Introduction' to S. Bedford, _A Visit to Don Otavio_ , New York: Counterpoint.

Dalal, A. (2003) 'Mexico' in J. Speake (ed.), _Literature of Travel and Exploration_ , New York, London: Fitzroy Dearborn.

García Márquez, G. (1996) _No One Writes to the Colonel_ , trans. J.S. Bernstein, New York: Penguin Books.

Gerbi, A. (1973) _The Dispute of the New World: the History of a Polemic, 1750–1900_ , trans. J. Moyle, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Gurría Quintana, Á. (2003) 'South America (The North)', in J. Speake (ed.), _Literature of Travel and Exploration_ , New York, London: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Hahner, J. E. (ed.) (1998) _Women Through Women's Eyes: Latin American Women in Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts_ , Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources.

Koster, H. (1816) _Travels in Brazil_ , London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.

Leask, N. (2002) _Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing_ , _1770–1840_ , Oxford University Press.

Leask, N. (2006) 'A Yankee in Yucatan: John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Cities of America', in T. Youngs (ed.), _Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century: Filling the Blank Spaces_ , London: Anthem Press.

Ledford-Miller, L. (2003) 'Central America', in J. Speake (ed.), _Literature of Travel and Exploration_ , New York, London: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1955) _TristesTropiques_ , Paris: Plon.

Lindsay, C. (2010) _Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America_ , New York and London: Routledge.

Méndez Rodenas, A. (2013) _Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims_ , Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.

Pitman, T. (2008) _Mexican Travel Writing_ , Bern: Peter Lang.

Pratt, M.L. (1992) _Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation_ , New York: Routledge.

Santos Gómez, S. (1983) _Bibliografía de viajeros a la Argentina_ , Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura.

Schmitt, C. (2009) _Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America_ , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Spicer-Escalante, J.P. (ed.) (2006) _Eduarda Mansilla: Recuerdos de viaje_ , Buenos Airies, Miami: Stockcero Inc.

Stepan, N.L. (2001) _Picturing Tropical Nature_ , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Szurmuk, M. (2000), Mujeres En Viaje, Madrid: Alfaguera Ediciones.

Tuninetti, Á. (2001) _Nuevas Tierras con Viejos Ojos: Viajeros Españoles y Latinoamericanos en Sudamérica, Siglos XVIII y XIX,_ Buenos Aires: Corregidor.

Tuninetti, Á. (2012) ' " _El ojo patrio"_ (Motherland's eye): Travel Literature and Nationhood in Twenty-First-Century Argentina', Modern Language Association Conference, Seattle, WA, 7 January 2012.

Wheeler, S. (1995) _Travels in a Thin Country_ , London: Little Brown.

Whitehead, N.L. (2002) 'South America / Amazonia: The Forest of Marvels', in P. Hulme and T. Youngs (eds), _The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing_ , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Wilson, J. (1997) 'Travel Literature', in V. Smith (ed.), _Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature_ , Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn.

The Middle East

_Eva Johanna Holmberg_

The region we now call the 'Middle East' has attracted European travel writers for centuries. This is a landscape where Jews, Christians and Muslims have all narrated their respective histories of salvation. It has been both a land of captivity and a Promised Land where pilgrims might follow in the footsteps of Jesus, the Jewish patriarchs, or the Prophet Muhammad. For the Ancient Greeks, this was the domain of barbarians and Persians, lands heroically conquered by Alexander the Great; in later periods, the region (or significant parts thereof) were controlled by the Mamluk, Ottoman, Safavid, British and French Empires, until the modern disposition of nation-states emerged in the twentieth century. Since medieval times at least, accordingly, travellers have known themselves to be journeying through a landscape with many histories and many names: the Levant, the Holy Land, the Orient and since the early twentieth century, the Middle East (see Melman 2002). This complex and often troubled legacy is also reflected in the multiplicity of motives that have historically brought visitors to the region; these have encompassed pilgrimage and crusade, the exploration of biblical history, ethnography and archaeology, a search for exoticism, riches and adventure and more recently, quests for a supposedly authentic 'East' or for a transformation of the self.

Ever since Edward Said's classic study _Orientalism_ (1978), the depiction of the Middle East and its inhabitants has been subject to intense debate. Mostly concentrating on French and English texts produced after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, Said identified a pervasive pan-European (and later also American) attitude and discourse about the so-called 'Orient'. Western accounts of the region, he alleged, were seldom simply neutral, empirically derived representations; rather, they were routinely rife with long-established stereotypes and clichés, even when produced by travellers who had actually visited the places they described. These stock motifs were deployed so as to 'other' the cultures of the Middle East as morally and intellectually inferior to the West. Thus recurrent themes have been the sensuality, luxury and decadence of Oriental peoples, the tyranny and brutality of their rulers, and the passivity, laziness and fatalism of the population more generally – thematic preoccupations which gave rise in turn to a well-established imagery of despotic sultans and pashas, of harems, slave-girls and odalisques, vacant-minded hookah-smokers and fierce Bedouin Arabs. This hostile 'Orientalist' discourse, Said sought to demonstrate, had a long geneaology in Western culture. The negative imagery just outlined had its roots in Ancient Greek suspicion of the Persian 'other', but intensified during the medieval and early modern periods, when the Islamic world and especially the mighty Ottoman Empire was more powerful and sophisticated than Europe and so presented a very real military and cultural threat to 'Christendom'. By the late eighteenth century, however, the military threat of the Ottoman Empire was on the wane whilst the foreign influence of Britain, France and other Western nations was on the rise. In this altered geopolitical context, Said suggested, Orientalist discourse increasingly worked (and arguably continues to work) to justify the colonial, commercial and strategic ambitions of the Western powers, enabling them to present themselves as the emissaries of progress and modernity, best placed to control and administer a region regarded as backward and primitive.

Said's critique of Orientalism has of course been both highly influential and highly controversial. Some scholars have rejected his thesis outright (e.g. Irwin 2006). Others (e.g. MacLean 2001; Melman 1992) have reminded us that the Western depiction of, and engagement with, the 'Orient' has been more nuanced than Said recognized, encompassing significant variations across differing historical periods and according to other variables such as gender and class. Moreover, the region was never just an 'imagined geography'; attitudes and images were always shaped to some extent by actual cross-cultural exchanges and encounters. In the present chapter, we will travel through the region by focusing first on the Holy Land and the landscape of medieval and early modern pilgrimages, then on the trading links and diplomatic ties established with the Ottoman and Safavid Empires in the early modern period, before considering European and US engagement with Egypt, Syria and Arabia in the colonial and postcolonial eras.

**Medieval maps of the mind**

Long before detailed maps and sea charts led navigators to Levantine harbours, the local knowledge of sailors, descriptions in classical and biblical texts, and legends such as those of Ulysses and Alexander helped people to make sense of and orient themselves in this landscape. Medieval maps depicting the Holy Land were mostly crafted for spiritual and contemplative purposes, showing both the earthly and heavenly city of Jerusalem (Vorholt 2012; Harvey 2012). The earliest reports of pilgrimage to the Holy Land included those of the anonymous pilgrim of Bordeaux (333–334 CE), and the Galician Egeria, the first female pilgrim to leave an account of her pilgrimage to the Holy Land (381–384 CE). Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, the Crusades gave rise to several accounts of the Holy Land and its sacred sites, including the histories of the Crusader states by William of Tyre and Jacques de Vitry's _Historia Orientalis_ ( _History of the East_ , _c_. 1220). Riccoldo da Monte Croce travelled across the Near and Middle East for twelve years, returning from Baghdad to Florence around 1300. Riccoldo's _Liber Peregrinaciones_ ( _Book of Pilgrimages_ , _c_. 1289–91) and Burchard of Mount Sion's _Descriptio Terrae Sanctae_ ( _Description of the Holy Land_ , _c_. 1284) – the latter based on Burchard's residence in Palestine between 1274–84 – were key sources for many later writers (Baumgärtner 2013). The more bellicose writings of this era foregrounded the figure of the cruel Saracen warrior, which served to solidify ideas of a united Christendom by creating stereotypes of its enemies. These influenced the depiction of Muslims and Muhammad for many years to come (see Tolan 2002).

One of the most influential late medieval travel texts was _The Travels of Sir John Mandeville_ (the oldest manuscript is dated to 1371), which served Latin Christendom for several centuries as a guide to the biblical and 'marvellous' East. Now regarded as fiction compiled from earlier travel accounts, Mandeville's _Travels_ depicts Constantinople, the Levant, Egypt and the Holy Land before progressing on to India, Cathay and the mythical land of Prester John in Africa. The Middle East is depicted as a region inhabited not just by Muslims, Christians and Jews (the latter supposedly held captive by Gog and Magog), but also by monstrous animals and peoples. The book also offered its readers glimpses of the earthly Paradise, placed in the easternmost corner of civilization (see Röhl 2004; Jost 2013; and for a recent translation, Bale 2012).

The Holy Land of the early pilgrims was a sacred landscape, but interest in material and secular aspects of the land and the local people grew over the centuries. Late medieval accounts often addressed the land's flora and fauna as well as Muslim military proficiency. German pilgrims produced numerous accounts more rooted in personal experience than Mandeville's. Felix Fabri, who made two pilgrimages in the late fifteenth century, was a Dominican scholar and theologian, yet also in many ways a humanist, dedicated to writing an exact account of what he saw, paying attention to ethnic groups and customs, and drawing distinctions between Levantine peoples based on physiognomy, dress and the colours of their turbans (Schröder 2009). Other accounts observed local cultures in close detail, paying attention to Eastern religions (which they usually painted in dark and heretical colours), social customs, and the chorography of cities and landscapes. Guidebooks offered useful phrases in Arabic and Hebrew, and advised on the procurement of passports, the payment of tributes, and the specifics of the sea voyage. The latter was usually facilitated by the industrious Venetians, whose galleys took passengers via the Adriatic to the port of Jaffa. Thereafter, the pilgrims usually proceeded to Jerusalem on donkeys or on foot. After the fall of Acre in 1291, the movement of Christian pilgrims became dependent on formal permission from Muslim authorities. This was also the start of complaints about taxes and tributes, hostile brigands, uncomfortable caravanserais and the lack of tasty food.

Christians were not the only pilgrims in the region. Jews often combined pilgrimage, including the visitation of tombs and holy sites, with secular activities, such as engaging in trade or buying books for their synagogues (Weber 2004) and medieval Muslim travellers were very mobile in seeking patronage, spiritual guidance, education and the fulfilment of their duties of the _hajj_ (Touati 2010; Toorawa 2004: 53–70). The number of Christian pilgrims from northern Europe obviously decreased after the Reformation. Yet despite Protestant efforts at demystifying the Holy Land and criticizing pilgrimage as a superstitious reliance on indulgences, some Protestants continued to visit Jerusalem, and their journeys continued to be shaped by Catholic practices and itineraries. Travellers such as Fynes Moryson, John Sanderson and William Biddulph visited the same sites and resided with the Franciscan friars at the Mount Sion monastery, collecting material objects as mementoes to bring back home even while claiming not to believe in their redemptive powers (O'Donnell 2009). All travellers were moved to tears by the first sight of Jerusalem, and most of them found the Church of the Holy Sepulchre a tumultuous and confusing experience, a tradition that has persisted until our times.

**The Levant of trade and diplomacy**

The growth of the Ottoman Empire saw European interest in the Middle East intensify and become more secular in its motivations. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 revealed the vulnerability of Christian Western Europe; by the sixteenth century the Ottomans controlled territory from Hungary all the way to the Persian Gulf and the Caucasus, as well as large parts of North Africa. The power of the Ottomans, and the military threat they represented to Europe for more than three centuries, ensured that the Middle East was carefully studied, mapped and depicted in the early modern period (see Bisaha 2004; Hamilton et al. 2005). The rise of the Ottomans also necessitated more diplomatic entourages to the region. The reports brought back by diplomats like the Flemish Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, who travelled to Istanbul in 1554 and 1556 representing the Habsburg emperor (see Forster 2010, originally printed in 1927 by Oxford University Press), exhibited considerable interest in the organization of the Ottoman army, a newly relevant concern after the bloody battles of Belgrade, Rhodes and Mohács. But they also recorded their views of Ottoman custom, Roman ruins, epigraphics and old coins, and were important pioneers in book and artefact collection, often trying to acquire rare Eastern specimens for the libraries of their patrons. In addition to his learned impressions of the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent, de Busbecq brought home specimens of hitherto unknown plants and even had the sultan's recently deceased giraffe dug up in order to inspect its bones. Artists like Melchior Lorich and Giovanni Bellini depicted the Ottomans' facial features and costumes for Europeans, whilst other travellers increasingly returned home with an array of Ottoman goods, initiating something of a vogue for all things Turkish, from coffee houses to carpets, tulips and ceramics (Brotton and Jardine 2000).

An influential vernacular travel account of the Ottoman Empire was that of Nicholas de Nicolay (1517–83), a French royal geographer who accompanied ambassador Gabriel d'Aramon to the Ottoman Empire in 1551. De Nicolay's _Quartre premieres livres des navigations et pereginations orientales_ ( _Four Books of Oriental Voyages and Pilgrimages_ , 1568) contained both an itinerary and short ethnographic descriptions, along with engravings of the various Ottoman social and religious groups, including ethnic minority peoples, wandering vagabonds, wrestlers and women both old and young. The book presented an image of the Ottomans that ran counter to prevailing stereotypes about their lasciviousness and sensuality; despite some scandalous and titillating claims of sexual transgressions by women inside the hammams (bathhouses), most of the images show fully clad, respectable figures (see Tinguely 1999; Rouillard 1941); de Nicolay even praised the massage he was given in one of the baths. Translated into several languages, the book became a manual on how to navigate Ottoman social hierarchies.

Trade was now an important focus of European interest in the Middle East. The Levant Company was established in England in 1581, with similar chartered companies being set up in the Netherlands and elsewhere across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (see Mather 2009). Increasing numbers of merchants accordingly visited the region, while commercial concerns became an important focus of diplomatic missions; the English Levant Company, indeed, paid the salary of the ambassador and consuls in Aleppo, Smyrna and elsewhere, and even sent envoys to the Persians and the Mughals. This generated a growing archive of first-hand accounts, many of which were included in the extensive early modern travel writing collections such as Giambattista Ramusio's _Navigationi et Viaggi_ ( _Voyages and Travels_ , 1550–1606), Richard Hakluyt's _Principall Navigations_ (1589; second edition 1598–1600), and Samuel Purchas's _Purchas His Pilgrimes_ (1625) – the latter, for example, included the travel reports of figures such as the chaplain William Biddulph, Sir George Sandys, Thomas Coryate and the Levant merchant John Sanderson. These travellers charted the territory in increasingly empirical fashion, allowing readers to follow in their footsteps along the banks of the River Jordan, the hustle and bustle of Cairo's slave markets, and on the pilgrim routes of the Holy Land. The Scot William Lithgow crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and travelled to the Middle East via North Africa, an arduous journey he described in the second edition of his _Rare Adventures and Painfull Peregrinations_ (1632). Many travellers depicted the Turks and their justice system as cruel and the sultan and his local rulers as tyrannical. Yet their complaints were partly symptomatic of what Gerald MacLean has characterized as 'imperial envy' and were often accompanied by many positive remarks and comments about the Levant and its culture (MacLean 2001; see also MacLean 2004). For if there were nothing alluring about the Ottoman Empire and its dominions, why would there have been such anxiety in this period about 'turning Turk' and converting to Islam? There were also contrasting accounts. Organ maker Thomas Dallam's travelogue about his journey to Istanbul in 1599–1600 is remarkable for its lack of the usual ethnocentric stereotypes regarding the tyranny and cruelty of the Turks, the sensual pleasures of the harems or the oddities of foreign religious worship (see MacLean 2004; Danson 2009; and for the text of Dallam's account, Bent 1893).

European travellers also began to range beyond the Ottoman Empire, establishing contact with the Safavid Empire in Persia. In the sixteenth century, the only accounts of Persia were to be found in a travelogue by the Muscovy Company merchant Anthony Jenkinson, and in the geographical histories of Giovanni Botero and Giovanni-Tommaso Minadoi. But in the early seventeenth century, the brothers Anthony and Robert Sherley sought to fashion an alliance between the Safavid regime and England, resulting in the publication of _A True Report of Sir Anthony Sherlies Journey_ (1600) _Sir Anthony Sherley his Relation of his Travels into Persia_ (1613) and Anthony Nixon's account of the brothers' voyages, _The Three English Brothers_ (1607). In the seventeenth century, English interests in Persia were vocalized also in drama, which often depicted the Empire, its people and their religious customs more favourably than the Ottomans, describing Persia as the 'chief of empires', with noble leaders and a more virtuous form of Islam (Grogan 2014; Houston 2009; Burton 2009).

In the seventeenth century, writing about the East took a scholarly turn. Books on the art of travel started to include separate sections dealing with Ottoman territories: James Howell's _Instructions and Directions For Forren Travell_ (originally published in 1642) was republished in 1650 'with a new Appendix for Travelling into Turkey and the Levant parts' (Howell 1650: 138). Diplomats continued to produce learned accounts of the region: examples include Sir Paul Rycaut's _Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches_ (1678) and Louis Deshayes de Courmenin's _Voyage du Levant_ (1621) (on Rycaut, see Anderson 1989). Other notable travellers included John Covel who served in the Levant in 1670–77 as a chaplain to the ambassador and left a manuscript account of his travels, with ethnographic observations, and a great number of drawings depicting Ottoman ceremonies, customs and buildings (Covel 2010). By the mid-seventeenth century, so many accounts were in circulation that travellers like Peter Mundy could claim that the city of Istanbul had been much better described by earlier authors.

Scholars used to assume that Ottomans and Arabs did not have similar curiosity about Western Europe, but this has been contested in recent years (Alam and Subrahmanyam 2007; Subrahmanyam 2011; Casale 2010). The Arab diplomats studied by Nabil Matar in _Europe through Arab Eyes_ (2009) and the remarkable seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi (1611–85) show such claims to be unfounded. In the later years of his life, Evliya collected his extensive notes, based on more than forty years of travel between 1630 and 1672, into the fascinating ten-volume _Seyahatname_ ( _Book of Travels_ ), which included observations on both European and Ottoman dominions, as well as on agriculture, religion, food and politics (see Dankoff and Kim 2010).

The eighteenth century could be characterized as the swan song of the Great Desert Caravan Route to India, one of the key trade routes to Asia. This overland route from Aleppo to Basra through the Syrian deserts was for many years preferred by the East India Company to the dangerous sea voyage round the Cape of Good Hope, especially when quick dispatches had to be sent to India. The Portuguese Antonio Tenreiro was among the first to record his return journey (1523), but after the French jewel merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier travelled to Basra and back in the seventeenth century, the area succumbed to unrest due to commercial rivalries. In the mid-eighteenth century the British started to dominate the area, with William Beawes, Gaylard Roberts, Bartholomew Plaisted and John Carmichael all describing the route (Carruthers 1929).

This period also saw the first published account of Middle Eastern travels by a woman, in the form of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's _Turkish Embassy Letters_ (1763). These letters were based on her stay in Turkey in 1716–18, when she accompanied her husband to Istanbul as he took up the role of Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, although they were not published until after Montagu's death. Montagu criticized earlier authors for exaggerations and lies, and for claiming closer access to Ottoman elites and to women's spheres than they had actually had. It may come as no surprise that several travellers who claimed to have been eyewitnesses to Ottoman harems had not been inside their walls. As an aristocrat and a woman, Montagu emphasized the uniqueness of her own perspective on the Ottomans. Her writing has often been a starting point for feminist critiques of Said, emphasizing the plurality of voices in Orientalist discourse (see Lowe 1991).

**Arabian and eastern attractions, 1800–1947**

By the early nineteenth century, the once mighty Ottoman Empire was thought to be in decline. Napoleon's invasion of Egypt was intended to reduce British influence in the area, but it also showed how vulnerable the Ottomans were, thus contributing to a growing view of the Empire as the 'sick man of Europe'. Thereafter Britain, France and Russia vied for influence in the region, although for the most part they did not seek direct control, preferring to prop up the Ottoman Empire and sometimes assisting the Ottomans against separatist movements. Yet Egypt increasingly fell under British influence, becoming a protectorate in 1882. Later, during the First World War, the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 divided the Arab provinces between Britain and France. These political developments naturally influenced the depiction of the region, with the Ottomans and other Middle Eastern communities being increasingly portrayed as corrupt, weak, and backward, in stark contrast to the early modern period. Paradoxically, however, one product of these changes was also a romantic idealization of primitivism, making the Middle East an exotic place to escape from modernity.

Across the nineteenth century, the area attracted a growing number of archaeological enthusiasts, devout pilgrims, and adventurous risk takers (Bar-Yosef 2005; Nash 2005; Melman 1992). This development has been attributed both to Lord Byron's _Turkish Tales_ (1813–16), which inspired many imitators, and also to the emergence of a tourist infrastructure, as steamships, railway services (most famously the Orient Express) and the pilgrimage tours offered by Thomas Cook made it easier to reach the Eastern Mediterranean. In the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Egypt especially became the focus of much scholarly and touristic interest. Napoleon's engineers, surveyors and antiquarians had scrupulously charted the Nile Valley, the Nile Delta and Upper Egypt, producing the magisterial, multi-volume _Description de l'Égypte_ ( _Description of Egypt_ , 1809–29). The early nineteenth century then witnessed intense French and British rivalry over the acquisition of Egyptian antiquities. This phase of European engagement with the Middle East is perhaps best exemplified by the expatriate Italian Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1828), whose account of British-sponsored expeditions to the Valley of the Kings, _Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia, &c_ (1820), did much to create Western culture's most enduring images of mummies and pyramids; Belzoni's legacy arguably lives on in fictional characters such as Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. Another important volume was Edward William Lane's _Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians_ (1836); this influential account was much referenced throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, helping to shape preconceptions not only about Egypt but also the Middle East more widely. However, it has more recently been the focus for much heated debate about the alleged biases and prejudices of the Western Orientalist tradition (see Said 2003: 159–66; Irwin 2006: 163–6).

Literary and artistic luminaries ranging from Chateaubriand, Byron and Flaubert to Ingres and Delacroix offered colourful and exaggerated depictions of the region and its inhabitants in both texts and images; the resulting wave of what Roderick Cavaliero has called 'Ottomania' (Cavaliero 2013; see also Lowe 1991: 75–6) generally perpetuated stereotypes of languid odalisques, courtesans and slave-girls. Chateaubriand's _Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem_ ( _Journey from Paris to London_ , 1811) was not the only example of a novelist recounting real-life Middle Eastern travels. The travelogues produced by novelists were usually more literary than scholarly in nature, and ranged in scope and style from romantic escapism to humorous and sarcastic commentaries on touristic travellers to the Holy Land; Mark Twain's _Innocents Abroad_ (1869) remains arguably the most popular, and irreverent, at least among American travel writing of the region (Yothers 2007: 83–106; Obenzinger 2009: 1–2). Another famous example of literary travelogue is Kinglake's _Eothen_ (1844), which recounted the author's encounters with funerals in Cairo and the famous eccentric Lady Hester Stanhope, who not only travelled to the Middle East conducting amateur archeological digs, but stayed there for good, her own body later becoming prey for treasure hunters and grave robbers (Melman 1992: 1; Gibb 2005).

If Egypt and the Holy Land were increasingly accessible to tourists, literary travellers and, not least, a new wave of Evangelical pilgrims from both Britain and the USA (see Yothers 2007: 19–42; Obenzinger 2009), many other areas in the region were still only being reached by adventurous scholars such as Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784–1817), the Swiss explorer of Petra, or the Finn Georg August Wallin (1811–52), who risked his life gathering information about the customs and languages of the Arabia Deserta disguised as a Muslim doctor. Northern Arabia was further described in C.M. Doughty's monumental _Travels in Arabia Deserta_ (1888), while Sir Richard Burton (1821–90) managed to get to Mecca in disguise, as recounted in his _Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah_ (1856). Burton is famous for both his Arabian travels and his unexpurgated translation of _One Thousand and One Nights_ (1882–84) into English. He was also an ardent critic of British imperialism, even if he had served in the East India Company army and fought in the Crimean War. Similar anti-establishment tendencies can be seen in later travellers like Wilfred Thesiger (famed for his _Arabian Sands_ of 1959) and T.E. Lawrence, who is nowadays perhaps better known by Peter O'Toole's portrayal of him in the film _Lawrence of Arabia_ (1962) than for his own account of his time in the Middle East, _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ (1922). These explorers showed the way to many romantic travellers who dreamed about escaping the Western world in search of the supposed 'authenticity' of the desert.

These romanticized accounts of the region often celebrated Bedouin Arabs for their fierce independence, depicting them as the embodiment of traditional hospitality, honour and manliness. Yet such favourable and sometimes anti-colonial accounts of Middle Eastern communities often shared many of the same fundamental stereotypes found in more overtly Orientalist and ethnocentric works by colonial administrators like George Curzon (later Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, 1899–1905) and Lord Cromer, the Controller-General and subsequently Consul-General of Egypt between 1877 and 1907. Curzon's _Persia and the Persian Question_ (1892) and Cromer's _Modern Egypt_ (1908) both depicted the Middle East as a region in decline and decay, in need of Britain's imperial dominance and help, and both assumed a stark contrast between European rationalism and the supposedly more 'slipshod mind' of the 'Oriental'. Both men also emphasized the need for Oriental studies, characterizing them as an 'imperial obligation' (Nash 2005: 109–11).

The nineteenth century also saw a growing number of female travellers, ethnographers, archaeologists, and missionary workers visiting the Middle East. The region's deserts were explored by Lady Anne Blunt (1837–1917) and Gertrude Bell (1868–1926), whose descriptions of Syria, Arabia and Mesopotamia rival those of Lawrence and Thesiger (see Melman 1992; Behdad 1994; Lowe 1991). One of the most prolific female travel writers of the twentieth century to have described the Middle East was Freya Stark (1893–1993). Stark had studied Arabic, Persian and history at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, prior to exploring the furthermost corners of Persia, Afghanistan and the southern Arabian deserts and producing between the 1930s and 1970s more than two dozen books about her travels. Although sometimes portrayed as eccentric 'lady travellers', Blunt, Bell and Stark made significant contributions to contemporary Western knowledge of the region, with Bell also playing an important role in the establishment and early administration of modern Iraq.

**Uprisings, emancipation and war: post 1947**

The Ottoman Empire finally dissolved in 1922, in the aftermath of the First World War. Reneging on promises made to Arab leaders during the war, Britain and France oversaw the reorganization of the region according to the national boundaries (and French and British spheres of influence) projected in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. The Second World War led to the creation of Israel in 1947, and the accompanying displacement of the Palestinian people. These developments helped to create the political and religious tensions that are such a marked feature of the Middle East today. The region's instability and violence, which has of course had reverberations all around the world, consequently feature prominently in travel accounts from the 1960s onwards, and war reportage and combatant memoirs have become a major part of the genre. The romantic tradition, which embraced the Middle East as a site of personal epiphanies and premodern values and lifeways, has largely fallen into abeyance; perhaps the last travelogue in this mode was Colin Thubron's early volume _The Hills of Adonis_ (1968), in which a solitary walking tour of Lebanon gives rise to spiritual reveries and lyrical effusions that are not greatly disturbed by the contemporaneous Six Day War between Israel and its neighbouring Arab states. In more recent travel accounts, however, the complex politics of the region has generally been a pressing, unescapable theme, with Israel, and/or the relationship between Israel and Palestine, being inevitably a major point of focus: noteworthy travelogues on these destinations include Saul Bellow's _To Jerusalem and Back_ (1976), Thomas Friedman's _From Beirut to Jerusalem_ (1989) and Sherna Berger Gluck's _An American Feminist in Palestine_ (1994) (see Obenzinger 2009: 155–62).

The larger geopolitical context, then, is generally a pervasive, fraught presence in recent Middle Eastern travel writing. Yet this has not prevented travellers essaying a great variety of itineraries and approaches in their depictions of the region. Jonathan Raban's _Arabia Through the Looking Glass_ (1979), later republished as _Arabia: A Labyrinth_ , addressed the postwar wealth and consequent rapid modernization of the oil-producing Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Dubai and Abu Dhabi; more recently, Richard Poplak's _The Sheikh's Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World_ (2009) offers a combination of sociological analysis and goofball comedy in its consideration of the ways in which Western music, film, TV and video-games have been taken up in the Middle East (and also in the wider Muslim world of Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and Indonesia). The last example stands in a tradition of comic travel writing about the region which also includes P.J. O'Rourke's _Holidays In Hell_ (1988), where an early chapter describes a visit to Lebanon, Tony Horwitz's _Baghdad Without A Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia_ (1991), Rory MacLean's _Magic Bus_ (2006), which retraces the steps of young Westerners on the hippy trail in the 1960s and 1970s, and painter Henry Hemming's _Misadventure in the Middle East_ (2007). In some of these texts, the comedy can seem in bad taste, and merely a means of perpetuating dubious Orientalist and Islamophobic stereotypes; in others, however, it is used to debunk those stereotypes, and to demonstrate how humanity and normality survive even in a region commonly depicted, in the Western media, as mired in perpetual violence and crisis.

Inevitably, religion remains a major theme in Middle East travel writing, with works such as William Dalrymple's _From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium_ (1998), Bruce Feiler's _Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land through the Five Books of Moses_ (2001) and Gerard Russell's _Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into Disappearing Religions of the Middle East_ (2013) interweaving travelogue and extensive historical research as they address the region's complex mosaic of religious and spiritual traditions. Recent years have also seen some noteworthy accounts by Muslims of the _hajj_ to Mecca. Such accounts have of course long circulated in the Arabic tradition (see Wolfe 1997); what differentiates works such as Abdellah Hamoudi's _A Season in Mecca_ (2005) and _The Hadj: An American's Pilgrimage to Mecca_ (1998), by Muslim convert Michael Wolfe, is that they are written in English and marketed to an English-speaking audience, and therefore serve as an important counterbalance to the accounts of earlier, colonial-era travellers like Richard Burton, who reached Islam's holy city through subterfuge and without sharing the faith of its inhabitants. Another alternative perspective on the region is offered in Amitav Ghosh's critically acclaimed _In an Antique Land_ (1992), in which the Indian Ghosh recounts his own experiences in rural Egypt whilst simultaneously reconstructing through historical research the cosmopolitan networks of culture and trade that linked the Middle East and India in medieval times.

The past several years of uprisings related to the Arab Spring, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the devastating civil war in Syria have kept tourists and scholars away from large parts of the Middle East, and the region is nowadays a departure point for thousands of refugees. YouTube videos showing human suffering and crumbling world heritage sites are arguably taking over from traditional travel narratives, along with new forms of blogging, tweeting and other efforts to avoid state censorship. It remains to be seen how these new media, and the region's ongoing political turmoil, will affect future representations of the Middle East.

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India / South Asia

_Tabish Khair_

How does one narrate the, often, seemingly 'incredible' difference of India / South Asia (henceforth generically 'India') and at the same time make it credible, definable and, in the colonial phase, governable? This has largely been the problem that much Western travel writing about India has had to face. But the solutions found have not been identical, and they have changed across time. In order to understand how and why, this chapter will look primarily at 'modern' Western travel texts, by which I mean works published from the mid eighteenth century onwards, after the European Enlightenment brought a new style, purpose and ideology to travel writing. In this tradition, as Kate Teltscher notes, the depiction of India is generally organized around two main tropes, whereby the subcontinent is viewed as either 'a land of _Arabian Nights_ exoticism, a country unchanged for 3,000 years, or a site to be mined for statistical information' (2002: 191). These tropes, which have historically been strongly inflected with colonial ideology, arguably still govern many representations of India; although as I shall also show, with reference to texts on India by non-Westerners and by Indians themselves, it has been possible to imagine India in other ways.

**Early accounts of India**

The earliest descriptions of India come from Chinese Buddhist travellers of the fifth to seventh centuries CE. Later, many Muslims from Africa and Asia wrote accounts, these being the products of a now almost forgotten but once sophisticated and highly cosmopolitan Indian Ocean world of travel, trade and seafaring (see Pearson 2003; Ghosh 1992). These Arabic texts, which ranged from travel-based studies and memoirs to fully-fledged travel accounts, were produced throughout the medieval period. What kind of India was narrated in these accounts? And do they utilize the two main European tropes identified by Teltscher?

The early Chinese accounts do collect information in India (where some of their authors also collected horse-loads of manuscripts), as does the medieval Muslim traveller al-Baruni, but this is very different from the statistical mining that Teltscher mentions. The information and texts collected by these different travellers are more of a comparative endeavour, by which they seek both to distinguish themselves from Indians and to establish bridges with them. Al-Baruni ( _c_. 1050), pressed by the monotheism and iconoclasm of Islam, repeatedly defends the Hindus by referring to both pre-Muslim traditions in Muslim lands and to the Muslim heritage of Greek knowledge. On the other hand, Babur in the fifteenth century and, to a lesser extent, Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century could be as acerbic about Indians as any (disowned) literary ancestor of V.S. Naipaul. Thus Babur writes:

Hindustan is a country of few charms. Its people have no good looks; of social intercourse, paying and receiving visits there is none; of genius and capacity none; of manners none; in handicraft and work, there is no form or symmetry, method or quality.

(Babur 2006: 275)

This is a typical account by an irate homesick foreigner, evaluating the new land with the help of inevitably absent home norms. However, even such unfavourable accounts do not depend on the trope of discovery in terms of exotic space or unchanged time, which as we shall see becomes a central component of post-Enlightenment or 'modern' narratives. When Babur, for instance, collects information, he does so in a manner of reportage rather than mining for statistical information: "The people of Hindustan have also an excellent mode of reckoning: 100,000 they call a lakh; 100 lakhs, one crore; 100 crores, one arb" (ibid.: 274). India could come across as a place of similarities or strangeness, novelty or boredom, but it was seldom treated descriptively in the two styles identified by Teltscher. Such accounts do not set out to discover India or a part of India in terms of definitive novelty, nor do they claim to pull the country away from the dark and into the light of narration and civilization – this being the modernizing mission that would characterize many Western accounts from the eighteenth century onwards.

What is interesting, with reference to a point that I will stress about 'modern' or 'post-Enlightenment' travel accounts in the next section, is the fact that early European travel accounts generally resemble these non-European travel narratives. The two most influential seventeenth-century accounts were Jean-Baptiste Tavernier's _Six Voyages_ (1675) and Francois Bernier's _Travels in the Mughal Empire_ (1670). Tavernier's description was based on six journeys to Persia and India between 1630 and 1668; Bernier's on his decade-long stay at the courts of the liberal and pluralist Dara Shikoh and, following Shikoh's fall, the puritanical Aurangzeb, between 1656 and 1668. Both writers show a similar interest in both novelty and ordinariness, fact and hearsay, without displaying the more profoundly othering nature of the tropes noted by Teltscher.

It is not that the fantastic was missing from the earliest travel accounts of India by so-called Westerners. In the fragments attributed to the first such travel writer, the Greek Scylax who was sent in _c_. 515 BCE by the Persian king Darius I to explore the course of River Indus, we notice an obvious intermingling of the credible and the incredible. This is also the case with _Indica_ by Megasthenes ( _c_. 350–290 BCE), a Greek historian and diplomat sent by King Seleucus I on embassies to Emperor Chandragupta, founder of the great Mauryan dynasty in India. A similar blend of fact and fiction is found in the descriptions of India offered in Herodotus' _Histories_ ( _c_. 450–420 BCE), Arrian's _Indica_ ( _c_. 160 CE) and many later accounts, which drew extensively on these ancient Greek texts. Yet these accounts do not construct India as a fundamentally 'other' place, nor do they present it as a space to be 'modernized'.

**Enlightenment and its others**

This difference is significant and it is rooted in a particular phase of European history; it characterizes _modern_ travel literature (and has been resisted by it as well, especially in the postcolonial phase). In the present context, I use the word 'modern' with careful vagueness, to mean simply an Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment European discourse whereby travel writing is constructed as a rational and ordered narrative of discovery. Given the genre, such accounts have to maintain a balance between incredibility and credibility, between relating the novel and bizarre features of other cultures, yet doing so in a way that seems plausible and trustworthy.

The self-conception of the Enlightenment is essential to understanding the nature of modern travel writing. As historians have increasingly recognized, the very concept of an 'Enlightenment' necessarily required the construction of a prior 'Dark Ages'. In this way the Enlightenment posited a discourse of emergence, of discovery and self-discovery that not only involved movement in time (going back to the ancient Greeks for instance, via the rediscovery of Classical texts) but also in space, as Europeans set out to discover the rest of the world and chart what Edmund Burke termed 'the Great Map of Mankind' (see Marshall and Williams 1982). A growing 'ethnographic impulse' in travel writing, as Joan Pau Rubiés aptly terms it (2002: 242), was an aspect and consequence of this. And just as the 'Dark Ages' were a necessary construct for the process of discovery across time to be launched and defined, much of the space outside Enlightened Europe was filled with versions of darkness in these ethnographic accounts. Geographical space thus acquired a temporal dimension. Enlightenment 'stadial' theories identified other cultures as being at earlier stages of social and economic development, and so as being survivals from, or throwbacks to, earlier periods that Europe had outgrown in its march to modernity; European travellers therefore often felt themselves to be moving back in time as they journeyed to regions they regarded as backward and primitive. Other peoples historically have had myths of contemporary civilizations in stagnation or decline, but there has seldom been anything like this cohesive, all-encompassing and temporalizing European construction of the Other. And this difference is essential to understanding the imagined geographies of India as given to us by 'Westerners', as well as recent changes in these geographies.

**'Modern' depictions of India**

In the colonial Western imagination, until well into the twentieth century, India offered a curious amalgamation of discovery and self-discovery, which fitted in very well with the post-Enlightenment tradition in travel writing. The dominant Western colonial tropes when it comes to imagining India in travel writing can be organized into two broad categories, which might seem opposed but in fact usually overlapped: first, Incredibility, or what following Teltscher we can call _Arabian Nights_ tropes, and second, Credibility, or what I shall here call _People of India_ tropes.

It is true that even in ancient Greek accounts, including the travels of Scylax and the 'history' of Herodotus mentioned earlier, India was already a fabulous place, full of strange beings. But it is misleading to talk about these accounts in the same breath as post-Enlightenment travel texts that construct India as a stage for _Arabian Nights_ exotica. In these early accounts, all spaces – including the ones relinquished by the traveller – contained similar marvels. Strange animals and people did not just inhabit India; they also inhabited Europe in ancient and medieval accounts. For this reason, I prefer to apply the _Arabian Nights_ label to later texts that construct India as a distinctive space of exoticism, stressing the incredible aspects of travel. As noted, this construction has both spatial and temporal aspects: India is not only far away, but also shrouded in the blanket of darkness that Europe threw off with the Enlightenment. Thus a colonial-era account like William Henry Sleeman's _Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official_ (1844), for all that it contains much painstaking statistical mining, also plays up in lurid fashion the activities of the so-called 'thugs', members of a supposed cult of Indians, with Muslim and Hindu names, who waylaid and murdered wayfarers. The exoticism of this and other post-Enlightenment accounts differs from that of ancient and medieval descriptions: there is now little discussion of elephant-eared men or fabulous beasts. Yet these later accounts still construct India in terms of an exotic difference. Thus India becomes a place defined by, and identified synecdochically with, not only thuggee but also customs like suttee or sati (the Hindu practice of widow self-immolation); by the zenana (separate women's quarters in a house or palace); and by social structures like the caste system. It is in this sense that post-Enlightenment texts indulge in _Arabian Nights_ exoticism, while ancient and medieval texts, which talked of fabulous beasts, did not – because the older texts neither excluded the incredible from their own realities nor defined India primarily in terms of this incredible difference.

This emphasis on exotic, often dangerous difference persists even in texts like Jim Corbett's mostly factual accounts of hunting 'man-eating' tigers and leopards (published from the 1930s to the 1950s). It must be stressed that these _Arabian Nights_ tropes do not occur separately from the other stock tropes of Orientalism. Sleeman's _Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official_ illustrates that the exoticizing tendency often coexisted in post-Enlightenment travelogues with the fact-finding required for colonial administration. I term the latter aspect of colonial depictions of India the _People of India_ trope, after John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye's nineteenth-century publication of that name. In this extensively illustrated, eight-volume work, published between 1868 and 1875, Watson and Kaye expanded the Eurocentric definitiveness of James Mill's _History of British India_ (1817) by providing a seemingly comprehensive overview of the vast hierarchy of Indian castes and tribes, detailing how they were organized in relation to one another and dividing them up into such colonial categories as 'martial', 'criminal' and 'law-abiding'. This is a good example of what Rubiés describes as the ethnographic impulse, although in its focus on the definitively 'Indian' exotica of a supposed caste system it is also influenced by the _Arabian Nights_ trope. For while a system of castes undoubtedly existed in India, it was by no means as stable and fixed in time or space as accounts like Watson and Kaye's _People of India_ assumed. Indeed, by being so fixated on this supposed point of exotic difference in Indian culture, and by assuming its existence from a position of power and incorporating it into colonial administration, colonial writers like Watson and Kaye to some extent actually helped to construct the modern caste system. As Indian historians have noted (Kosambi 1962, 1965; Gupta 2000), caste had earlier been a rather more theoretical concept, adumbrated in Brahminical books but not necessarily followed so strictly in practice.

In such ways, colonial travel narratives and other post-Enlightenment accounts of India selected certain aspects of Indian existence as distinctive aspects. The point is not whether these were actual or not, common or uncommon, mainstream or not; the point is that these were among many features of a complex culture, yet they were highlighted as exotically definitive because of an Orientalizing colonial gaze which sought evidence of India's backwardness. For instance, as Uma Narayan highlights (1997), around the time when British and European travel texts were constructing sati as a definitive – and cruelly exotic – feature of 'Hindoo' and Indian society, there was a tradition of wife-selling in England. Had Indians colonized Europe, this ritualistic custom (which began in England in the seventeenth century, became more frequent in the eighteenth century, and was still being reported in the nineteenth century) could have been just as easily turned into an exotic _Arabian Nights_ trope definitive of England as sati was made definitive of India. In both such endeavours, the ethnographic impulse and the modern colonial gaze would have played a role; the latter is not necessarily separate from the former, and credibility and incredibility go hand in hand.

My stress on _Arabian Nights_ and _People of India_ tropes should not be misconstrued to suggest that colonial travel accounts were only fabulous and/or painstakingly administrative. Many such texts are of course principally concerned to offer the traveller's personal observations. Yet in many colonial accounts, these personal observations still often incorporate and are framed within the _Arabian Nights_ and _People of India_ discourses. For many travellers, the authority and interest of their travelogue was predicated precisely on the claim that they had first-hand, eyewitness experience of some of the exotic aspects of Indian life. Thus women travel writers to India frequently reported on the women-only space of the zenana – either in a condemnatory and polemical tone, as in the American writer Katherine Mayo's 1927 bestseller, _Mother India_ , or in a partly sympathetic, if condescending, manner, as is the case with the Welsh Fanny Parkes' _Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque during Four and Twenty Years in the East with Revelations of Life in the Zenana_ (1850). These two texts, in different ways, display the usual admixture of exotica and ethnographic reportage.

**Twentieth- and twenty-first-century accounts of India**

By the twentieth century, the scope for travel to yield important discoveries was greatly reduced; as Joseph Conrad's narrator puts it in _Heart of Darkness_ (1899), all blank spots in the maps had already been filled. Yet for European travel writing, discovery remained an important motif, whether it be the discovery of entire lifestyles, as in Wilfred Thesiger's _Arabian Sands_ (1959), or of a different mode of travelling – such as, in the South Asian context, a traversed route given a new perspective by the _newness_ of the act of walking in Eric Newby's _A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush_ (1958). Evidently the trope of discovery, inserted into modern travel writing by the European Enlightenment, cannot be simply extracted from it. But with the discoverable shrinking, not just what is to be discovered but how it is discovered has to change. It is this that helps us understand some of the differences in the imagined geographies of India, as provided in colonial travel texts and in postcolonial ones – 'postcolonial' being a term I use to encompass British texts after colonization as well as Indian texts, because there is no reason why the end of colonization should preface the colonized with a 'post' but leave the colonizer unaffected.

The term 'postcolonial' is slightly misleading in historical terms because a change in attempts to imagine India is noticeable in the best late colonial texts, such as J.R. Ackerley's _Hindoo Holiday_ (1932) and George Orwell's _Burmese Days_ (1934). Both are thinly fictionalized, highly personal accounts of the two authors' stays in _specific_ parts of South Asia and both consciously avoid the temptation to encompass all of South Asia or India. Ackerley's novel, for instance, is basically an account of the narrator's desire to kiss two young men, and of his relationship with his employer, a local rajah. Even a far more wide-ranging text from that decade, Robert Byron's _The Road to Oxiana_ (1937) – which narrates the author's travels in Persia and Afghanistan – is distinguished by vivid reporting of largely personal experiences and observations. These major travel texts, fictionalized or not, were clear attempts to move away from some dominant colonial tropes and the definitive Indian exotic, and this attempt was further developed, as we shall see, in the postcolonial period.

The ethnographic impulse has not disappeared, though it has been hugely tempered. The closest we come to it is in personalized journeys into India, perhaps best illustrated by V.S. Naipaul's three travel books about India, since here the informing discourses are more colonial than postcolonial. Despite the personal angle that is sometimes highlighted but more often obscured in the text, Naipaul's early books, _An Area of Darkness_ (1964) and _India: A Wounded Civilization_ (1977) are replete with tropes of definitive otherness – poverty, famine, violence, irrationality, dirt, dust, defecation, civilizational failures, and above all the core colonial discourse – now deeply absorbed by both the Hindu Right and Muslim reactionaries – of India as a country of two warring and incompatible 'nations'. The later account, _A Million Mutinies Now_ (1990), presents a slightly more optimistic view of India largely because it is an India that Naipaul sees as 'awakening to history and self-assertion' (Teltscher 2002: 194) – a perception strikingly similar to the Hindu Right's ideological 're-writing' of India as a peaceful Brahminical ('Hindu') civilization, deeply wounded by centuries of Muslim incursions and finally waking up to assertive and authentic self-definition. Naipaul, like his great predecessor Rudyard Kipling, is always a far more perceptive and nuanced commentator in his fiction than in his non-fiction.

Naipaul's books on India continue the tradition of the _People of India_ tropes, at least in the sense of coming up with sweeping and definitive statements about a complex culture; statements that seek to make sense of it all. However, mostly in the postcolonial phase, such magisterial definitions of India are uncommon. Instead, what we get are accounts of specific parts of India, particularly cities, as in Dominique Lappierre's travel-based novel set in Kolkata/Calcutta, _City of Joy_ (1985). More interesting still are accounts which situate cities in a historical context, such as William Dalrymple's _City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi_ (1994), or in a complex socio-economic matrix, as in the New York-based Suketu Mehta's account of Mumbai in _Maximum City_ (2004). Similarly, Sam Miller's _Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity_ (2010) ventures into the globalizing Delhi of the twenty-first century. The best recent attempts to encompass a huge subject matter ('India' or 'Islamic conflicts') are not definitive in the colonial sense of 'mining for statistical information' or capturing an exotic other, but are instead based on personal observations and long, sustained conversations with 'natives' – good examples being Mark Tully's _No Full Stops in India_ (1991) and Jason Burke's war-torn _On the Road to Kandahar_ (2006).

Then there are books that delve into India as an economy or a political state, of which there has been an explosion in the last two decades. One recent example is the _Washington Post_ correspondent Simon Denyer's _Rogue Nation_ (2014), where the subtitle _Harnessing the Power of India's Unruly Democracy_ clarifies its concerns; another is _Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality_ (2014) by John Elliott, 'an old India hand [who . . . ] arrived in 1983 to set up _The Financial Times'_ India bureau' (Deb 2014: 8). Both these books, in keeping with this genre of travel-based reportage-studies, have their roots in the ethnographic impulse of earlier travel writing, but they set out to explain a specific aspect of India, not to define all of it. On the Indian side, there are dozens of similar texts, one of the more significant being _The Argumentative Indian_ (2005) by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen. Then we have books like the US-based Siddhartha Deb's PEN prize-winning _The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in New India_ (2011) and Katherine Boo's National Book Award-winning _Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity_ (2012), both of which explore economic inequality in India from different but largely personalized perspectives. These are usually books that fall somewhere between studies, memoirs and travel writing. In some of them one comes across glimmerings of the ethnographic impulse, even a semi-magisterial attempt to encompass all of India, but this is hugely tempered and given a more objective focus, either by talking of a particular city or a specific aspect of India such as its economy or democracy.

Elements of exoticism do survive in twentieth-century travel writing. There is the recurrent assumption that India is a highly spiritual civilization, a land of 'gurus', as in Allen Ginsberg's _Indian Journals_ (1970). But by and large the important travel texts of the postcolonial period try to avoid the usual tropes of colonial discovery and obvious _Arabian Nights_ incredibility. One way to do this is to traverse India differently; if India cannot change, surely the narrator and his mode of seeing can. We have already noted the newness of walking in Newby's _A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush_. To this can be added a plethora of texts that traverse known territory in 'new' ways. Accompanied by his wife, Newby himself sails 1,200 miles down the sacred, polluted river in _Slowly Down the Ganges_ (1966); in Dervla Murphy's _On a Shoestring to Coorg_ (1976) the narrator is accompanied by her five-year-old daughter; Mark Shand rides (what else?) an elephant in _Travels with my Elephant_ (1991); Paul Theroux takes trains across Asia, including India, in _The Great Railway Bazaar_ (1975). As _Arabian Nights_ India has become the stuff of travel brochures and in-flight magazines (and has been adopted by Indian tourism departments, as their common slogan of 'Incredible India!' underlines), recent travel writing avoids these tropes or indulges in them with a degree (redeeming or not) of humour and self-irony, as in Sarah Macdonald's _Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure_ (2004). The focus is on narrating a credible India, though often with explosions of sheer incomprehensibility or marvel or, increasingly, anachronism – an amalgamation also found in E.M. Forster's _A Passage to India_ (1924), a novel and novelist whose brave attempts to 'connect' nevertheless required the counterbalance of an incomprehensible experience in a mysterious cave.

Evidently, old colonial tropes – or sights, for that matter – cannot be innocently revisited in serious travel writing. Pico Iyer puts this succinctly in _Video Night in Kathmandu_ (1989):

While I was in Asia, I made ritual pilgrimages to the Taj Mahal, Pagan and Borobudur; I climbed live volcanoes in the dead of the Javanese night and rode elephants through the jungles of Nepal. I spent nights in an Indonesian hut, where my roommates consisted of two pack rats, a lizard and a family-size cockroach, and other nights in a Moghul palace on a lake, where I sat for hours on the marbled roof, watching the silver moon on water. In Bali, I witnessed a rare and sumptuous cremation, and in Kyoto, I saw the unearthly Daimonji Festival, when all the town is lit with lanterns to guide departed spirits home. None of this, however, is recorded in the pages that follow, partly because all of it has gone on, and will go on, one hopes, for centuries, and partly because such familiar marvels may be better described by travellers more observant than myself.

(Iyer 1988: 10)

Here, Iyer lists sights and experiences that would fit very easily into colonial versions of writing about Asia, whether of the _Arabian Nights_ variety, or dominated by the 'ethnographic impulse'. Yet having provided a list of sights and topics that might feature in such a colonial travel account, and which still feature frequently in modern travel brochures, Iyer specifically decides _not_ to write about them. Instead, back in the 1980s, he writes about the ways in which the West (particularly the USA) penetrates the spaces he visits.

Hence the prevalence of texts offering an off-beat path or perspective into India, both by Westerners and Indians. An excellent example is _Butter Chicken in Ludhiana_ (1995) by the London-based Indian, Pankaj Mishra. It is a travel book that focuses on the small district towns of India. To understand the difference of its trajectory, one has to appreciate the fact that in colonial and early nationalist writings about India, it was 'natural' and rural spaces that took prominence. Indian English writing (highly urban by definition) had trouble with this subject matter but gamely struggled to conform to the idea, expressed in colonial narratives as well as by leaders of the stature of Gandhi, that India was a 'land of villages'. Travel writing about India found it just as difficult to address Indian metropolitan spaces, except as points of departure. All this had changed by the 1980s, when Indian metropolises had long come into their own, but it needed the brash brilliance of Salman Rushdie to make Indian metropolitan spaces stop apologizing when they appeared in English writing (Khair 2014: 18–36). By the 1990s, though, when Pankaj Mishra published _Butter Chicken in Ludhiana_ , Indian metropolitan spaces had colonized writing, including fiction, about India. Books on Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta – the last two yet to be renamed – were penned with gay abandon by Indians and Westerners (as seen above). If Indian rural and natural spaces did not altogether disappear, they definitely took a back seat. Indian district towns became even less visible. Hence, Mishra's travel narrative is significant as a bid to travel against the urbanizing flow of the Indian English and Western narration of 'India' in the 1990s.

The turn towards personal observations and a more specific focus, already noticeable in late colonial texts such as the books by Ackerley and Orwell, has been further accentuated and nuanced in the postcolonial phase. What had been forgotten, partly due to colonial erasure, forms the core of a book like Amitav Ghosh's _In an Antique Land_ (1992), which is partly an attempt to recover the sophisticated Indian Ocean world of medieval travel mentioned earlier. Such recoveries run against the grain of colonial history, removing focus from the inevitable colonial bridge which makes European(ized) experience central to all of colonial and even much of _postcolonialist_ writing. Instead, a work like _In an Antique Land_ undercuts or bypasses this link back to the colonizer by focusing on another postcolonial space (in Ghosh's case, Egypt). A kind of sub-genre in postcolonial travel writing about India presents various efforts at cultural revisiting, sometimes, as in V.S. Naipaul, largely over the discursive bridge of colonial perceptions and sometimes, as in Pankaj Mishra's _Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond_ (2006), largely opposed to them. Naipaul broadly accepts the colonial division of India into Hindu and Muslim 'nations', while Mishra questions it; Naipaul derives postcolonial modernity from the West, regarding it as either successful or failed mimicry, while Mishra sees it as evolving from an original mimicry-impacted _contention_ with the West. I would place many of William Dalrymple's books – both the historical ones like _White Moghuls_ (2002) and the more obvious travel writing kind such as _City of Djinns_ (1994) and _Nine Lives_ (2009) – in this category too: they offer a sort of re-presentation of forgotten or overlooked aspects of Indian history, peoples and cultures.

Much postcolonial travel writing about India does still exploit traces of the colonial tropes highlighted by Teltscher. But these are usually found in the mainstream media and in tourist brochures rather than in more literary forms of travel writing; and if they do occur in the latter, they are usually presented in a self-aware and ironic manner. Similarly, it is usually in what one might call the 'in-between' journalistic genres – especially reportage-studies of India by Westerners and, perhaps more so, Anglophone Indians – that vestiges of the ethnographic impulse are still visible. Literary travel writing about India seeks, sometimes unsuccessfully, to avoid both _Arabian Nights_ and _People of India_ tropes while still being compelled to present a fascinating mix of incredibility and credibility. This change is obviously an aspect of what Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund have highlighted as a general trend in postcolonial travel writing. This trend, they note, involves questioning 'the notion of "real" and "authentic" travel by posing the question: "Authentic to whom?" ' (Edwards and Graulund 2011: 9). Postcolonial travel writing on India by Indians like Ghosh and Mishra, as well as by Westerners like Tully, Iyer and Dalrymple, sets out to avoid previous expectations of selfhood and otherness, often in order to explore new connections (sometimes in the past) or to walk down previously untrodden perspectives. If it cannot abjure the component of 'self-discovery' and 'discovery' in modern travel writing per se, it nevertheless strives to accentuate both differently.

**Select bibliography**

Babur (2006) _Babur-Nama: Journal of Emperor Babur_ , Delhi: Penguin Books.

Bassnett, S. (2004) 'The Empire, Travel Writing, and British Studies', in S. Mohanty (ed.) _Travel Writing and Empire_ , New Delhi: Katha.

Deb, S. (2014) 'Stunning Stasis', _Biblio: A Review of Books_ , 19(5) and (6): 8.

Edwards, J.D., and Graulund, R. (eds) (2011) _Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations_ , Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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China

_Julia Kuehn_

Ever since the first contact and records by Western travellers and travel writers, China has been a place that demonstrates particularly well the dilemma between travel facts and travel fabrications, the reason for this being what Douglas Kerr and I have elsewhere called China's ulteriority (Kerr and Kuehn 2007: 1–2). China was, for the Western traveller, immense, baffling, unfathomable, excessive and often simply 'closed'. There was always more than could be travelled, sketched, converted, subjugated or traded with, more than could be inventoried, lectured or marvelled at, understood or philosophized about: China was truly a _mise-en-abîme_. Hence documentation often met its own bounds, resulting in speculation, hearsay and guesswork, as travellers found, or actively sought, strangeness, mystery and exoticism. As a consequence, accounts of China have often traded in paradoxes and contradictions, emphasizing imperial splendour but common-man poverty, heathenism but potential for Christian conversion, an ancient civilization with barbaric customs, and vast, empty landscapes coupled with packed cities and the dangers of overpopulation. In this chapter, I explore how some of these stock themes have evolved over the centuries, as Western travellers struggled to come to terms with a country that could often mean peril and promise at the same time.

**Medieval contact**

Marco Polo was not the first medieval European traveller to China, or the first to meet Chinese people or write about them. The Italian Franciscan friar Giovanni da Pian Del Carpini (John of Plano Carpini) was sent in 1245 as a papal envoy to the Mongol Empire, where he met many Chinese. He was the first to call the country Cathay, in his _History of the Mongols Whom We Call Tartars_ and the _Book of the Tartars_ (both written in the late 1240s), and he portrayed the 'Cathayans' as affable, kind, hard-working, fine craftsmen, with a language of their own. For John, the Chinese were quasi-Christians who worshipped a god but also honoured Jesus Christ, thus merely requiring baptism. Likewise, Flemish Franciscan friar Willielmus de Rubruquis (William of Rubruck) spent eight months in Mongolia's capital Karakorum between 1253 and 1254, meeting numerous Chinese and setting down his impressions in the report he wrote for King Louis IX. Fifteen years later, in 1269, the Venetian merchants Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, Marco's father and uncle, returned from their first voyage to China, and set in motion the journey that would produce _The Travels of Marco Polo_ , the most detailed and widely circulated chronicle of a European traveller's journey to and residence in China. Seventeen-year old Marco left for China with Niccolò and Maffeo in 1271. He arrived in Beijing in 1275, and departed in 1292 after journeys to various Chinese provinces, purportedly in Kublai Khan's diplomatic service. Marco returned with his family to Venice in 1295 and was later imprisoned by the Genoese, then at war with the Venetians. In prison he related his stories and impressions to fellow inmate and romance writer Rustichello da Pisa. In the narrative subsequently produced by Rustichello, Polo's retrospective accounts – which include some hearsay of places and peoples he never saw himself – are combined with romance embellishments, which has in turn generated considerable debate over the centuries about the text's veracity. Elsner and Rubiés label Polo and Rustichello's travelogue a generic blend of 'lay empiricism' and realism on the one hand and a 'rhetoric of entertainment' on the other, invoking both an 'appeal to curiosity and the desire for knowledge' (1999: 35). A realistic geography merges with fable, rumour and legendary material, as the text recounts not only the splendour of Kublai Khan and his court but also real-life marvels like the crocodile and the coconut, alongside more fanciful tales of black witchcraft, men with tails, and lions that prostate themselves in front of the Khan (Polo 1958: 112). To complicate matters even more, the changing narrative voice from the 'I'/'eye' of Polo to the 'I' of Rustichello further contributes to the precarious coexistence of factual knowledge and the powers of the creative imagination. But whether or not the reader trusts Polo, who promises in his Prologue to 'set down things as seen, things as heard' with 'no fabrications' (Polo 1958: 1), what we can assert, following Colin Mackerras (1999), is that Marco Polo was the first 'image-creator' of China. His positive portrayal of China as the Eldorado of the East established an image of the nation that would persist for several centuries.

Shortly after Polo's account of China, further accounts were produced by Italian Fransciscan friar Giovanni da Montecorvino (John of Montecorvino), who arrived in China in 1294, and by Italian Franciscan friar Odoric of Pordenone, who arrived in China in 1320. These supplied further details about the country. After Polo, however, the most detailed and influential account of China was the very popular _Travels of Sir John Mandeville_ ( _c_. 1357–71). This is a fictional account, scholarship has confirmed; the persona of the English knight Mandeville was a successful invention. The likely author of the text was a Flemish Benedictine monk or a Liège physician who probably did not travel further than the Holy Land, and who instead plagiarized most of his descriptions from encyclopaedias and travel books, embellishing them with accounts assimilated from a remarkably wide reading. Mandeville's account of China is mostly indebted to Odoric's and regularly misreads the earlier text; Odoric's observations about the Chinese fishing with tame cormorants, for example, are translated into fishing with tame otters. Other descriptions can be traced back to Carpini, Armenian monk Hetoum's _Historiae Orientis_ (1307) and the third part (the _Speculum Historiale_ ) of the thirteenth-century medieval encyclopaedia _Speculum Maius_ , written by French Dominican friar Vincentius Bellovacensis (Vincent of Beauvais). However, scholars have stressed the importance of not reading Mandeville anachronistically and labelling him too quickly a liar: quoting, referencing, stealing and displaying a strong narratorial presence were medieval writing conventions (see Youngs 2013: 28). And even if much of Mandeville's _Travels_ is plagiarized fabrication, what one reviewer called in 1710 the 'enchanted ground and fairy-land' fashioned through the 'Copiousness of his Invention, and Greatness of his Genius', was perhaps even more instructive, successful and admired than the truth might ever have been (quoted in Adams 1983: 101).

Portuguese soldier of fortune Galeote Pereira, Portuguese Dominican friar Gaspar da Cruz and Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci provided further early modern accounts of China. These fed in turn into synthesized histories of China, like Bernardino de Escalante's _Discourse of the Navigation made by the Portuguese to the Kingdoms and Provinces of the Orient, and of the existing Knowledge of the Greatness of the Kingdom of China_ (1577) and Juan González de Mendoza's _History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof_ (1586). Samuel Purchas's anthology _Purchas, His Pilgrimage; or, Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in all Ages_ (1613) was the first English-language geo-ethnographic synthesis of various China travel accounts. Purchas's religious and nationalist agendas may have resulted in questionable editorial decisions and injudicious workmanship, but his is nevertheless a scholarly book which references the travel accounts of Polo, Odoric, da Cruz, Spanish Jesuit Diego de Pantoja (who travelled with Ricci), and de Escalante's synthesized China account. While the descriptions of China in these synthesized accounts still contain some myths, there is a notable paradigm shift towards a more realistic and accurate representation of the country, eschewing rumour, idealization and fantasy. Purchas's book especially influenced ideas about and representations of China for a long time, a notable instance being Coleridge's poem 'Kubla Khan' (composed in 1797; published in 1816); this was supposedly the result of an opium-induced dream about the Great Khan's summer palace in Xanadu, brought on by reading the description in Purchas.

**Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century explorations**

After the early independent and missionary voyages, fewer travellers made it to China in the following two centuries. Those that went increasingly hailed not from southern Europe (Italy, Spain, Portugal) but from France and Britain, and their interests were principally trade and exploration (the latter being largely a prelude to commerce). British merchant-traveller Peter Mundy wrote about China in 1637, and pirate-explorer William Dampier touched upon China on his first circumnavigation in 1687. Mundy's diary entries, descriptions and drawings, collected in _The Travels of Peter Mundy,_ provide astonishing detail of things seen and experienced, particularly between Macao and Guangzhou (Canton). Mundy was employed by the East India Company at the time, in pursuit of a specific trading agenda, but he was a first-rate observer and lay ethnographer, with a curious mind for knowledge and facts. Slightly differently, Dampier's agenda was to lay down his observations on remote parts of the world in as much detail as possible, as he trusted that they would be of interest to his readers. Dampier's main contact point in China was St John's Island, in Canton province, and Dutch Formosa (Taiwan). Dampier first describes St John's through its geographic coordinates, geological appearance and wildlife. A detailed description of the island's inhabitants follows: 'tall, straight-bodied, raw-boned men', who are further described as being 'long-visaged', with 'little eyes', 'large' noses, and 'ashy complexion[s]', who wore no hats, caps or turbans but were often in possession of 'a small umbrella' to protect themselves against the heat and 'a large fan' to cool themselves (Dampier 1937: chapter 15, n.p.). Footbinding is mentioned, along with Chinese handicrafts (ranging from porcelain and lacquer-ware to silk, painting and carving), religion and – important for a seaman – Chinese junks.

Regrettably, neither of the two great explorers of the eighteenth century made it to China. In 1768, Bougainville did not proceed north of Papua New Guinea, and James Cook's crew only touched upon Macao on their third voyage, when returning home after Cook's death in 1779. Yet eighteenth-century Europe – and especially the French and English world – remained eager for more knowledge of China. The country was imagined as both a model for political rule and a place of abundant resources, production and general wealth. The Europeans hoped especially to tap into the latter, whether in the form of tea, porcelain, silk or just Chinese design and style, as a vogue for 'chinoiserie' emerged in Europe (Porter 2010). This period accordingly witnessed several ethno-geographic and historical accounts, such as the French Jesuit historian Jean Baptiste Du Halde's _General History of China_ (1735). These histories were complemented by philosophical contemplations about China, written by authors as varied as the French _e_ _ncyclopedistes_ , Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Quesnay, Smith, Hume and Goldsmith. None of these writers actually travelled to China, and almost all of these accounts continued the positive vision of China as a country of immense possibilities, led by a benevolent and far-sighted ruler. Against the backdrop of a changing Europe, China became for the philosophers, in Zhang Longxi's words, an Other 'filled in with all sorts of fantasies, philosophical speculations, and utopian idealizations' (1998: 118), and the zenith of the Western enthusiasm for China can be found around this time.

**Nineteenth-century Orientalist accounts**

In the late eighteenth century, the broadly positive view of China from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century was replaced by a more negative attitude. In particular, as the British Empire progressively overtook the other European Empires in size and significance, the accounts of China emerging from diplomatic missions like George Macartney's in 1792–4 increasingly presented China in a less favourable light. Famously, Macartney's refusal to kow-tow before the Chinese emperor (unless the latter did likewise in front of a portrait of the British king) put an end to Britain's hopes that Anglo-Chinese 'bonds of friendship and benevolence' could be extended (Staunton 1797: 36). The latter idealistic and diplomatic phrases – recorded by a member of the Macartney Embassy – mask the increasingly commercial agenda underlying Britain's interest in China. China's perceived self-sufficiency, insistence on matters of protocol and general resistance to opening its ports to industry were now considered negatively, as backward and a sign of an inferior civilization. The more information about China was gathered during the manifold voyages by Europeans in the nineteenth century, the more negative the image of China grew, in direct correlation to a – specifically British – imperialist outlook. Suddenly, and starting around the time of the Macartney Embassy's travelogue, older accounts of China were now labelled 'contradictory and problematical' (Staunton 1797: 19). As Peter Kitson writes, from the Macartney Embassy onwards, a 'Great Divide' was increasingly seen and acted upon (2013: 126).

John Barrow's _Travels in China_ (1805) was the first of many 'Orientalist' travelogues, understanding 'Orientalism' here in the sense developed by Edward Said, as a strategy for the pejorative depiction of Asian cultures. For Barrow, China was an inferior culture, of limited interest, frozen in time, with a tyrannical government that cared little for its subjects. Barrow's horizon for the comparisons he draws is a superior, advanced, modern Britain/Europe. His central question to the reader may be 'what rank the Chinese may be considered to hold, when measured by the scale of European nations' (1805: 421), but the answer is pre-empted: China's is a lower rank. In his _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ (1821) and in later essays on Sino-European politics written around the First and the Second Opium War (1839–42 and 1856–60), Thomas de Quincey similarly portrayed the Chinese as cruel, inscrutable and overpopulated; all three characteristics spelling potential danger, as did the emerging stereotype of the Chinese opium addict who might, like the nation, wake up at any moment from his stupor and perform unpredictable acts.

Protestant missionaries, many of them resident travellers, now dominated the proselytizing scene in China. Travel accounts by German Karl Gützlaff, Englishmen Robert Morrison and W.H. Medhurst, and Americans David Abeel and Samuel Wells Williams make, on the one hand, the case for acquiring local information by speaking the language and knowing Chinese customs. On the other hand, however, they generally exhibit a narrow-minded, unimaginative and conservative outlook very different from that of earlier Jesuit missionaries. In this regard missionary works resemble those studies and travel accounts written by early diplomatic personnel in China. The latter generally focus, in an informed and often scholarly manner, on Euro-Chinese diplomacy, Chinese philosophy, religion, geography, law, administration, politics and trade, but a condescending tone can nevertheless be detected in travelogue-studies by, among others, Frenchman Cyr-François-Natalis Rondot, Englishman Thomas Taylor Meadows and Dutchmen Gustaaf Schlegel and Jan de Groot.

The nineteenth century saw an increasing number of explorer-travellers to China, examples being Scotsman Robert Fortune (Botanical Collector to the Horticultural Society of London, and instrumental in bringing Chinese tea plants to India), Australian George Morrison and the formidable Englishwoman Isabella Bird. These travellers generally proclaim the desire to 'add to our knowledge of the people and productions of China' whilst simultaneously seeking to persuade readers to view the Chinese with a 'favourable eye' and so develop 'kindly feelings on [this] large portion of the human family, far more ancient as a nation, and as industrious, if not so civilized, as ourselves' (Fortune 1971: vi–vii). However, while their quest for knowledge may have been a successful one, their travelogues often adopt a stance of superiority, especially when it came to preferred themes like Chinese politics and the treatment of Chinese women. Cruelty against humanity was a recurring conclusion in these studies, and Chinese women's bound feet were regularly seen as the visible emblem of what the Western writers perceived as China's disregard for the individual. In words and deeds, 'imperial eyes' (Pratt 1992) and imperialist gestures abound in these travelogues, and these are perhaps more pronounced in British accounts than in Australian ones. Australian Mary Gaunt, for example, like her compatriot Morrison, seems more inclined to comment on Chinese hospitality and kindness in her 1914 travelogue, _A Woman in China_ , although it may be that personalities as much as nationality influence these varying degrees of hostile Orientalism.

Women were perhaps _the_ novelty travellers of the nineteenth century. A host of British, Irish, Australian, American and German women – including Bird, Constance Gordon Cumming, Eliza Bridgman, Emily Daly de Burgh, Elizabeth Enders, Elizabeth Georgina Kemp, Ellen Newbold LaMotte, Alicia Little, Ida Pfeiffer, Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore and Grace Thompson Seton – arrived as travellers rather than missionaries, which was how, before, most foreign women landed in China. The travellers commented on various facets of the country and not merely, as some scholarship has suggested, domestic and women-related issues, and again they did so with varying degrees of Orientalism, sympathy, identification and knowledge. Once Western women had made China a travel destination there was a steady influx of specifically British and American women well into the twentieth century; examples from the first four decades of the twentieth century include Elizabeth Kendall (who visited China in the 1910s and 1920s), Mrs Alec-Tweedie and Florence Ayscough (1920s), Mrs Cecil Chesterton and Innes Jackson (1930s), Violet Cressy-Marcks (1930s–1940s) and Eileen Bigland (1940).

'Thematic variety' and 'knowledge' are the keywords for nineteenth-century travel writing about China. Of the 733 monographs in Chadwyck-Healey's 'Nineteenth-Century Books on China' collection, about 250–300 are travelogues in the broad sense. Written by women and men, missionaries, soldiers, diplomats, seamen, explorers, travellers, merchants and traders they can be found under the categories 'Religion and Philosophy', 'Geography', 'Anthropology and Sociology', 'Politics and Government' and 'Economics and Commerce'. The 'Opening of China' as Susan Thurin calls it in her study of the same title (1999), was a double-edged sword: while facts and information were gathered by various travelling professionals and explorers, negative views of China became almost the norm. A central theme here was China's deathly stagnation, which seemingly clashed with the Western quest for modernity and progress. This is well illustrated in the four travel books produced by Scottish photographer John Thomson between 1873 and 1876. These books, offered by Thomson as a 'record of who we are, and what we have achieved in this nineteenth century', emphasized the contrast between a progressive West and a seemingly motionless China (Thomson 1891: 673). The nineteenth-century 'picture [of China] at best is a sad one', concludes Thomson, 'and though a ray of sunshine may brighten it here and there, yet, after all, the darkness that broods over the land becomes but the more palpable under the straddling fitful light' (1875: 222).

**Twentieth-century variety**

Broadly speaking, China travelogues became more literary in the twentieth century, although it must also be acknowledged that English-language travel writing is extremely varied in its outlooks, moods, opinions, ideological allegiances and generic conventions. Earlier accounts in the century may be grouped together by the persisting Orientalist image of 'the Yellow Peril' – a phrase apparently coined in the late nineteenth century – which found its way into cartoons, Fu Manchu films, theatre, Limehouse fiction and even popular songs (see Forman 2013). Later texts, however, show more variety in imagery and ideology. This increasing diversity of attitudes and images arguably reflects the turbulence of this period in Chinese history, as the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 gave way to the 1911 Revolution, the struggle between Nationalists, Communists and various warlords over the next few decades, the 1938–39 Sino-Japanese war, and, eventually, the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949.

One such highly literary travelogue is William Somerset Maugham's _On a Chinese Screen_ (1922), which is largely a series of poetic, impressionistic travel vignettes. With Maugham we can already catch a glimpse of what Samuel Hynes claims in relation to travelogues of the 1930s: namely, that travels overseas became inward journeys and parables of the times (Hynes 1976: 228). The experience of early twentieth-century wartime atrocities had shattered the comfortable notion of an enlightened and untrammelled Western advance; introspection was required and 'observations' now became, as Paul Fussell has noted, 'discursions' and 'impressions' (1980: 204). A journey to China now often meant adventure and heroism, or going beyond the familiar into a still war-torn country and into a very different political and ideological landscape. With American Harry Franck we have, perhaps, the last traveller – reminiscent of his nineteenth-century colleagues – who declared that his intention was to simply explore China and describe its landscape and people. In the Forewords to his two China travel books, _Wanderings in Northern China_ (1923) and _Roving through Southern China_ (1925), Franck declares himself 'an average individual with no particular bent for the scientific or the statistical, nor with an axe to grind' (1925: vii). Peter Fleming was more flippant in tone but similarly travelled as an amateur, with pronounced nonchalance and without a particular agenda. His English comportment, self-declared superficiality and ironic detachment greatly impressed W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood but professional traveller Ella Maillart was not so complimentary, after teaming up with Fleming for the journey related by Maillart in _Forbidden Journey: From Peking to Kashmir_ (1937) and by Fleming in _News from Tartary_ (1936). Their convenient travel companionship worked, though, perhaps because neither of them was particularly interested in China's political struggles at the time. Instead, Maillart's narrative was a post-romantic journey of self-discovery in which she sought freedom from the conventionality of her native Switzerland, whilst Fleming's account was pitched in a characteristically humorous, self-deprecating vein.

Franck, Fleming and Maillart were travelling in a period of 'political chaos, virtual anarchy, incessant lawlessness, and banditry' (Franck 1925: ix), yet they chose to disregard Chinese politics unless these affected Chinese people's everyday lives or their own. In contrast, John Dewey's _Letters from China and Japan_ (1920) – produced while he was lecturing in Shanghai and Beijing for four months from May 1919 – inaugurate a series of politically-oriented Chinese travelogues which not only record meetings and interviews with political leaders or other people of interest (like Reginald Johnston, English tutor to the last emperor of China, Puyi), but also provide western eyewitness accounts of the May Fourth Movement and the threat posed to China by the Japanese. Bertrand Russell – lecturing in Beijing for a year in 1920 – had high hopes for Young China, and in his philosophical treatise _Problem of China_ (1922) called upon Western countries to give the nation the respect and support she needed in her struggle for change.

Nicholas Clifford suggests that 'no one travelled for enjoyment or enlightenment in the China of the 1940s' (2001: 183). This observation is also applicable to travel writers in the 1930s. Auden and Isherwood left England in 1938 to 'write a travel book about the East', which would become _Journey to a War_ (1939). China was chosen as a destination when the Sino-Japanese war broke out in July/August 1937: as they said, alluding also to the Spanish Civil War which attracted large numbers of journalists, they had found 'a war of [their] very own' (Isherwood 1976: 289). Unlikely war correspondents who admit their ignorance of Far Eastern affairs and of the Chinese language, they bumble along on their 'adventure', meet Chiang Kai-shek, Agnes Smedley and Peter Fleming, but in their youthful obliviousness the war only becomes 'real' when they attend a tea party in Guangzhou and hear the whining of power-driven bombers and the distant thump of explosions. 'Isn't that an air-raid?', asks Isherwood. 'Our hostess glanced up, smiling, from the tea-tray. "Yes, I expect it is. They come over about this time, most afternoons [. . .] Do you take sugar and milk?" ' (Auden and Isherwood 1973: 22). Together, Isherwood's travel diary and Auden's sonnets, photographs and 'Commentary' pose troubling questions about war, travelling, travel writing and the modern condition. The immense complexity of these issues led to Isherwood's retrospective realization in 1973 that he cut a rather ludicrous figure on this stage of world history – 'Little Me in China', as he later put it (Auden and Isherwood 1973: 8).

Osbert Sitwell produced another highly literary account in _Escape with Me! An Oriental Sketch-Book_ (1940), while Agnes Smedley and Edgar Snow wrote more journalistic travelogues strongly infused by their authors' pro-Communist sympathies. Exploring China's political chaos, complexity and confusion, Smedley's four China travelogues – _Chinese Destinies_ (1933), _China's Red Army Marches_ (1934), _China Fights Back: An American Woman with the Eighth Route Army_ (1938) and _Battle Hymn of China_ (1943) – show her respect for and loyalty to the soldiers and the Communist cause. Offering first-time interviews with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and other leaders from the Guomindang side, Snow's _Red Star over China_ (1937) presented Mao as a viable nationalist leader and portrayed both China and Communism as anti-fascist, progressive, and an antidote to Japan's might and supposed intentions on the Western colonies.

The number of travellers to China declined sharply after 1949, with another Orientalist phase in the Western view of China ensuing after the establishment of the People's Republic of China, and especially during the years of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Travelling to China in the spirit of adventure or exploration was a thing of the past. If there was travelling it was mostly done by journalists whose countries had political, ideological or economic interests in China. An exception is Simone de Beauvoir's travelogue _The Long March: An Account of Modern China_ (1957), which comments specifically on the improved conditions of women: this traveller sees 'the emancipation of the individual' in the new China, '[m]arriage [and] motherhood ha[ving] become free' and women having found 'dignity' (2001: 164). With de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, who arrived in China in 1974 when the _Tel Quel_ group was going through a Maoist phase, we encounter some better-known traveller-writers. Lesser-known academics, diplomats and journalists, however, made up the bulk of China travellers between 1949 and 1976 until, in the 1980s, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux and Colin Thubron ventured out. Chatwin – in China in 1985 whilst working on _The Songlines_ – did not write a sustained China travelogue, but his impressions are collected in his notebooks and various journalistic pieces. Paul Theroux's travels to China are documented in _Sailing through China_ (1983) and _Riding on the Iron Rooster_ (1988), whilst Thubron's experiences are related in the more or less contemporary _Behind the Wall_ (1987) and _The Silk Road_ (1989), as well as in the later _Shadow of the Silk Road_ (2006).

With these three China travellers we turn full circle to where this essay began, namely the travelogue's eternal conflict between fact and fiction, documentation and embellishment – a topic famously discussed by Theroux and Chatwin in a 1985 lecture at the Royal Geographical Society (see Lisle 2006: 27). Thubron's descriptions of China are written in his characteristically intricate style and accompanied by fictional devices such as (in _Shadow of the Silk Road_ ) imagined dialogues with Silk Road merchants. No less romantic, Chatwin's essay 'Rock's World' (1986) recounts both the author's own travels to Yunnan and the eccentric life of Austro-American botanist and explorer Joseph Rock who lived in Lijiang Valley between 1922 and 1949. Interweaving history, ethnography and (world) literature, Chatwin's philosophical contemplations are worlds apart from Theroux's descriptions. The latter's unromantic, documentary prose itinerizes, describes but also judges, and ends ultimately in a negative vision for China: 'Any change in China would be for the worse, which is a pity because it seemed so bad when I sailed through it [on the Yangtze River]' (Theroux 1984: 64). One can only speculate whether Theroux's aesthetic sobriety and, in the end, rejection of China and the Chinese, are his way to gain control over the feeling of powerlessness he experienced when faced with China. Like so many travellers before him, Theroux begins the account of his railway journey from London to and through China with a nod to the country's ulteriority: 'The bigness of China makes you wonder. It is more like a whole world than a mere country' (1988: 15). Yet Thubron utters the same feelings of bewilderment, apprehension and perplexity in his more ornate prose; China, to him too, is a 'luminous puzzle' (1987: 2).

**Conclusion**

The man who spends a year or two in China, and then attacks the problem of telling all he saw, heard, felt, or smelled there is like the small boy who was ordered by the teacher to write on two neat pages all about his visit to the museum. It simply can't be done.

Thus wrote Harry Franck in _Wandering in Northern China_ (1923: vii). Obviously, this chapter has also only explored a few strands of the Western travel writing tradition related to China. This is a tradition, however, set to develop in interesting ways in the twenty-first century as China – 'rising' since the 1980s – has now firmly resumed its ancient and medieval status as one of the world's largest economies. China has at this point clearly 'risen'; we will be able to discern in another decade or so the overall direction taken by a new wave of travelogues and travel documentaries.

**Select bibliography**

Adams, P.G. (1983) _Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel_ , Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

Auden, W.H. and Isherwood, C. (1973) _Journey to a War_ , 1939, London: Faber and Faber.

Barrow, J. (1805) _Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey through the Country from Pekin to Canton_. Philadelphia, PA: McLaughlin.

Beauvoir, S. de (2001) _The Long March: An Account of Modern China_ , trans. A. Wainhouse, London: Phoenix.

Clark, S. and Smethurst, P. (eds) (2008) _Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and Southeast Asia_ , Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Clifford, N. (2001) _'A Truthful Impression of the Country': British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880–1949_ , Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Dampier, W. (1937) _A New Voyage Round the World_ , 1697, London: Black.

Elsner, J. and Rubiés, J.-P. (eds) (1999) _Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel_ , London: Reaktion.

Forman, R. (2013) _China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fortune, R. (1971) _A Residence among the Chinese: Inland, on the Coast, and at Sea: Being a Narrative of Scenes and Adventures during a Third Visit to China, from 1853–1856_ , Taipei: Ch'eng Wen.

Franck, H.A. (1923) _Wandering in Northern China_ , New York and London: Century.

Franck, H.A. (1925) _Roving through Southern China_ , New York and London: Century.

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Australia

_Richard White and Justine Greenwood_

Almost all travel writing reflects on the tension between sameness and difference. Travel in a settler-colonial society, however, complicates this binary because the expectations of similarity and difference are more opaque. Visitors to Australia – the vast majority came from Europe until the mid-twentieth century – found neither the familiarity of the 'old world' nor a sense of plunging into a wholly unknown other. While they might have found nature exotic, it was often being tamed, and while the social world replicated the world they left, it was never quite the same. What might be considered the first 'travel book' set in Australia was a satirical dystopian fantasy about an imagined, previously unknown continent of Terra Australis. For its author, Joseph Hall, writing around 1605, the new continent was _Mundus Alter et Idem_ : 'the world different and the same'.

For the settlers themselves, the negotiation of familiarity and difference takes on a different shape. With their actual or prosthetic memory of migration, they themselves were often enthusiastic travellers. Despite their convict origins, Australians were relatively wealthy and mobile, with familial, business and cultural connections to other parts of the world. But settlers also had to make sense of the land they lived in. As they travelled the country – and the process of settling Australia often involved more travelling than staying still – they too reflected on its familiarities and differences from the old world.

For Aboriginal Australians, travelling their land had always been a central part of their being. Their 'travel writing' consisted of mud maps, highly symbolic painting, songlines and other oral traditions: travel was written onto the very landscape itself. Their traditional practices of travel were seriously dislocated and transformed by the momentous invasion of Europeans. Only in the late twentieth century did Aboriginal Australians create their own genre of travel writing in English. This chapter, however, is principally concerned with more conventional Western traditions of travel writing, where indigenous populations are objects gazed on by other travellers rather than travelling subjects in their own right.

**Colonial oddity: to 1901**

For the first European visitors to the Australian continent, Australia was the unknown 'Terra Australis Incognita'. Philosophers had long anticipated a 'great south land' to balance Europe, often clothing it with extravagant fantasies of gold and riches. Consequently early explorers were disappointed, the first Dutch arrivals scarcely wasting time putting pen to paper. The English buccaneer, William Dampier, who made landfalls on the west coast in 1688 and 1699, was scathing of the barren, flyblown coast and, especially, its inhabitants, 'the miserablest People in the world' (Dampier 1698: I, 463). Jonathan Swift was so inspired by Dampier – Gulliver was Dampier's 'cousin' – that Lilliput was set not far from present-day Adelaide. A century later James Cook's 'discovery' of the more benign east coast in 1770 challenged Dampier's interpretation. To Cook, the Aboriginal population 'may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans' (Beaglehole 1955: I, 399). Cook's more positive account was heavily reworked by Dr John Hawkesworth, whose rendering of Cook's voyage became the most popular travel book of the century. Cook's discoveries led directly to the decision to establish a convict settlement at Sydney in 1788. Hawkesworth, however, could not allow Cook's assessment of the Aboriginal population to stand, commenting 'if we admit that they are upon the whole happier than we, we must admit [. . .] that we are the losers by the perfection of our nature' (Rennie 1995: 97).

After 1788, exploration fanned out from Sydney in search of usable land. As explorers penetrated further west, their journals painted an increasingly grim picture. In the popular imagination, fed by the journals of Sturt, Eyre, Giles and Carnegie and the deaths of Kennedy, Leichhardt and Burke and Wills, haggard explorers struggled against heat and thirst and dangerous natives. Again it was a matter of high expectations crushed. The gradual penetration of Australia's interior took place after the opening up of the American west. Early hopes of equivalent inland river systems or an inland sea were dashed and replaced by the chilling notion that Australia had a 'dead heart'. Most of the vast continent, explorers finally acknowledged, was uninhabitable for permanent settlement.

But there were still great expanses of the continent that were more fertile. Sir Thomas Mitchell's southward exploration in 1836 painted a picture of 'Australia Felix'. In Australia's south-eastern quarter, a common trope was that the landscape, with its extensive grassland and clumps of trees created by Aboriginal 'firestick farming', resembled an English 'gentleman's park' (Gammage 2011: 5). As Simon Ryan has pointed out, Australian land exploration post-dated the formation of Romantic paradigms of travel writing, and the journals of many explorers and commentators adopted the language of the picturesque and sublime (Ryan 1996: 70). By the mid-nineteenth century, sheep were displacing the Aboriginal population throughout the south-east. While exploration was largely a British imperial project, the French were influential in early sea exploration and land explorers included the German Ludwig Leichhardt, the Pole Paul Strzelecki and the Russian Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay.

If the immediate possibility of material wealth failed to grip the European imagination, the natural world excited curiosity. Scientific interest in natural wonders guided much of the writing as well as art depicting Australia (Smith 1960: 4–5). As theories of evolution developed in the early nineteenth century, Australia's peculiar flora and fauna were on the circuit of budding scientists. Joseph Banks, Robert Brown, Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley puzzled how Australian plants and animals might fit into the natural order. At a more popular level, the curiosity of the natural wonders produced a cliché of Australia as a 'land of contrarieties' (Clarke 1977: 154–156), which combined with older notions of antipodean inversion to produce a sense of Australia as a topsy-turvy, upside down world. The platypus was at first considered a fake, the black swan an impossibility, the kangaroo a misshapen joke. The country seemed to offer no danger from man-eaters (only later were crocodiles and sharks seen as dangers, and then more to tourists) but poisonous snakes and spiders took hold of the European imagination.

The scientific mind was also captivated by the indigenous population, and particularly by what was imagined as their primitivism. Enlightenment interest in the origins of mankind, markedly among early French writers, continued through to early anthropological studies, such as those of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, R.H. Mathews and Baldwin Spencer, and to many missionary accounts. But that early curiosity also gave way to more stridently social Darwinist commentary, which depicted Aboriginal Australians as a race doomed to extinction in the face of a superior civilization. The casual dismissal of an entire population became the hallmark of much late nineteenth-century travel writing.

Explorer journals gave way to more conventional travel writing, but the natural world remained a puzzle. Julia Horne (2005) has traced the development of a sense of wonder as the landscape gradually came to be seen as one a tourist could admire. Anthony Trollope's mammoth _Australia and New Zealand_ (1873) was particularly influential, his praise of tourist landscapes much repeated. Others found Australia's immensity oppressive, its emptiness disturbing, and its flatness dull. Those in search of picturesque variety were appalled by its 'monotony'. The infinite could be an aspect of the sublime but the vastness of the flat, implacable horizon generally failed to inspire. European eyes were often unattuned to the subtleties of the bush; they appreciated its curiosity value but often struggled to find beauty in it. The alienation lent itself to a gothic sensibility. Marcus Clarke, author of the melodramatic convict saga _For the Term of His Natural Life_ (1874), called it 'Weird Melancholy'. 'In Australia alone', he wrote, 'is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of Nature learning how to write' (Clarke 1876: iii). The myth began to grow up that Europeans were alienated from the Australian landscape: that only the Australian-born could find beauty in a gum tree.

It was not only nature that was topsy-turvy: the social structure itself seemed turned upside down, reiterating ideas of antipodean inversion. The social experiment of creating a new society from a convict population attracted attention from the start; a number of accounts of the early settlement were published by officers of the First Fleet. Other visitors to or residents of the early settlement described the nature of convict society, from Mary Ann Parker's self-deprecating _A Voyage Round the World_ (1795) to Peter Cunningham's genial _Two Years in New South Wales_ (1827), Louisa Meredith's acerbic _Notes and Sketches_ (1846) and Alexander Harris's incisive _Settlers and Convicts_ (1847). As a free society developed, the shortage of labour meant relatively high wages, and many travellers commented, positively or negatively, on the 'independence' of the Australian worker. From 1851, gold rushes and the emergence of democratic institutions in advance of Europe attracted further attention. Travel writers promoted the idea of an antipodean working man's paradise, where conventional social hierarchies were inverted. Some regarded that inversion as a promise of a democratic future; for others it was absurdly comic or downright dangerous.

The heyday for publishing travelogues on Australia was the second half of the nineteenth century. The rush of migrants wanting to take their chances at the diggings produced a flood of works describing the characteristics of the colonies and how to prospect for gold. As David Goodman points out, this genre was dominated by two narratives, one of social inversion and another of pastoral idyll (Goodman 1994: 129–135). Conventional travel books, such as those by Ellen Clacy and William Howitt, merged into 'how-to' guides for prospective diggers. So much information swirled around that John Sherer, author of one of the most lively and popular accounts, _The Gold-finder of Australia: How he Went, How he Fared, and How he Made his Fortune_ (1853), long believed to be first-hand, did not take the trouble to leave London to write it.

Once the social upheaval of the 1850s dissipated, metropolitan interest in Australia shifted to the new phenomenon of rapidly growing cities, apparently affluent working people and democratic institutions. These characteristics made the new settler colonies attractive to more permanent migrants, so contemporary travel writers always dealt with prospects for migration. They pictured Australia as a land of the future; Australia's past held little interest. As social Darwinism took hold, they promoted the idea that a new 'type' of white man was evolving on the fringes of empire, particularly among the bush workers of the Australian wool industry.

Travel writing _mattered_ : it had a social impact beyond merely entertaining the curious, since it could affect migration, investment and trade. And because it mattered, Australians monitored travelogues obsessively. Travel writers were fêted; their most banal compliment became an article of faith; their slightest criticism rankled. Among the more celebrated were Dilke, Twopeny, Froude, Trollope, Sala, Adams, Twain, Buchanan and Foster Fraser. The picture of visitors being asked their opinions of Australia the moment they landed became a running joke. It betrayed not merely colonial insecurity, but also the reality that to a settler society, so dependent on the outside world, the world's opinions carried weight. Equally it meant that influential travel writing was produced not merely by specialized travel writers, but by a multitude of people visiting Australia in other capacities. The gaze of these outsiders was internalized and turned into Australians' idea of themselves (White 1994).

**Writing the nation 1888–1945**

Part of the colonial condition was the suspicion that the metropolitan outsider's word carried more weight than a local's opinion: no home-grown traveller produced the sort of magisterial survey that Camden, Defoe or Cobbett compiled for England. However, from the early twentieth century, travel writing by Australians about Australia began to attract readers. Around the centenary of European settlement in 1888, two ambitious collaborative projects resulted in lavishly illustrated surveys of the embryonic nation (Garran 1886; Morris 1887–1889). While not strictly travel writing, they promoted the scenic possibilities of the emerging nation and imagined it as a single, travelable whole.

The beginnings of a nativist form of travel writing can be found in the development of home-grown nature writing. This consciously resisted the conventional 'local colour' established by much nineteenth-century travel writing – gum trees, kangaroos, bushrangers – but for Australians, imbued with British culture, it took an effort to see their environment as natural rather than exotic. Much of this 'travel writing' was place-based and regional: E.J. Banfield's _Confessions of a Beachcomber_ (1908) and other works about living on the Great Barrier Reef, for example, or Jack McLaren living among North Queensland Aborigines in _My Crowded Solitude_ (1926). Women on pastoral properties particularly contributed to this genre, from Mrs Aeneas Gunn's _We of the Never-Never_ (1908) to Myrtle Rose White's _No Roads Go By_ (1932) and Elyne Mitchell's accounts of running a property in the Victorian Alps in the 1940s. While not travelling themselves, they brought a traveller's gaze to Australia and inspired others to travel.

Others travelled through nature. Charles Barrett was led from bird watching to write extensively of travels throughout Australia. Journalist C.E.W. Bean reported on his travels in western New South Wales in _On the Wool Track_ (1910) and _The Dreadnought of the Darling_ (1911), celebrations of an imagined Australian 'type' being created in the outback, which would later inform his official war history. Nathan Spielvogel wrote _A Gumsucker at Home_ (1914) about rural Victoria after his very successful account of a trip to Europe, _A Gumsucker on the Tramp_ (1906). 'Bushwalking' – as hiking became known in Australia from the 1920s – developed as a popular pastime (Harper 2007) and keen bushwalkers such as Le Gay Brereton, H.J. Tompkins, Robert Croll and E.T. Emmett produced some lyrical and imaginative travel writing, which was not at all pedestrian. Scientists engaged in field work also turned natural history into important popular travel books, such as the mammalologist H.H. Finlayson's _The Red Centre_ (1935), the geologist C.T. Madigan's _Central Australia_ (1936), the marine biologist T.C. Roughley's _Wonders of the Great Barrier Reef_ (1936) and the ecologist Francis Ratcliffe's _Flying Fox and Drifting Sand_ (1938).

The gradual conquering of the continent by the motor car produced accounts of longer journeys around or across Australia. Here, conventional distinctions between explorer/traveller/tourist often collapsed. As Laina Hall (2005) has argued, 'overlanding' was a distinct form of motor travel and produced a whole sub-genre of writing that tended to be more about the exploit than the travel, journeys with 'no ultimate destination other than the completion' (Bishop 1998: 144). Some expeditions, such as those by Francis Birtles, Malcolm Ellis and Michael Terry, were effectively using the motor car as a modern means of exploration. Others blazed more unusual trails, such as the first honeymoon round Australia (Dorney 1928). Nevertheless the writings of these 'overlanders' incorporated a range of observations about nature, outback life and indigenous affairs. They particularly evoked 'an imagined national motorscape, of dead straight roads, leading on to a never-fading horizon' (Hall 2005: 14), of loneliness in an alien landscape. In many, the figure of the white explorer who had previously travelled the land was a looming presence. Ernestine Hill's _The Great Australian Loneliness_ (1937) was perhaps the closest to a classic. As Margriet Bonnin (1981: 185) has pointed out, they often included political commentary on the economic and increasingly defence-focused benefits of northern development, as in the two influential travel books by English migrant William Hatfield, _Australia through the Windscreen_ (1936) and _I Find Australia_ (1937). Motoring also provided the opportunity to discover 'lost worlds', as Australians increasingly realized that they had a past worth visiting (Greenwood 2011: 35).

Two local writers were particularly popular and prolific in the genre that P.R. Stephensen called 'the gawdstruth Australian outback travel books' (quoted in White 2012: 188). Ion Idriess averaged over one book a year for thirty-five years from 1931, drawing on his colourful experiences of outback life. Frank Clune was even more prolific. About half of his sixty-five books could be classified as travel, initially following the footsteps of explorers around Australia but later branching out overseas. Both specialized in writing as 'ordinary Australians', sometimes verging on self-parody, and were overtly egalitarian and determinedly not 'highbrow' – Clune would later make a point of writing as a tourist rather than a traveller.

Much of this local writing had connections to an emerging and increasingly active tourism industry: some of the most evocative and lyrical travel writing appeared in the service of public relations. State tourist bureaus published and/or commissioned Tompkins' _With Swag and Billy_ (1906), Banfield's _Within the Barrier_ (1907), Clem Christesen's _Queensland Journey_ (1935) and Barrett's _Isle of Mountains_ (1944); E.T. Emmet was the first director of Tasmania's tourism bureau. Overlanding was often tied up with or sponsored by car and oil companies. The publication of the Australian National Travel Association's magazine _Walkabout_ from 1934 also promoted travel writing and tourism.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Australian-born dominated travel writing about Australia, but there were still some influential visitors. From the end of the nineteenth century Australia attracted notice as a 'social laboratory', where experiments in democracy, state ownership, votes for women, welfare and industrial relations could be seen as a model others might emulate. Variously called 'colonial socialism', 'state socialism' or 'socialisme sans doctrines', the phenomenon was described by American sociologist Victor S. Clark, by the feminist Jessie Ackermann (also American), and by political figures such as William Pember Reeves from New Zealand, Albert Métin from France and James Bryce from Britain.

As Australia retreated into conservatism after 1918, visitors were more likely to revert to earlier conventions, with particular interest in the 'outback' and a distinctive Australian character. British visitors often brooded over Australia's links to the empire and the future of the race: examples among established travel writers included mining engineer and eugenicist J.H. Curle, whose 1930s books railed against Australian sloth, and Halliday Sutherland, the crusader against birth control and eugenics, who published _Southward Journey_ in 1942. _Cobbers_ (1934), by the English composer Thomas Wood, was more nuanced; according to Russel Ward, it was 'the most perceptive and captivating characterization of Australia and its people ever written by a visitor' (Ward 1990). The novels of D.H. Lawrence, written during and after his visit to Australia in 1923, produced some powerful impressions of the spirit of the place.

Non-British visitors also tended to see Australia in political terms, particularly in the decade before 1939 (Govor 1997). The Czech journalist Egon Kisch, who in 1934 famously jumped ship and broke his leg when the Australian government attempted to exclude him because he was Communist, appropriately called his account of his visit _Australian Landfall_ (1937). On the other hand, in _A Foreigner Looks at Australia_ (1936), Paul Staal, the Netherlands Consul-General, felt that Australia was overly democratic, in thrall to workers and in need of 'a Hitler'. A rare non-Western visitor was Ardaser Wadia, an Indian Professor of English, whose visit in 1932 was inspired by his enthusiasm for empire and his boyhood reading of Louis de Rougemont's spurious tales of exploration (1899).

As local writers took on the task of describing Australia as travelable space, we can see the beginnings of an imaginative possession of the land. In the process Indigenous Australians could often be written out. 'Bushcraft' became an accomplishment of white Australians. However it would be simplistic to read travel writing as simply a process of colonialism. A rich literature is emerging around the question of 'belonging' and 'possession' in Australia, but the best of it finds more complex roots and challenges our thinking at fundamental levels about how humans connect to the natural environment. And it was often travel writers, both local and those from overseas, who were drawing attention to the plight of Aboriginal Australia. The authorities, ever alert to what the world thought, took particular notice of criticism from visitors. Travel writing still mattered.

**Travel writing in an age of mass tourism**

From the end of the Second World War mass tourism boomed into a worldwide industry, though Australia itself did not become part of the international tourist track until the 1980s. The best known Australian travel writers, such as Frank Clune and Colin Simpson, left off their explorations of the bush and made more comfortable careers producing travelogues for the Australian sightseer treading the well-worn tourist paths of Europe and Asia (White 2012). The Australian Society of Travel Writers, established in 1975 by a small group of journalists, exemplified this outward gaze. However, another boom did occur in the 1950s, one which led to a different kind of travel writing about Australia.

The Labour government's 1946 decision to open Australia to mass immigration saw hundreds of thousands of new migrants arrive during the following decades. These migrants, despite often having faced considerable hardship, sometimes approached their new country with a tourist gaze. Many produced memoirs of their emigration to Australia, as much a record of their travels as their settlement. Hungarian migrant Magda Bozic, who arrived in 1956, explained: 'In the first few weeks we lived liked tourists, like carefree tourists in a land of bright colours and sharp light, sticky-sweet orange-drinks and tasteless sliced-bread' (Bozic 1984: 9). These people were the products of a policy that deliberately merged tourism and immigration (Greenwood 2014).

Most of the migrant accounts were written long after their arrival. Some did appear earlier, such as those by young Britons who used the assisted passage scheme to indulge their 'itchy feet' (Hammerton and Thomson 2005). Eunice Gardner's _The World at Our Feet: The Story of Two Women Who Adventured Halfway Across the Globe_ (1957) anticipated the positioning of Australia as a stop on the backpacker's itinerary. In 1973, two other British migrants with itchy feet, Tony and Maureen Wheeler, published _Across Asia on the Cheap_ , the first in a series of guidebooks that would become the _Lonely Planet_ phenomenon.

Other British writers echoed the nineteenth-century tradition of combining a travel book with advice to migrants. The difference was that these writers described cities and suburbs, where migrants were now assumed to settle, rather than the better-known bush. Journalists J.D. Pringle in _Australian Accent_ (1958) and John Black in _The Poms in the Sun_ (1965) mixed visits to tourist spots (fish and chips in Watson's Bay, the beach at Bondi) with trips to migrant hostels and analysis of suburban life. Both turned a critical eye on modern Australian society. In the cities they found a transformation in the more unsophisticated aspects of Australian culture (the lack of decent restaurants, early pub closing hours and sex-segregated bars), thanks to the influence of European migrants. Another travel guide-cum-social commentary-cum-migrant prospectus, _Boomerang_ by Hungarian-British journalist and writer George Mikes, appeared in 1968. Mikes was more concerned with the conditions experienced by Indigenous Australians than the amenities of pubs. This critique of Australian racism would be taken up by other well-known travel writers, from Tony Horwitz in 1987 to Bill Bryson in 2000. In presenting racism as quintessentially Australian, just like the bush or the beach, they encouraged the re-thinking of Australian racial attitudes.

For the more adventurous, the outback retained its fascination. _Lonely Planet_ 's first guide to Australia, _Australia: A Travel Survival Kit_ , was published in 1977. Australia, along with South-East Asia, Nepal and India, was now firmly in the backpacker's sights (Kenny 2002). The idea of 'survival', used by Lonely Planet as a series header, fed into the settler-colonial imagery of explorers traversing a vast and uninhabited land (Clarsen 1999). A new generation of overlanding travel writers turned to titles like _27,000 Miles through Australia_ (1963), _8,000 Kms into Australia (or if you wish 5,000 Miles)_ (1979) and _12,000 km Australien und Neuseeland_ (1989) in their attempt, as Laina Hall put it, to discover 'the Real Australia' somewhere 'out there' in the desert or the bush (Hall 2005: 13).

Local writers also sought the 'real' Australia and 'real' Australians in the outback. As Bill Tucker wrote, 'It is a big country, mate, and Out There are people and stories and sights and sounds and smells that the average Australian must experience before he can truly call himself Australian' (quoted in Hall 2005: 199). Other writers used the road trip to question these assumptions of national identity. Donald Horne's _Right Way, Don't Go Back_ (1978) was as much a reflection on the state of Australia as it was a road trip narrative. As overlanding became more common and more accessible, thanks to better roads and better cars, some authors played with the genre. _Sean and David's Long Drive_ (1996) was a postmodern road trip, focused less on the journey and more on the existential experience inside the car. Conversely, in _Bypass_ (2004) former Jesuit priest Michael McGirr explored whether the 'real' Australia might be found on well-travelled roads rather than 'out there', as he cycled the length of Australia's busiest highway from Sydney to Melbourne.

McGirr's preference for the bicycle reflected an alternative road trip increasingly common from the 1970s, when the car had lost much of its claim to take the traveller off the beaten track. Writers traversed Australia by bike, motorcycle, camel and on foot, and for most the focus was on endurance and survival. In _Tracks_ (1980) Robyn Davidson recounted her six-month journey across the Central Australian desert, accompanied only by her dog and four camels. The book is both an example of endurance travel and, with its female narrator in a space normally imagined as the male explorer's domain, a subversion of it. Even more challengingly, Davidson refused to dwell on the hardships she faced, a key feature of the survival narrative (Holland and Huggan 2003: 121–123). Similarly Heidi Douglas's _Catch up with the Sun_ (2012) leavened the arduous aspects of her horseback journey across the desert with humorous anecdotes about her fat little horse and her two cranky camels.

For most male writers, the outback still remained an unforgiving environment, a view promoted by the occasional tourist death from thirst. John Muir reverted to the notion that one had to endure the desert to fully understand it. His _Alone Across Australia_ (2001) described a 'history-making' 2,500 kilometre unsupported crossing of Australia on foot. In _To Hell and High Water_ (2012) Gregory Bryan followed in the footsteps of Henry Lawson, the nineteenth-century Australian writer and poet, and deliberately harked back to an earlier way of imagining the Australian bush. Australia was once again a landscape to 'conquer', one characterized by 'the heat, the distance, mosquitoes, blisters and thirst' (Bryan 2012: back cover).

Most of these survival narratives – Davidson was an exception – placed Aboriginal Australians on the periphery of white experiences of the landscape. Other writers engaged with Indigenous Australia directly. Simon Ryan praised Jean Devanny's three books exploring Northern Queensland for their acute observations about black–white interactions (Ryan 2006: 74). Bruce Chatwin's hugely successful work, _The Songlines_ (1987), was applauded not only for 'transforming English travel writing' by making it 'cool' (Stewart 2012), but also for its insights into the Aboriginal relationship with the land. More recently, however, Clare Johnson has critiqued Chatwin for confining Indigeneity to 'notions of the primitive' and searching for 'authenticity', thereby reverting to the idea of a 'real Australia' somewhere in the 'empty space of the desert' (Johnson 2002: 60). In contrast, local writers since Chatwin have used their travels to explore the politics and possibility of reconciliation between white and Indigenous Australia. Barry Hill's _The Rock_ (1994), Kim Mahood's _Craft for a Dry Lake_ (2000) and Nicholas Jose's _Black Sheep_ (2002) all sought to move beyond 'the standard myth of white frontier masculinity' to a re-imaging of Australia as a country that continues to bear the scars of colonial confrontation (Clarke 2005: 78). But the most powerful writing on the consequences of colonization comes from Indigenous Australians. Some, such as Paddy Roe, have introduced outsiders to their traditional land (Benterrak et al. 1984) while others, such as Kim Scott ( _True Country_ , 1993; _Benang: From the Heart_ , 1999) and Ruby Langford Ginibi ( _My Bundjalung People_ , 1994), are dispossessed writers seeking to recover their roots in their own country.

International recognition as a tourist destination from the 1980s saw Australia attract the attention of some prominent names in travel writing, mostly British and American. Humour provided a common connection. Having moved from the USA to Sydney, Tony Horwitz sought the 'exotic reaches of his adopted land' hitchhiking from Sydney to Perth, but _One for the Road_ (1987) depicted a familiar Australia characterized by the 'savage Outback populated by irreverent, beer-guzzling frontiersmen' (Brown 1988: 2). Howard Jacobson's _In the Land of Oz_ (1987) attempted to broaden this image by including more of the cities, but he too was drawn to an 'exotic' outback Australia. The most successful of these later international travel books was Bill Bryson's _Down Under_ (2000), which presented a complex and more critical image of Australia, attuned to underlying prejudice towards Indigenous Australians throughout the continent.

The merging of memoir/autobiography and travel writing was also a trend reflected in Australian writing about Australia from the 1980s onwards, as it had previously been for Australians travelling overseas. Rodney Hall, a novelist who arrived in Australia as a postwar child migrant from Solihull, used his travels to explore both his and Australia's relationship with Britain – a fitting reflection for Australia's bicentenary ( _Home: A Journey Through Australia_ , 1988). Expatriates literary critic Peter Conrad and art critic Robert Hughes also mixed travel writing and memoir in books about returning to Australia (in 1989 and 2006 respectively). Scientist Tim Flannery wove together even more disparate strands – personal reflections on his career, travel across Australia and an evolutionary account of the kangaroo – in _Country_ (2004), which constitutes a far more nuanced search for the 'real' Australia, replacing the concept of a 'ghastly blank' with a landscape shaped by human interaction.

There remains a multiplicity of ways that Australia has featured and evolved in travel writing over more than two centuries, yet some themes reoccur: nature is awe-inspiring yet harsh; the people are friendly yet prejudiced; and the culture is never quite as sophisticated as the 'old world'. As Australian travel writing, like all travel writing, enters the blog age, it is clear that these tropes endure. Many blogs, including those by so-called 'grey nomads' – retirees who travel around Australia in caravans – document the search for the 'real' Australia in the outback and bush, often consciously following the footsteps of explorers. Others, however, point towards the development of different understandings, and migrant bloggers continue to blur distinctions between migrant and tourist as they record their experiences of coming to terms with a new country. In both the outback and the suburbs, travel writing continues its task of making the familiar strange and making the unfamiliar manageable.

**Select bibliography**

Beaglehole, J.C. (1955) _The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Benterrak, K., Muecke, S. and Roe, P. (1984) _Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology_ , Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

Bishop, P. (1998) 'Driving Around: The Unsettling of Australia', _Studies in Travel Writing_ 2: 144–163.

Bonnin, M. (1981) _A Study of Australian Descriptive and Travel Writing, 1929–1945_ , PhD Thesis: University of Queensland.

Bozic, M. (1984) _Gather Your Dreams_ , Richmond, Victoria: Hodja Educational Resources Cooperative.

Brown, J.D. (1988), 'Searching for Shangri-La: Travel Writers Follow the Back Roads to Adventure', _Chicago Tribune_ , 22 May.

Bryan, G. (2012) _To Hell and High Water: Walking in the Footsteps of Henry Lawson_ , Newport, NSW: Big Sky Publishing.

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Sub-Saharan Africa

_Laura E. Franey_

At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say: When I grow up I will go there. [. . . T]here was one yet – the biggest – the most blank, so to speak – that I had a hankering after.

True, by this time, it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.

(Joseph Conrad, _Heart of Darkness_ , p. 8)

For ancient writers, as for the young Joseph Conrad, those portions of Africa beyond the Mediterranean littoral frequently served as a fertile ground for the exercise of the imagination. Whilst people from Sub-Saharan Africa were known because of their various roles in the pharaonic kingdoms of Egypt and, later, in the Roman Empire, there were virtually no genuine first-person accounts telling of travels into lands south of the Sahara. Sub-Saharan Africa appears in ancient texts, including the Jewish scriptures, as a place of great wealth, containing gold and spices and featuring powerful but mysterious monarchs, such as the Queen of Sheba. Ancient writers also often imaginatively populated the lands to the south and west of such known areas as Carthage, Alexandria, and Cairo with monstrous peoples and animals. For instance, Pliny the Elder wrote in 77 CE of 'races' such as the Cyclopes, Amazons, and cynocephali (literally, the 'dog-headed people') inhabiting the African wilds. Over the ensuing millennia, as technology enabled greater contact between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa and especially as Western chattel slavery and imperialism developed, associations of monstrosity and savagery persisted, whilst the Ancient world's more romantic imaginings of Africa were largely replaced by portraits of anomie and backwardness. By the end of the nineteenth century, Western explorers and travellers had mostly filled in the blank spaces on maps of Africa, as Conrad laments in the epigraph above. In the process, however, they had fashioned a powerful image of Africa as what Conrad terms a 'place of darkness'. Such imagery helped to foster a stark sense of the geographic, temporal, and even spiritual differences between Africa and the ostensibly 'civilized', developed regions of Europe and North America, and so worked to justify the political, economic, and socio-cultural hegemony of Westerners in the age of empire. And this 'imagined geography' persists today; as we shall see in the final section of this chapter, images and stereotypes redolent of colonialist and even racist ideology continue to inform many recent Western representations of Africa.

**Medieval and early modern accounts**

In the Ancient period, North Africa was very much part of the classical Mediterranean world, whilst sub-Saharan Africa was unknown and exotic. But the rapid growth of Islam after the seventh century created a schism between Europe and North Africa, the latter being perceived, during the Crusades, as a hostile place filled with enemies to Christianity. Lands to the south and east of the Mediterranean coastline, however, were now sometimes imagined as key redoubts of Christian populations, led by such legendary figures as Prester John, mythical king of Abyssinia. This led to a 'late-medieval motif of a Christian Africa – part real, part imagined – as Europe's helper in need and ally in the confrontation with Islam' (Pieterse 1992: 25).

However, in reality, Islamic adventurers were creating trade routes through the Sahara Desert – thereby establishing contact between North Africans and peoples like the Hausa and Songhai – and developing trading posts at several locations down the East Coast. In the early 1300s, a Morocco-born Muslim trader named Ibn Battuta provided a written account of his extensive – and extraordinary – travels throughout the Islamic world of the time. The African portions of his travelogue encapsulate his travels south from the Arabian Peninsula to Muslim settlements at Zeila (in Ethiopia), Mogadishu (in Somalia), and Kilwa (in modern-day Tanzania). He visited mosques and religious schools and noted the trade in gold and enslaved peoples from the interior. Setting a pattern for later negative perceptions, Ibn Battuta often expressed dissatisfaction with what he saw in sub-Saharan Africa, saying, for instance, that Zeila was 'the dirtiest, most disagreeable, and most stinking town in the world' (Dunn 1986: 124).

**Early modern visions and views**

The fifteenth century marks an important turning point in European views of Sub-Saharan Africa, because it was then that Europeans made their first sea voyages to places south of the Sahara. These voyages resulted not only in a more accurate level of European knowledge of the continent's contours but also in the establishment of an intense trade in captured African people that ultimately created a great global diaspora of Sub-Saharan peoples. Starting early in the fifteenth century with the journeys of Prince Henry the Navigator, Portuguese sailors explored far down the West Coast, visiting, by the early 1480s, coastal areas in modern-day Sierra Leone, the Bight of Biafra, and the mouth of the Congo River. In 1497, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama and his crew became the first Europeans to round the Cape of Good Hope; they rested for a month in Mozambique before going as far north as Mombasa before sailing east to India and then returning to Portugal. Thus, early Muslim explorations on the East Coast were finally merged in the early sixteenth century with Christian journeys down the West Coast, resulting in solid knowledge of the entire outline of the continent. However, there was still very little exploration in the interior of Africa, given that the focus for the Portuguese – and, in the following two centuries, for the English – tended to be on the exportation of Africans for forced labour in the New World and on ways to access and transport the riches of the Indian subcontinent. A few inland exploration attempts were launched, but usually these ended quickly because of disease or difficulties encountered in travelling up rivers filled with cataracts.

Most travel accounts in this period were penned by sailors or others involved in the slave trade. Influential works included those contained in the large compendia of travel popular at this time, such as Richard Hakluyt's _Principal Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation_ (1599) and Samuel Purchas's _Purchas His Pilgrims_ (1625), as well as individual records of travel such as Richard Jobson's _The Discovery of the River Gambia_ (1623). Two influential texts about sub-Saharan Africa that weaved together first-hand information from real-life travellers with imaginary visions of the African landscape and African societies were Portuguese writer Luis de Camoes' epic poem _The Lusiades_ (1572) and Englishwoman Aphra Behn's novella _Oroonoko_ from a century later (1688). Combining motifs from the ancient epics of Homer and Virgil with travellers' real-life adventures, De Camoes's poem creates a portrait of strange and horrifying events at the Cape of Good Hope. Some of the keynotes of later imaginings of Africa are already struck here, especially the portrayal of black Africans as uncivilized 'brutes' in need of – but perhaps not worthy of – saving by white Europeans. In contrast, Behn's _Oroonoko_ centres on a heroic West African man who, along with his beautiful love interest, Imoinda, is treacherously sold into Caribbean slavery. The novel offers highly romanticized descriptions of Oroonoko's homeland, although these seem to be based more on European images of the Muslim cultures of the Mediterranean littoral than on contemporary accounts of sub-Saharan Africa.

**Late eighteenth-century and romantic imaginings**

The last two decades of the eighteenth century saw a shift both in the _types_ of travel writings about sub-Saharan Africa and in the _tropes_ featured in these accounts. Notably, European travellers now began to go further inland, though there were still relatively few such expeditions. Especially in southern Africa, but also on the West Coast, scientific exploration increased in importance as did mission-related travels. Whereas earlier travels had been motivated mostly by either cartographical purposes (e.g. mapping the coasts) or for the purposes of trade (finding quicker trade routes to the Far East or expanding the reach of the slave trade), the second half of the eighteenth century saw scientific exploration inspired by natural history and by what might best be called rudimentary ethnology and anthropology. These new motives developed out of Linnaean science. In the 1730s, Carl Linnaeus developed a taxonomy for animals, and his classification system encouraged scientific expeditions to many parts of the world. As Mary Louise Pratt explains in _Imperial Eyes_ (1992), followers of Linnaeus 'fanned out by the dozens across the globe by sea and by foot, [. . .] everywhere collecting plants and insects, measuring, annotating, preserving, [and] making drawings' (1992: 25). A hallmark of the new literature produced by these Linnaeus-inspired travellers was a stated devotion to truth-telling rather than chimera-mongering – his followers often stated that their intention was to displace the older literature of monstrous creatures and bizarre happenings with facts about the natural environment.

One of Linnaeus's followers was Anders Sparrman, a fellow Swede who chronicled his scientific travels in southern Africa in _Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope_ (published in Swedish in 1783 and in English in 1785). The writings of the first travellers to the interior of southern Africa – such as Sparrman and the English naturalist William Paterson, whose _Narrative of Four Voyages in the Land of the Hottentots and Kaffirs_ appeared in 1789 – tended to elide descriptions of the human inhabitants in favour of an intense focus on landscape and on plant and animal life. In these texts, Pratt suggests, the 'encounter with nature' becomes 'the narrative scaffolding' for travel writing: 'the landscape is written as uninhabited, unpossessed, unhistoricized, unoccupied even by the travellers themselves' (1992: 51).

The 1790s also saw the publication of important travel narratives about both East and West Africa, many of which presented significant truth claims as their authors attempted to set their own writings apart from the seemingly more fanciful works of old. For instance, James Bruce's _Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile_ (1790) was a multi-volume work detailing his experiences in Ethiopia and Abyssinia. Though its veracity was initially questioned, Bruce made some significant geographical discoveries, and his narrative provides a rich and somewhat romanticized record of his everyday life while enjoying the hospitality of East African potentates. West Africa witnessed a significant increase in scientifically-oriented travel around the turn of the nineteenth century, and frequently those journeys possessed a commercial agenda as well. Such mixed motives emerge in four representative British expeditions in the Niger River region from the 1790s through the 1840s. Mungo Park conducted two solo expeditions in the 1790s; Hugh Clapperton led a small group in the 1820s, with one member, Richard Lander, returning with his brother in the following decade to settle some geographical questions; and there was a multi-faceted Niger Expedition of 1841, which sought simultaneously to colonize an area of modern-day Sierra Leone, to develop a commercial plantation there, and to convert the local population to Christianity. Charles Dickens was thinking of the latter expedition, which ended disastrously, when he famously satirized foreign missionary endeavors in the person of Mrs. Jellyby in _Bleak House_ (1853).

The travelogues that emerged from these Niger expeditions highlight key themes present in much writing about sub-Saharan Africa. Park's narrative created an enduring mythos of the hard-pressed survivor (the 'experiential unhero' in Mary Louise Pratt's terminology) who overcomes human and natural obstacles and finds humour in the life-threatening situations he faces. The fact that Park, Clapperton, one of the Landers, and almost all the Europeans who participated in the 1841 expedition died while still in Africa also cemented a view of West Africa as an unforgiving place requiring heroic self-sacrifice from those who tried to reveal its secrets. In economic terms, explorers of the Niger region at this time tended to envision the African interior as a potential location of _consumers_ of British goods, rather than as a source of enslaved labour (the earlier view) or as a source of minerals and other natural products (a view that would emerge strongly at the end of the nineteenth century with the increasing trade in ivory and rubber). The perceived need to 'enlighten' and Christianize the benighted natives was also strongly apparent in early and mid-nineteenth-century narratives, culminating in David Livingstone's hugely popular _Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa_ (1857). When Britain finally ended its own involvement in the slave trade in 1807, and especially after it had abolished slavery itself in all of its own territories in 1833, the nation adopted the mission of ending _all_ slave trading. This self-appointed role as a sort of world police force led to increased expeditions in the West African interior to make treaties with African leaders, encouraging them to switch from slave-trading to legitimate trade and abandon their traditional beliefs in exchange for Christianity.

To indicate the breadth of travel writing in this era we must also reference best-selling narratives by men of African birth who wrote about sub-Saharan Africa. Examples from the late 1700s include the _Letters_ of Ignatius Sancho (1782) and _The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano_ (1789), both written by formerly enslaved men who recalled their early years in West Africa. The most important such writer in the Victorian period was Samuel Ajayi Crowther. A West African sold into slavery as a teenager in the 1820s but rescued by British sailors, Crowther took holy orders in London (later becoming the first bishop of the Nigerian diocese of the Anglican Church) before participating in the 1841 Niger Expedition as well as in two subsequent missionary expeditions in 1854 and 1857. These trips resulted in two published narratives, including his _Journal of an Expedition up the Niger and Tshadda Rivers_ (1855).

**Adventure and imperialism: the 1840s–1930s**

One of the key geographic puzzles finally solved satisfactorily for Westerners in the Victorian period was the search for the source of the Nile River. The search produced memorable – but quite different – travelogues by John Hanning Speke and Richard Burton, who teamed together in an expedition jointly financed by the Royal Geographical Society and the Foreign Office in the late 1850s. Burton's books on Africa emphasize the traveller as both a worldly, intellectually curious polymath _and_ an intrepid hero successfully overcoming all the obstacles that Africa puts in his way. Narratives such as _First Footsteps in East Africa_ (1856) depict East and Central Africa as places of superstitious beliefs, despotic rulers, and beautiful and licentious women. A friend of Burton's later said that 'It was the abnormalities and not the divinities of men that fascinated him' (quoted in Hibbert 1982: 203), and it was, indeed, the odd or the strange – from cannibalism to lip piercings to the dances of 'witch doctors' – that attracted the attention not only of Burton but of many other Western travellers in Africa, whether they were writing about African families, political systems, or religious beliefs and practices. In contrast, Speke's _Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile_ (1863) contains more description of mundane daily travel activities and geographical calculations. Speke's book was thus more closely related to books like Livingstone's _Missionary Travels_ , where the theme of adventure was important but not all-encompassing.

We see both trends – the sensationalizing adventure tradition and the more sober, science-oriented tradition – at work in the multitude of travel narratives that focused on the Congo River and Central Africa in the mid to late nineteenth century. The question of what lay at the 'heart' of the continent seemed of infinite interest to Europeans and Americans. People wondered about the exact route of the Congo River, about whether or not cannibals roamed the jungles, and what kinds of exotic animals lurked there. As the title of Joseph Conrad's novella _Heart of Darkness_ suggests, this region was often thought of as the centre, not only of mystery but also of darkness and evil itself. Henry M. Stanley's multiple narratives about the Congo region were crucial in popularizing both this image and the label 'the dark continent'. Stanley, an American born in Wales, gained lasting fame after his successful search for David Livingstone in the early 1870s. The dispatches he sent to his sponsor, the _New York Herald_ , were transformed into his first African narrative, _How I Found Livingstone_ (1872). He then returned to East Africa in a quest to continue Livingstone's unfinished geographical work, and he emerged on the West Coast as the first European to have discovered the source of the Congo River and to have traced its entire length. In _Through the Dark Continent_ (1878) and in the narrative that traced his final African journey – _In Darkest Africa_ (1890) – he transformed himself into a swashbuckling hero, justified in using any means (even warfare against the forces of local leaders) to attain his goals. His popular narratives presented Africa as a place of mystery, cruelty, and primitivism ripe for – in fact, almost demanding – European intervention and control. They also perpetuated the image of Africa as a diseased land teeming with ways to kill blacks and whites alike: The small-pox was raging', he wrote in _Through the Dark Continent_ ,

dysentery had many victims, over fifty were infected with the itch, some twenty suffered from ulcers, many complained of chest diseases, pneumonic fever, and pleurisis; there was a case or two of typhoid fever, and others suffered from _prolapses ani_ and umbilical pains [. . .]. Every day we tossed two or three bodies into the deep waters.

(1988: II, 133)

Stanley's self-image as the heroic and ruthless explorer surviving constant threats in impenetrable jungles came to be a predominant image in Western popular culture. Echoes of Stanley's rhetoric can be found in novels from H. Rider Haggard's _King Solomon's Mines_ (1885) through to the Tarzan series by Edgar R. Burroughs, as well as in Disney World attractions like the _Jungle Cruise_.

The nineteenth century also saw the first significant accounts of travel to Africa by women. Some of these travel writers travelled with their husbands and co-authored narratives; see, for example, John and Katharine Petherick's _Travels in Central Africa_ (1869). More frequently, however, Western women travellers were motivated by a desire to escape gender-based limitations at home and to prove that lone female travellers could accomplish impressive things in 'uncivilized' places. May French-Sheldon, an American who claimed in _Sultan to Sultan_ (1892) to have been called 'Bébé Bwana' (or 'woman master') by her porters during her East African trip of 1891, 'sought acclaim as an African explorer in an era when this seemed the epitome of adventurous masculine pursuits' (Boisseau 1999: 3). On the West Coast, Mary Kingsley gained fame as one of the first Englishwomen to travel without white male escorts into the interior of Cameroon. In contrast to May French-Sheldon, however, Kingsley's writing style was more in the tradition of Mungo Park than that of Henry Stanley. Self-deprecating and ironic, Kingsley did not shy away from showing herself in ridiculous scrapes as she searched out rare fish and details about African religious beliefs and practice (what she, and others in her time, called 'fetish'). On the flip side of these images of daring female travellers, however, was the ongoing association of Africa itself (like the Americas in earlier centuries) with a mysterious female body in need of penetration and control by male adventurers, scientists, and political officials. Africa came to be seen by many as an ancient body that had to be harshly exploited by modern Europeans if it were to have new life, a place that could be fecund and productive only if the people who knew how to exploit its natural resources ruled it through imperial relationships.

Whether for sport or for capturing specimens for zoological gardens and museum taxidermy displays, hunting exotic animals came to be an important element of Western travel in sub-Saharan Africa. Explorers had often embedded within their travel narratives isolated stories of killing unfamiliar animals (such as lions, elephants, and hippopotamuses), but from the 1850s more and more narratives came to focus almost exclusively on animal-related adventures. Classics of the genre include Paul Du Chaillu's _Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa_ (1861), which featured this French-American's search for the elusive gorilla, and Frederick Selous's _A Hunter's Wanderings in Africa_ (1881). Even political leaders got into the act, with Theodore Roosevelt writing a book called _African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist_ (1909) and Prince Wilhelm of Sweden contributing a volume in 1921 entitled _Among Pygmies and Gorillas, with the Swedish Zoological Expedition to Central Africa_ (1921). The hyphenated term in Roosevelt's title – 'hunter-naturalist' – highlights the tension that existed between the killing of animals for sport and the killing of animals for scientific purposes. While hunting-focused narratives tended to highlight the big-game stalker's brushes with death and the hyper-masculine qualities that allowed him to subdue countless wild beasts, they also regularly featured discussion of new zoology-related knowledge. After the development of easily portable cameras, the photographic safari became popular, resulting in a number of narratives that told of amateurs' or professionals' experiences while visiting Africa to photograph wild animals.

**Post-war and postcolonial imaginings**

Many of the images discussed above lingered in the Western imagination well into the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first century. That is especially true of the image of the continent as disease-ridden and a place of potential harassment and death for outsiders. Though this portrayal decreased during the middle part of the twentieth century because of the deployment of more effective medications and prevention tools, a view of Africa as a particularly disease-ridden place actually increased in the last two decades of the twentieth century, with the discovery of AIDS (Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome) and its precursor virus, HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus). After AIDS and HIV were identified in the 1980s, research revealed that the latter had most likely arisen first in Central Africa in the late nineteenth century. Other diseases that have loomed large in African travel writing include dengue fever, yellow fever, malaria and trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness). Two examples, one from the field of traditional travel reportage and one from more recent social media, illustrate the continued relevance of this disease association: first, Edward Hooper's book, _The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS_ (2000), which emphasized Africa as the origin of disease; and second, a notorious Twitter post from December 2013. About to go on vacation in South Africa, a female PR executive tweeted: 'Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white' – a post which went viral and caused considerable outcry.

The trend of focusing on Africa's animal inhabitants to the exclusion of its human inhabitants has continued to the present day, but with an important twist. The hunting-and-collecting books of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave way to narratives highlighting the _immersion_ of Western scientists in the animal world without causing death or transporting animals out of Africa. This has produced accounts like Jane Goodall's _My Friends, the Chimpanzees_ (1967), and _In the Shadow of Man_ (1971), and Dian Fossey's _Gorillas in the Mist_ (1983), as well as countless exposés of poaching and pleas for animal conservation in popular scientific journals such as the _National Geographic Magazine_.

African American travel writing about Africa became more prolific and more diverse in the twentieth century. As we have seen, narratives about Africa by people of African descent had existed for 200 years already. The earliest of such narratives, usually by former slaves, evinced either a pronounced nostalgia for the glories of Africa or else a fervent rejection of 'heathenism' and an embrace of Christianity. Starting in the 1920s with the Harlem Renaissance, and growing during the early years of African liberation movements and decolonization from the late 1950s through the 1970s, travel narratives by African Americans often portrayed conflicting responses to the continent – on the one hand pride in African culture and accomplishments despite decades of imperialist oppression, but on the other hand a sense of disappointment at what was perceived as backwardness or ignorance. W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes were just two of the cultural and artistic celebrities who wrote about journeys to Africa during the Harlem Renaissance: Du Bois visited Liberia in 1923–4, while Hughes sailed to Africa in 1923, making stops in over thirty port cities, ranging from Freetown in Sierra Leone to Luanda in Angola. (His trip might be seen as a sort of modern West Coast mirror of Ibn Battuta's journeys on the East Coast in the 1300s.) Both men published pieces about their experiences in black periodicals, while Hughes also discussed his travels in his autobiography, _The Big Sea_ (1940). In the 1950s, Richard Wright's _Black Power_ (1957) recounted the novelist's vacillation between elation and despair while sojourning in the British Gold Coast (on the cusp of becoming independent Ghana), and Era Bell Thompson's _Africa: Land of My Fathers_ (1954) captured her mixed feelings about the numerous countries she visited, from the British Gold Coast to Belgian Rwanda and Congo. Novel and film versions of Alex Haley's _Roots_ in the 1970s, as well as television shows about African Americans travelling in Africa (such as an episode of the BBC's _Great Railway Journeys_ dedicated to scholar Henry Louis Gates's train travels in eastern and southern Africa in the 1990s) emphasized deep connections between people of the African diaspora and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The postcolonial period generally saw initial hopefulness and excitement about new opportunities for African nations quickly followed by concerns about neocolonialism and corruption. This larger context led to some new themes being inaugurated in Africa travelogues, but also provided new directions for the deployment of old tropes. The most important of the new-but-old themes was an emphasis on political dysfunction and social breakdown. Political corruption and the potential for violence took centre stage in Tim Butcher's two popular African travel narratives – _Blood River_ (2008) and _Chasing the Devil: A Journey Through Sub-Saharan Africa in the Footsteps of Graham Greene_ (2010) – as well as the narratives of visits 'home' by white 'exiled' Zimbabweans, such as Peter Godwin's _When the Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa_ (2008). Much fiction of the twentieth century followed the lead of these narratives in emphasizing themes of corruption, disintegration, and danger, while also often evincing a sense of nostalgia for the mythical lost days of empire, when people supposedly knew their respective places (in terms of race, gender, nationality, and class). Novels that deal with these themes include Saul Bellow's _Henderson the Rain King_ (1959), V.S. Naipaul's _A Bend in the River_ (1979), and Bruce Chatwin's _The Viceroy of Ouidah_ (1980).

Another trend that has continued is the representation of Africa as a primitive place – in economic, political, physical, artistic, and psychological terms. This representation can have positive or negative valences. Travel to the continent becomes a way for the writer either to learn how to experience a childlike joy through contact with people defined as living in a 'simpler' way or to pronounce doom on people who have been left behind by technological progress. Sigmund Freud's division of the human psyche into id, ego, and superego was mapped imaginatively onto landscapes of the world, with Africa becoming the primitive id and Europe the civilized and developed superego. It became commonplace in literary criticism to understand a novella like Joseph Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_ as being not really about Africa at all but about a journey into the psyche, with Kurtz's famous utterance, 'the horror, the horror', being interpreted as a reference to all people's capacity for acting on the animalistic and selfish desires of the id. Psychological exploration consequently forms an important part of later African travel writing, from Graham Greene's _Journey without Maps_ (1936), written about Greene's search for psychic insights while on a walking tour of Liberia with a female cousin in 1930s, to Paul Theroux's 2013 narrative about his experiences on the road in south-west Africa in _The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari_.

Saving Africa and Africans, whether from outsiders interested in plundering resources or from Africans themselves, figures prominently in media representations of sub-Saharan Africa in the early twenty-first century. We see this trend in narratives penned by former Peace Corps volunteers or others involved with United Nations activities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These texts as well as multimedia travel expressions by celebrity travellers such as media mogul Oprah Winfrey, actress Angelina Jolie, and musicians Bono and Madonna give wide exposure to the idea that most sub-Saharan Africans are suffering – and will continue to suffer without Western intervention – because of famine, political corruption, war, rape, female genital cutting, and disease, especially AIDS.

Binyavanga Wainaina's satirical treatment of contemporary travel literature in _Granta_ in 2005 perhaps provides a possible way out of the seeming dead-end of these traditions. With deadpan irony, Wainaina advises travel writers to:

[a]void having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life – but empty inside, with no dialogue, [. . .] no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Flipping this formula around, creating a travel literature that _does_ show Africans as ordinary people rather than as either unrealistically noble or unrealistically evil, is perhaps an important next step in the long history of Western depictions of Africa, along with increasing self-representation, both in travel writing and in the media generally, by Africans themselves.

**Select bibliography**

Blackmore, J. (2009) _Moorings: Portuguese Expansion and the Writing of Africa_ , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Boisseau, T.J. (1999), 'Introduction', in M. French-Sheldon _Sultan to Sultan_ , Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Brantlinger, P. (1988) _Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914_ , Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

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The Polar Regions

_Janice Cavell_

The first known travel writing about the far north was by a Greek, Pytheas of Massilia, who sailed beyond Britain in the fourth century BCE and reached a land he called Thule. The historian Polybius ridiculed his account, but scholars now believe that it was true and that Thule was either Norway or Iceland. Pytheas' narrative itself has been lost, but the basic facts about it were transmitted to later writers by other Greeks and the Romans. Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder all reproduced extracts, while a poetic dimension was added by a reference in Virgil's _Georgics_ ( _c_. 29 BCE) to 'ultima Thule' as the remotest land on earth.

Over the centuries, the far north and then the far south gradually evolved into powerful symbolic spaces, even as map-makers' and scientists' claims about their nature and potential shifted repeatedly. Polar discourses have both valorized European masculinity and lamented the futility of human effort in the cold, remote 'heart of whiteness'. Despite periods when polar exploits fell into disrepute, the published records of explorers' journeys acquired exceptionally strong cultural resonance. Whether modern travel writers' aim is to extend the polar canon or write back against it, the literature produced in earlier centuries continues to exert a remarkable degree of influence over their representations of the Arctic and Antarctic.

**Medieval and early modern accounts**

A few medieval travellers' tales, some mingled with fantasy, were preserved in the writings of the Irish monk Dicuil, Alfred the Great, Adam of Bremen, Saxo Grammaticus, Albertus Magnus, and the anonymous authors of _Navigatio Sancti Brendani_ ( _Voyage of St. Brendan_ , _c_. 900 CE) and _Konungs Skuggsjá_ ( _King's Mirror_ , _c_. 1250). From these accounts, educated Europeans gained a general picture of distant lands beyond icy seas, where the sun stayed almost constantly above the horizon in summer and disappeared in winter. The Norse settlement of Iceland and Greenland inspired a body of saga literature that dealt in an appealingly heroic way with northern lands. However, since they were in a little-known language, the sagas had almost no impact outside Scandinavia until the rise of scholarly, antiquarian interest in the eighteenth century. Despite the circulation of luxury goods from Iceland and Greenland, such as polar bear skins, white gyrfalcons, and walrus ivory, the very existence of these places barely impinged on the general European consciousness in the Middle Ages. When contact with the Greenland colony was lost in the fifteenth century due to the increasing cold of the Little Ice Age, the fact went almost completely unnoticed (Nansen 1911; Vaughan 1982).

During the Renaissance, Gerardus Mercator's famous 1569 map presented a new and visually compelling image of the far north. Mercator gained his information from a Dutch traveller named Jacob Cnoyen, according to whom the North Pole was a gigantic rock in the midst of a mighty whirlpool. Around the whirlpool was a continent, divided into four parts by narrow channels through which the sea rushed northward (Taylor 1956). South of the continent was a narrow sea extending around the globe. Cartographers showed an exit from this northern sea on the other side of the world, through the 'Strait of Anian' between Asia and North America.

This geography clearly suggested that Europeans could sail either northeast or northwest and reach the Orient. As a result of English and Dutch voyages, Novaya Zemlya, Spitsbergen (Svalbard), Baffin Island, and Hudson Bay were all discovered during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The exploits of English adventurers such as Hugh Willoughby, Martin Frobisher, John Davis, and William Baffin were chronicled in the influential compilations of travel literature by Richard Hakluyt (1589; 1598–1600) and Samuel Purchas (1614, 1625); Gerrit de Veer's narrative of Willem Barentsz's expeditions (1598; English translation, 1609) was also widely read. Frobisher's voyages provided vivid accounts of contact with the Inuit, while de Veer's harrowing story of a winter spent on Novaya Zemlya introduced the theme of heroic polar suffering and endurance. Despite the commercial motives behind these ventures, northern exploration quickly became a source of national pride.

After this impressive beginning, however, Arctic discovery lost much of its appeal. The search for the Northwest Passage, misdirected by Baffin's erroneous report that the sounds leading westward from Baffin Bay were dead ends, was focused on Hudson Bay. After several futile attempts, many concluded that no passage existed in this direction; moreover, the narrative of Thomas James (1633), who was the first to overwinter in the region, reported almost unbearable suffering from the intense cold. James Knight's 1719 expedition disappeared altogether. However, optimism was renewed in at least some quarters after voyages by the Danish navigator Vitus Bering in 1728 and 1741, sponsored by the Russian government, confirmed the existence of a strait between Asia and North America.

**Eighteenth-century imaginings**

During the period when discovery expeditions were few, whalers sailed regularly into the Arctic. Heavy ice was usually met to the west and north of Spitsbergen, but there were reports that some ships had found open water and proceeded to within a few degrees of the pole. These accounts, when gathered and published by men of science such as Daines Barrington (1775), encouraged the belief that Arctic ventures could, after all, yield worthwhile results. Writers searching for historical forerunners of their theory turned to Robert Thorne, who had declared in 1527 that it might be possible to sail directly across the pole, and that the climate there might be tolerable to Europeans. 'I judge, there is no lande uninhabitable, nor Sea innavigable [ _sic_ ]', Thorne had written (Hakluyt 1598–1600: I, 219). Soon the Arctic continent was replaced in the north's imagined geography by the 'open polar sea', which allegedly could not permanently freeze because of its great depth. Even though Constantine Phipps' naval expedition in 1773 was stopped by ice, Thorne's statement became a catchphrase for Arctic enthusiasts.

In North America two fur traders, Samuel Hearne and Alexander Mackenzie, crossed the subarctic to the northern ocean in 1771 and 1789 respectively. Both produced successful narratives (Hearne in 1795, Mackenzie in 1801), but while Mackenzie's sober prose was universally acceptable, Hearne's occasionally lurid descriptions of his Native guides' savagery raised mixed feelings. There were persistent rumours that his account had been heightened for publication by a ghostwriter. Nevertheless, Hearne's book certainly increased literary interest in the far north. The eighteenth-century imagining of the Arctic was also enriched through the Danish resettlement of southwestern Greenland after 1721, led by the missionary Hans Egede. Egede's _Description of Greenland_ (1729, 1741; English translation, 1745) and another missionary volume, David Crantz's _History of Greenland_ (1765; English translation, 1767) were troves of scientific, ethnographic, and historical information.

The historical element in Egede's and Crantz's books had a lasting impact on British visions of the remote north. The loss of contact with the Greenland colony now became an Arctic mystery with enduring fascination and appeal. A settlement was wrongly believed to have existed on the southeastern side of the island, which had been inaccessible since the fifteenth century. The prospect of finding the lost settlement was used by John Barrow, the chief promoter of nineteenth-century Arctic exploration, as a sure way to interest the public in his project. Nearly a century later, Vilhjalmur Stefansson established his fame with a sensational story of having discovered the colonists' descendants – the so-called Blond Eskimos – in northern Canada. Europeans in the Arctic thus often searched both for the unknown and for others of their own kind who were supposedly lost behind a barrier of ice. It was a powerful trope, with overtones of mythic adventure, that would attain its strongest expression during the Franklin search in the 1840s and 1850s.

The Antarctic seas found a place in the European imagination after the first voyages to the Pacific Ocean. Ships rounding Cape Horn were sometimes forced southward into a region whose icebergs and stormy weather provided many a thrill to readers. Then, during his second voyage (1772–75), James Cook was instructed to circumnavigate the globe in a high southern latitude, thereby either proving or disproving the existence of a large southern continent, the long-rumoured 'Terra australis incognita'. Cook demonstrated that if there was a continent, it must lie close to the pole in a region of intense cold, beyond seas filled with gigantic icebergs that looked like 'mountains, rising one above another until they were lost in the clouds' (Cook 1777: I, 267). He reached a latitude of only 71° 10′ S before he was forced to turn back.

Cook's narrative was printed in cheap editions, some of his officers published their own accounts, and his voyages inspired a host of popular secondary works. These volumes, combined with the books by Egede, Crantz, Hearne, and Phipps, plus John (Johann) Reinhold Forster's _History of the Voyages and Discoveries made in the North_ (1784; English translation, 1786) and several general compilations of exploration literature, supplied eighteenth-century readers with a wealth of information on the polar regions. Inevitably, the imaginations of poets as well as geographers were stirred. Early in the century, James Thomson's _Winter_ (1730) gave a thrilling bird's-eye overview of the 'wild stupendous Scene' around the North Pole and invoked the image of lost explorers: 'Miserable they!/ Who, here entangled in the gathering Ice/ Take their last Look of the descending Sun' (Thomson 1981: ll. 892, 920–22). From even richer materials, Samuel Taylor Coleridge – a keen reader of exploration literature – later fashioned his _Rime of the Ancient Mariner_ (1798). The Mariner's voyage south of Cape Horn owed both its realism and its uncanniness to vivid descriptive details culled from Purchas, James, Egede, Crantz, Hearne, Cook, and others (Lowes 1951).

**Nineteenth-century quests**

In 1817–18 Admiralty official John Barrow revived the idea of the open polar sea and sent out two expeditions, one to explore westward through Baffin Bay and one to sail north between Greenland and Spitsbergen. Both failed, but Barrow persisted. The result was a decades-long search for the Northwest Passage. Many narratives were published during the 1820s and 1830s, of which the most popular and influential were by Edward Parry (1821, 1824) and John Franklin (1823). Parry found the entrance to the passage through Lancaster Sound and sailed hundreds of miles farther west than any previous explorer, revealing the existence of a large, labyrinthine archipelago. The fact that the North Magnetic Pole was located among the islands gave Arctic discovery a practical scientific motive and also added to the sense of wonder surrounding it, since magnetism was considered one of the prime mysteries of nature.

In 1819–20 Parry's ships overwintered on uninhabited Melville Island. His lavishly illustrated narrative enthralled readers with scenes of icy splendour, reinforcing the vogue for what Chauncey Loomis (1977) has dubbed the 'Arctic sublime'. During his second expedition, Parry and his crew spent two winters near the Inuit settlement of Igloolik; the resulting book firmly established 'Esquimaux' as objects of keen interest among British readers. This prolonged contact episode also inspired Inuit oral histories (Eber 2008). Franklin, meanwhile, followed Hearne's overland route to the Arctic Ocean and explored the coastline in 1819–22. The sufferings that he and his comrades endured on their return journey, and their Christian fortitude in the face of what seemed to be certain death, lent an appealing religious element to the Arctic enterprise.

Despite the predominance of the Royal Navy in early nineteenth-century polar exploration, non-naval writers also had significant authority. For example, the whaling captain William Scoresby junior (whose report of better than normal ice conditions in 1817 had helped to spark Barrow's project), enjoyed high public regard because of his scientific attainments. Scoresby's _An Account of the Arctic Regions_ (1820) presented information gleaned during many northern voyages. So well known was Scoresby, even before his book was published, that it was hardly remarkable for Mary Shelley's Robert Walton to have gone on whaling voyages in preparation for his Arctic career. Some scholars have interpreted Shelley's novel as a critique of Barrow's optimistic plans, but chronologically this is impossible. The first brief announcement of the new voyages was made only weeks before _Frankenstein_ was published, and earlier literature provided a more than ample basis for Walton's conviction that, 'sailing over a calm sea', he would be conveyed to an Arctic 'region of beauty and delight' (Shelley 1823: I, 2).

Scoresby denied that the change he had observed in the ice was permanent, and indeed although climactic conditions in northern Europe improved during the mid-nineteenth century, in North America the Little Ice Age was at its height (Mann 2002). Nevertheless, the open polar sea theory persisted, due in large part to the work of scientist David Brewster (1823). Drawing on Alexander von Humboldt's concept of isothermal lines, Brewster suggested that there was a 'pole of maximum cold' in the western archipelago, and that conditions around the geographical pole would therefore be milder. However, the alleged region of lower temperatures and open sea was said to be surrounded by a ring of heavy ice.

Brewster's theory exercised an immense influence over the strategies used in the search for Sir John Franklin's missing 1845 expedition. Franklin's two ships, _Erebus_ and _Terror_ , had departed amid hopes that the unknown part of the Northwest Passage would easily be navigated. However, years passed without any news from Franklin, and when search expeditions were sent out they found no trace of the missing men. It was widely thought that the ships had passed through the ring of ice into the open sea, but were unable to get out again. Further search expeditions were inspired by the belief that the explorers had survived by going native in this area of relative warmth and abundance (Cavell 2009).

The many books written about the search were collectively of great importance in the imaginative construction of the north. The most influential of these volumes were Elisha Kent Kane's _Arctic Explorations_ (1856) and Leopold McClintock's _The Voyage of the 'Fox' in the Arctic Seas_ (1859). Kane's book, the first major American contribution to Arctic literature, was written in a more colourful style than British narratives, which had long been noted for their unadorned prose. _The Voyage of the 'Fox'_ recounted the final British search expedition, during which the only known records of the Franklin disaster were found. As far as could be ascertained, the entire expedition had perished; some Inuit oral accounts told of cannibalism among the last survivors. Charles Dickens categorically rejected these allegations and countered them with accusations of Inuit treachery and deceit. However, his attitude was not necessarily typical. Certainly, the bleak story contributed to an increasingly negative perception of northern lands, but it also strengthened British pride by proving that before they died, Franklin's men had found the last link in the Northwest Passage.1

A final volume deserves mention, although it was published after the British press had declared the search over. Another American, Charles Hall, travelled north in the 1860s and lived among the Inuit as the best way to discover further clues to the Franklin mystery. His narrative (1865) offered an unprecedentedly intimate and sympathetic portrait of Arctic Aboriginal people. Hall's career also marked another turning point: governments had become increasingly reluctant to sponsor polar expeditions, and Hall instead resorted to showmanship, appearing on the lecture platform with two Inuit in full Arctic dress. In an era of growing press sensationalism, it was a portent for the future.

George Nares' 1875–76 British naval expedition reached the northern coast of Ellesmere Island, and a sledge party was sent out over the frozen sea. The pack was composed of heavy ice floes, with gigantic pressure ridges that made sledging barely possible. After this discovery, the British government abandoned the northern quest. The dream of a navigable Arctic sea ought to have been over, yet explorers still tried to push their way toward the pole in ships. According to a few theorists, warm ocean currents moving into the polar basin would produce openings in the ice (Tammiksaar et al. 1999). Sponsored by newspaper magnate James Gordon Bennett, the American George Washington De Long sailed north from Bering Strait, only to lose his ship, many of his men, and his own life. Wreckage from the ship eventually washed up on the other side of the globe, inspiring the young Norwegian oceanographer Fridtjof Nansen to design a vessel that could be frozen into the pack without being crushed.

Nansen's 1893–96 expedition in his ship, the _Fram_ , took him to a record high latitude and worldwide fame. His book _Farthest North_ (1897) was as much of a new departure as his exploration technique. Reflecting the aesthetic climate of the 1890s, Nansen's word pictures of the north were far more poetic than previous descriptions, and his philosophical musings were informed by his reading of Darwin and Schopenhauer. This _fin-de-siècle_ sensibility was combined with professional scientific rigour and an intense Norwegian patriotism. Nansen's strong advocacy of Norwegian independence from Sweden highlighted a trend towards the use of polar exploration for nationalist purposes – often by ambitious individuals acting with no or minimal official state sponsorship – in many countries other than Britain and the United States, including such seemingly unlikely nations as Italy. By the time Nansen wrote, many middle-class readers had their own experiences of icy scenery to draw upon, whether in Switzerland or more northern regions. Travel to such places as Iceland, Spitsbergen, and Alaska became ever more common throughout the nineteenth century; by the 1890s, tourist excursions were available. Under these circumstances, Nansen's reinvigoration of polar literature ensured a wide international audience for Antarctic narratives.

**The heroic age of Antarctic exploration**

Southern polar exploration in the early nineteenth century involved both whalers and officially sponsored government expeditions from Britain, the United States, Russia, and France. The coasts of Antarctica were glimpsed at widely separated spots. The best-known narrative from this period was written by James Clark Ross (1847), whose ships successfully pushed through the ice, allowing Ross to discover an open sea and a mountainous coastline.

There was then a hiatus until the 1890s. Scientific expeditions from several countries were sent out in the first years of the new century, and the resulting narratives strengthened international interest in the poles. However, only Robert Falcon Scott's _The Voyage of the 'Discovery'_ (1905) recorded extensive land travel on the Antarctic continent, and it did so with considerable literary charm. While Scott's poetic descriptions were more restrained than Nansen's, they still went beyond the earlier conventions of polar prose. On Scott's last expedition, he and four others died during their return journey from the pole. His lightly edited diary was published in 1913, and its gripping account of the party's tragic last days made the book a lasting success. Ernest Shackleton's _South_ (1919), which told a story of endurance and survival, was equally popular. As a result, the Antarctic continent was widely regarded as the last stronghold of true adventure. An uninhabited world of ice, with a sublimity and solitude exceeding that of the far north, it held an intense fascination for twentieth-century audiences.

For readers in the post–First World War era who wanted to know what lay behind the surface of commanders' narratives, the second Scott expedition provided an important new text. Apsley Cherry-Garrard's _The Worst Journey in the World_ (1922) recorded the author's feelings of inadequacy and his enduring guilt over the fatal outcome. Cherry-Garrard's frank analysis of both Scott's strengths and weaknesses was unprecedented. Although it inadvertently encouraged a gradual trend towards debunking polar heroes, his book's main appeal lay in the emotional depth that it added to the standard narrative of polar heroism.

In the following decades there were many new polar publications, but readers evidently favoured the classic texts by Scott, Shackleton, Cherry-Garrard, and a few others. These books were reprinted numerous times in cheap editions, including paperbacks. The appeal of the heroic age stories was also demonstrated through works of imaginative literature, from A.E.W. Mason's _The Turnstile_ (1912) through Beryl Bainbridge's _The Birthday Boys_ (1991). These were often conventional in both form and content, but there were a few genuinely subversive re-imaginings, such as Ursula Le Guin's short story 'Sur' (1982), in which a group of Latin American women reach the South Pole before the European males, but leave no marker to authenticate their exploit.

**Polar controversies**

Nansen's major rival in Arctic exploration was the American Robert Peary, who characterized Nansen's innovative mode of travel as passive and unmanly. Peary seemed to challenge traditional gender roles when his wife, Josephine, accompanied him on two of his early expeditions. He took pride in her successful publication of her own book, _My Arctic Journal_ (1893), which portrayed a domesticated Arctic (Hansson 2009). However, in an increasingly obsessive pursuit of his goals, Peary preferred to smash through the ice as far as possible with his own specially built ship, the _Roosevelt_ , before taking to sledge travel. In his narratives (1907, 1910) he deliberately emphasized the violence of his 'battles' with nature (Robinson 2006: 129).

Peary's hyper-masculine rhetoric was discredited through his vendetta against Frederick Cook, who claimed to have reached the North Pole a year before Peary. The bitter Cook–Peary controversy did much to tarnish polar exploration as a whole. Expeditions, however, continued – many of them inspired by the belief that there was an Arctic continent north of the Beaufort Sea. This theory, put forward by R.A. Harris of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, was quickly subjected to a scathing critique by Nansen, yet most explorers continued to uphold it. Just before the First World War, Vilhjalmur Stefansson set out in search of the supposed land. He, too, became embroiled in controversy: the publication of his narrative, _The Friendly Arctic_ (1921), led to public disputes with members of the scientific staff. Stefansson's claim that explorers must transform themselves into 'white Eskimos' appealed to many, but his critics argued that Stefansson was able to portray the Arctic as friendly only by ignoring the seventeen deaths on his expedition.

During the 1920s, explorers in search of new Arctic land turned to aviation. For funding, they usually relied on sponsorship by commercial firms and on press contracts that would guarantee publicity. As a new, modern, and yet thrillingly dangerous activity, flying in remote regions lent itself well to the theme of human ingenuity pitted against nature. But again there was no shortage of controversy, for example in the hostile exchanges between Roald Amundsen and Umberto Nobile after their 1926 transpolar flight. Moreover, exploration by air offered little opportunity for interactions with Arctic Aboriginal people or fresh views of the polar environment. There were of course exceptions to the dominant trend, such as the Danish ethnographer Knud Rasmussen's epic overland journey from Greenland to Alaska, described in his _Across Arctic America_ (1925–26; English translation, 1927). However, most books were formulaic and soon forgotten. When Arctic scientist Rudolph Anderson heard that the narrative of a proposed submarine voyage to the North Pole was to be published beforehand, with deluxe autographed copies being sold for a high sum to help finance the expedition, he commented: 'They might as well write the book in advance as it will be the same old bunk anyway' (Anderson 1931). It was an apt summary of an era when the polar regions often became subordinate to explorers' self-promotion.

**Science and sovereignty**

Transpolar aviation had major geopolitical implications, and behind the era's flashiness, governments were taking a new interest in the 'last frontiers'. The major powers were of course dominant, but the appearance of postcolonial states on the scene was noteworthy. These included former British colonies and some Latin American countries. For example, Canada and Australia both inaugurated their official polar presences in the early twentieth century. Gradually, flamboyant polar commercialism became less common than government-sponsored scientific exploration. Much of this work had the establishment of sovereignty as its ultimate aim, and in order to establish their serious nature, published accounts were usually restrained. Only in the Soviet Union was there an intensive official campaign to make Arctic scientists into national heroes (McCannon 1998). Beginning in the 1950s, several countries undertook major research programmes in the Antarctic. The rhetoric surrounding this enterprise characterized it as transcending Cold War rivalries for the benefit of all humanity (Spiller 2004). Typical publications in the period included George Dufek's _Operation Deepfreeze_ (1957) and Vivian Fuchs and Edmund Hillary's _The Crossing of Antarctica_ (1958).

Because the polar regions were difficult and extremely expensive to reach, travellers without a formal scientific or political mission were rare. An early account of Antarctica by a woman, Jennie Darlington's _My Antarctic Honeymoon_ (1956), was possible only because the author was married to a scientist. The mid-century scientific and sovereignty traditions produced only a few books with enduring appeal, such as Graham Rowley's memoir, _Cold Comfort_ (1996). The mystique of the poles was preserved mainly through re-readings of older texts rather than through literary innovation. Indeed, in an effort to recapture some of that mystique, new books were often laden with references to earlier journeys. Fuchs and Hillary, for example, visited sites associated with heroic-age expeditions; Fuchs carried Scott's watch; and at the South Pole the flag of the 1901–3 Scottish National Antarctic Expedition was unfurled.

**Heroic footsteps and postcolonial re-imaginings**

Polar literature written in recent decades is remarkable for the ubiquity and denseness of its intertextuality with old exploration narratives. In many cases, the reason is an individual's admiration for a particular explorer. Numerous modern journeys have followed the route of a chosen hero, attributing a timeless value to his achievement through re-enactment. The best example is _In the Footsteps of Scott_ (1987) by Roger Mear and Robert Swan. Sometimes the aim is to perform an old feat by novel means; typical titles in this subgenre include Vladimir Snegiryev's _On Skis to the North Pole_ (1985) and David E. Fisher's _Across the Top of the World:_ _T_ _o the North Pole by Sled, Balloon, Airplane, and Nuclear Icebreaker_ (1992).

Other travellers – especially academics or literary journalists – often claim, with varying degrees of explicitness and intensity, to see the polar regions in a fundamentally different way, thus revising explorers' imperialistic perceptions of landscapes and people. This postcolonial project, however, still ties new writing to the old texts. Despite the availability of tourist cruises in some areas, the far north and south remain generally difficult of access. Accordingly, some authors of this type cannot write from extensive personal experience; many have never seen the polar regions in winter.

Since transportation in the high Arctic and Antarctica is mainly by air or ship from one spot of interest to another, the strong narrative structure provided by a journey with a single clear goal is often lost. Instead, there may be either a thematic or an episodic, impressionistic organization. For example, the subtitle of Stephen Pyne's _The Ice:_ _A_ _Journey to Antarctica_ (1986) is misleading: although the author spent three months in the Antarctic, his book is divided into chapters with scientific, historical, and literary themes, while his travels provide only a lightly sketched framework. John Moss's _Enduring Dreams_ (1994) blends the author's Arctic experiences, reading, and reflections in an episodic stream of consciousness. Barry Lopez's _Arctic Dreams_ (1986) and Sara Wheeler's _Terra Incognita_ (1996) and _The Magnetic North_ (2009) have similar episodic structures, although Wheeler places more emphasis on the process of travel than Moss or Lopez. In _Skating to Antarctica_ (1997), Jenny Diski breaks out of this pattern by the well-worn, but in her case highly effective, device of combining the outer journey to an extreme location with an inner journey through her own traumatic family history. Craig Cormick's _In Bed with Douglas Mawson_ (2011) achieves unity through its focus on Mawson, Australia's best-known polar explorer, with whose ghost Cormick holds imaginary conversations as he travels through the Antarctic.

Despite some highly engaging writing, the claims to superior insight so often found in recent literature can appear rather glib and perfunctory. For example, one author begins his account of a canoe journey through the Canadian subarctic by expressing his wish to see the area of Franklin's tragic 1821 trek, then adds piously that he must also visit an Inuit community, because it is essential to 'gaze, through the filter of their culture, at the landscape' (Raffan 1990: 5). However, many such books reflect a genuine wrestling with the traditional polar canon, if not always with the realities of the Arctic and Antarctic themselves.

The process is especially important in postcolonial nations with a polar heritage, such as Canada and Australia, where it increasingly extends to imaginative literature. Franklin's expeditions have provided material for many Canadian works of fiction, for example Mordecai Richler's _Solomon Gursky Was Here_ (1989), Rudy Wiebe's _A Discovery of Strangers_ (1994), John Wilson's _North with Franklin:_ _T_ _he Lost Journals of James Fitzjames_ (1999), and Dominique Fortier's _On the Proper Use of Stars_ (2010), while Scott and Mawson are central characters in _The White_ (1999), by the Australian novelist Adrian Caesar. Other Australian novels with polar themes include David Smith's _Freeze Frame_ (1992) and Robyn Mundy's _The Nature of Ice_ (2009). Many of these books position themselves as writing back to the British imperial tradition; polar spaces are thus symbolically appropriated for use in new constructions of identity and nationhood. Although such works may be seen as attempts to occlude the fundamentally imperialistic relations between the two former colonies and their remote hinterlands, they indicate that the polar regions hold not only an enduring but also an evolving place in the Western imagination.

**Note**

1 There are numerous myths about the last Franklin expedition. It is sometimes described as exceptionally large and, by implication, hubristic; however, James Clark Ross's 1839–43 Antarctic expedition, in the same two ships and with almost exactly the same number of men, was highly successful. Nor was an ethnocentric reliance on canned food responsible for the tragedy: Franklin intended to hunt, but could not because his ships were trapped in one of the Arctic's worst game areas (Cavell 2009). Finally, responses to the cannibalism reports varied considerably. Many writers accepted the probable truth of the stories with sad resignation, and the most common motive for the widespread lack of willingness to discuss the subject was compassion for the dead explorers and their families (Cavell 2013).

**Select bibliography**

Anderson, R.M. (1931) Letter to R. Bartlett, 8 March 1931, Library and Archives Canada, MG30 B40, vol. 4, file 8.

Brewster, D. (1823) 'Observations on the Mean Temperature of the Globe', _Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh_ 9(1): 201–25.

Cavell, J. (2009) 'Going Native in the North: Reconsidering British Attitudes during the Franklin Search, 1848–1859', _Polar Record_ 45(232): 25–35.

Cavell, J. (2013) 'Publishing Sir John Franklin's Fate: Cannibalism, Journalism, and the 1881 Edition of Leopold McClintock's _The Voyage of the "Fox" in the Arctic Seas_ ', _Book History_ 16: 155–84.

Cook, J. (1777) _A Voyage Towards the South Pole, and Round the World_ , 2 vols, London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell.

Eber, D.H. (2008) _Encounters on the Passage: Inuit Meet the Explorers_ , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Hakluyt, R. (1598–1600) _The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, made by sea or over-land, to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth, at any time within the compasse of these 1600 yeeres_ , 2nd edn, 3 vols, London: George Bishop, Ralph Newbery, and Robert Barker.

Hansson, H. (2009) 'Feminine Poles: Josephine Diebitsch-Peary's and Jennie Darlington's Polar Narratives', in H. Hansson and C. Norberg (eds), _Cold Matters: Cultural Perceptions of Snow, Ice and Cold_ , Umeå: Umeå University/ Royal Skyttean Society.

Loomis, C.C. (1977) 'The Arctic Sublime', in U.C. Knoepflmacher and G.B. Tennyson (eds), _Nature and the Victorian Imagination_ , Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Robinson, M.F. (2006) _The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture_ , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shelley, M. (1823) _Frankenstein:_ _O_ _r, the modern Prometheus_ , 1818, 2nd edn, 2 vols, London: G. and W.B. Whittaker.

Spiller, J. (2004) 'Re-Imagining United States Antarctic Research as a Defining Endeavor of a Deserving World Leader: 1957–1991', _Public Understanding of Science_ 13(1): 31–53.

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Vaughan, R. (1982) 'The Arctic in the Middle Ages', _Journal of Medieval History_ 8(4): 313–42.

Deserts

_Rune Graulund_

As an imaginary landscape, the desert has a long history. From the forty years of Moses' exodus from Egypt to the forty days Christ spent wandering the desert, the image of the weary desert traveller suffering under a harsh and relentless sun has become a stock trope of the Western collective unconscious. To enter the desert, to go 'through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought, and of the shadow of death' (Jeremiah 2:6) is to test oneself and one's faith in the face of the most unforgiving and pitiless of places. However, the Bible was not the only text through which the desert came to life. Indeed, as exemplified by the Crusades (1095–1272), and by explorers like Marco Polo ( _c_. 1254–1344) or Ludovico di Varthema ( _c_. 1470–1517), Europeans have for centuries travelled the arid regions of Africa and Asia. Such encounters with the desert resulted in a range of textual responses, ranging from private correspondence and military intelligence to the sometimes outlandish reports of travellers like Polo and di Varthema. While such texts are arguably very different in both form and purpose, the majority of these stress the enthralling mystique but also the horror of a landscape utterly unlike anything found at home in Europe.

The mythology of the desert as an environment of extremes is not solely a Western invention. The insights offered in the Moroccan Ibn Battuta's _Journey_ (1355) would in time provide Europeans with access to fairly accurate, first-hand descriptions of the desert. The Tunisian Ibn Khaldûn (1332–1406), reckoned by many to be the father of the discipline of sociology, also played an important role in shaping a range of tropes common to the Western imagination with regard to desert and its inhabitants. Khaldûn's thesis that the 'toughness of desert life precedes the softness of sedentary life' (Khaldûn 1989: 93) has become a standard reference point for the belief that desert nomads should be considered superior to 'civilized man', because supposedly more aggressive, more determined and more mobile than the passive and decadent inhabitants of the city. Protected by walls and tied down by possessions, people who live in cities grow soft over time, Khaldûn argues, hence they will inevitably fall prey to the peoples of the desert. Grown as hard and merciless as the environment that has fostered them, desert peoples will forever remain superior to those who succumb to the leisured life of civilization. Khaldûn's theories have had a surprisingly diverse influence on the contemporary Western imaginary of the desert. Ranging from the 'desert power' of science-fiction novels like Frank Herbert's _Dune_ (1965) to the abstract philosophical musings on 'nomadology' in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's _A Thousand Plateaus_ (1980) and the political critiques expressed in the 'dromology' of Paul Virilio's _Desert Screen_ (1991) and _Open Sky_ (1995), Khaldûn and his ideas of desert life are still very much alive.

Popular as the desert may be in today's intellectual climate, it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Westerners truly began to experience the desert in significant numbers. Europe being the one inhabited continent in the world without extensive tracts of arid lands, the desert was until the invention of mechanized and motorized transport difficult for European travellers to get to. However, the late arrival of Europeans to the desert can also be explained by lack of motivation. Europeans managed to circumnavigate the globe as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, yet some 400 years later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there still remained desert regions in which no European had ever set foot. If we consider the etymology of the word 'desert' this is perhaps not so strange. The English word derives from the Latin 'deserta', which is to say a space signifying 'absence' and 'desertion'. With 'desert' for centuries being more or less synonymous with 'wasteland' and 'wilderness', the early explorers and travellers setting out from Europe tended to have other, more profitable and less hostile regions in mind. Accordingly, while Marco Polo did in fact report on desert environments as early as the thirteenth century, he only did so in passing. Far more interested in the riches further east, Polo spent entire chapters of _The Travels of Marco Polo_ (late thirteenth century) detailing the curiousness of paper currency, the quality of local wines, and methods for growing rhubarb. But he rarely spent more than a couple of sentences on deserts, a space in which, as he regretfully put it, 'there is not any appearance of dwelling, nor are there any inhabitants' (Polo 1997: 63). Nevertheless it was paradoxically for the very reason that the desert was initially defined as being at best useless, and literally 'wasteful', that it would eventually grow to become such a powerful symbol of the wild and the exotic.

**From Arabia deserta to deserta populosa**

Nowadays, when a backpacker's gap year is not complete before he or she has visited the Australian Outback and hiked up Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock), it is hard to imagine a more potent symbol of Australia. Yet as Australian scholar Rosslynn D. Haynes explains it, 'the mystique associated with [places like] Uluru has not always been benign'. Indeed, as Haynes points out, half a century ago it would have seemed absurd to imagine the desert 'as Australia's most appropriate national symbol' (Haynes 1998: 264). Tellingly, on the other side of the globe, in North America, much the same scenario unfolded. While it may now be the case that for 'many European writers, intellectuals, and artists the desert is _the_ American landscape par excellence' (Gersdorff 2009: 15), this was not the case a hundred years ago. In _Death Valley in '49_ (1894), American pioneer William Lewis Manly had little positive to say about the desert. Indeed, despite the title of the book, only one chapter deals with the crossing of Death Valley, a place of 'trial, suffering and death' (Manly 1982: 216) and a place he is only too happy to leave. Consequently, while we now think of both Australia and the United States as nations proud of their desert landscapes and heritage, it took time before 'the desert began to qualify in some circles as beautiful and suitable for appreciation' (Limerick 1985: 7).

This lack of interest means that there is not a great deal of travel writing about the desert prior to the mid-nineteenth century. One remarkable exception, however, is the account offered in _Travels through Arabia, and Other Countries in the East_ (1774–1778), by the German Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815), which provides some richly detailed examples of life in the desert. Yet prior to the mid-nineteenth century, examples like Niebuhr's are few and far between. Once the attitude towards the desert finally did turn, however, what had till then been a trickle soon turned into a flood. As American art critic John C. Van Dyke expressed it in _The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances_ (1901), the public awoke to the 'simplicity of large masses – simplicity in breadth, space and distance – that is inviting and ennobling' (Van Dyke 1999: 19). With the attraction of the desert steadily on the increase, the young T.E. Lawrence (1888–1935) at the beginning of the early twentieth century had plenty of desert yarns to inspire his own spectacular account, _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ (1922). In turn, film director David Lean in _Lawrence of Arabia_ (1962) produced what is perhaps our most enduring image of the desert. In actor Peter O'Toole, whose white clad and intensely blue-eyed figure led the heroic Bedouin to revolt against a backdrop of magnificent dunes, Lean created an image of the desert traveller so vivid that it has been permanently fixed on the retina of the Western unconscious. As a consequence, even though most deserts are in fact neither sandy nor inhabited by Bedouins, the desert tropes established by Lawrence and later reinforced by Lean seem almost impossible to eradicate even for those who consciously desire to do so. A case in point is British architect and desert enthusiast Reyner Banham (1922–1988). As he admits in _Scenes in America Deserta_ (1982), although he knew perfectly well that the 'spectral, hurtful light' greeting him in the Mojave was nothing like that greeting Lawrence in the Arabian desert, Banham could not refrain from asking: 'Where are the camels?' (Banham 1982: 7, 161).

As suggested above, Lawrence was but the most famous of a long tradition of British desert travellers. Names like Richard Francis Burton, William Gifford Palgrave, or Wilfrid Scawen Blunt may now be unfamiliar to the general reader. Yet at the height of their fame these were household names in Victorian Britain. Among these British Arabists, one writer in particular inspired Lawrence to take on the desert. Described by Lawrence as 'a bible of its kind' (Lawrence 1979: 17), Charles Montagu Doughty's _Travels in Arabia Deserta_ (1888) has been an inspiration for an impressively eclectic variety of writers. These included not only later desert travellers like Banham (whose _Scenes in America Deserta_ points directly to _Travels in Arabia Deserta_ via its title) but also modernists like poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and novelist Henry Green (1905–1973), who would go on to eulogize _Travels in Arabia Deserta_ for the 'archaism of its style' (Hogarth 1928: 135). Written in a highly eccentric fashion and sprawling over more than a thousand pages, _Travels in Arabia Deserta_ remains to this day a seminal, if at times barely readable, desert travelogue.

Although the British desert travel tradition is often defined in explicitly homocentric (and on occasion homoerotic) terms, women desert travellers were in fact present both before and after Lawrence. One early example was Anne Blunt, the wife of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Anne Blunt, routinely referred to as Lady Anne Blunt, thus reinforcing not only her upper-class status but also her gender, published _A Pilgrimage to Nejd: The Cradle of the Arab Race_ (1881). Other, more independent women travellers followed in her footsteps, with Gertrude Bell's _The Desert and the Sown_ (1907) becoming a classic of its kind. To this list of female British Arabists one should also add the journalist Freya Stark. As prolific in her literary output as she was in her travels, _The Valleys of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels_ (1934) and _The Southern Gates of Arabia: A Journey in the Hadhramaut_ (1936) are but some of the many books and articles in which Stark provided readers with dazzling accounts of the deserts of the Middle East. Finally, while neither British nor an Arabist per se, there is the intriguing case of the tough and hard-living Swiss adventurer Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904). One of the few European travellers to convert to Islam, Eberhardt's travels were very different from those of Blunt, Bell and Stark. Dressing as a man and partaking in activities normally forbidden to women, Eberhardt drank, fought and had sex with as little inhibition as the men she spent the majority of her time with.

**A death in life: abstinence or indulgence, truth or mirage?**

While desert travel on occasion elicits such carefree behaviour, the majority of Western desert travel writers have stressed abstinence over indulgence. Much like Lawrence in _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ , the majority of desert travellers emphasize suffering and asceticism. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the desert was often praised for its purifying atmosphere engendered through deprivation rather than for its fulfilment of the body's base desires. For Lawrence, if there is anything the desert teaches, it is that the body is nothing but a vessel:

The body was too coarse to feel the utmost of our sorrows and of our joys. Therefore, we abandoned it as rubbish; we left it below us to march forward, a breathing simulacrum, on its own unaided level, subject to influences from which in normal times our instincts would have shrunk.

(Lawrence 1997: 12)

As he later described it, he became 'organically [. . .] efficient in the desert, felt neither hunger nor surfeit, and was not distracted by thoughts of food or hunger' (Lawrence 1997: 459). In this detachment from his body, Lawrence believed he had found a higher calling, a level of existence that was, as he phrased it, 'disbodied', so that he became 'unconscious of flesh or feeling'. Indeed, Lawrence and his companions eventually viewed their bodies 'with some hostility, with a contemptuous sense that they reached their highest purpose, not as vehicles of the spirit, but when, dissolved, their elements served to manure a field' (Lawrence 1997: 460).

Like many desert travellers both before and after _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ , Lawrence thus concluded that the body is but a means to an end. And that end – the _real_ reason that one goes to the desert – was envisaged as the ultimate of all ends, namely death. However, it is also important to recall why Lawrence found himself in the desert in the first place. For Lawrence, the desert, through being void, purifies by offering death. Yet it was a death of a very different kind to the one offered to his compatriots in the muddy fields of Europe at the time. Torn apart by artillery and machine guns, trampled by tanks and mechanized transportation, the demeaning mess of mud, man and machinery experienced in the trenches of the First World War is both literally and figuratively a world apart from the world described by Lawrence. The desert provided Lawrence with a space in which he could re-enact chivalrous ideals of an older, more traditional, and simple past; hence he could, in theory at least, fight a war that was 'pure' (Lawrence 1997: 17).

War, of course, is never pure, regardless of where it is being fought. Indeed, as more recent accounts of war in the desert will remind us, desert wars can be as dirty as any other form of warfare. As former American Marine Anthony Swofford reports in _Jarhead: A Soldier's Story of Modern War_ (2003), travelling thousands of miles in order to fight a war for reasons he cannot fully comprehend, it can be difficult to see what is so great about fighting in the desert. Still, Swofford admits, while there was much to dislike, he did 'enjoy shitting in the desert' (Swofford 2004: 15). Partly because the act of defecating tallies well with his view of his overall situation: 'I was in the stink and shit, the gutter' (Swofford 2004: 51). But also because the desert

will not stop. This is the pain of the landscape, worse than the heat, worse than the flies – there is no getting out of the land. No stopping. After only six weeks of deployment, the desert is in us, one particle at a time – our boots and belts and trousers and gas masks and weapons are covered and filled with sand. Sand has invaded my body: ears and eyes and nose and mouth, ass crack and piss hole. The desert is everywhere.

(Swofford 2004: 15)

The desert is 'everywhere', Swofford claims, mentioning a range of objects and bodily parts invaded by the desert sand. Here, 'sand' and 'shit' are interchangeable literally as well as figuratively, invading every nook and cranny of his entire being. He is physically engulfed by the sand, just as he is figuratively and morally 'in the shit' because he has signed up for a war he does not believe in. Readily admitting to himself and his readers that he wants to indulge himself and amass 'ammunition and alcohol and dope, I want to screw some whores and kill some Iraqi motherfuckers' (Swofford 2004: 7), Swofford's views on desert warfare are a long way from Lawrence's lofty and highly abstract goals. Swofford does not fool himself that he will reach a higher, heroic and metaphysical goal distanced from all that is base and vulgar, nor does he in any manner constrain himself. Volubly proclaiming that: 'THERE IS A FUCKING DESERT HERE AND NOTHING ELSE' (Swofford 2004: 198), he sees little of value in the desert but the fact that it proves falsehoods for what they are. The desert is 'disturbing', he suggests, because in the desert 'one is always in the open'. This is disturbing because, as his commanders inform him, 'In the open you die.' The problem, though, is that 'the whole goddamn desert is open' (Swofford 2004: 135). In Swofford's rendition, then, the desert is a place of truth, but only because it proves that, like sand, shit and death, the 'mirage is everywhere' (2004: 15).

**The quest for self: contemporary desert travellers**

Accounts like those of Swofford's are in the minority the further we move into the twentieth century. By far the majority of Western travellers in this period praise the desert for its ability to instil a sense of authenticity and tradition so patently missing at home. One of the best examples of this tendency is Wilfred Thesiger's _Arabian Sands_ (1959), an account of half a decade spent living among the Bedouins of the so-called 'Empty Quarter' of the Arabian Peninsula.

Like Burton and Lawrence, Thesiger generally admired the desert tribes he spent so much time travelling with. Thesiger shared with Burton a respect for the 'grim Badawin, wild as their native wastes', men who possessed 'all the dignity of pride and dirt' (Burton 1954: I, 228), and like Lawrence, he believed that theirs was the 'strength of men geographically beyond temptation' (Lawrence 1997: 210). There is an important distinction between Thesiger and his predecessors, though, in that he ardently desired not only to _imitate_ the people among whom he travelled, but to actually _become_ one of them. In his own words, he set out to explore the so-called 'Empty Quarter' of Arabia so as to get to know the 'most authentic of the Bedu, the least affected by the outside world' (Thesiger 1991: 68). Yet to simply 'know' them was not enough. Rather, Thesiger wanted to emulate as fully as he could a people whose 'bodies were lean and hard, trained to incredible endurance', a people 'weathered by life in the desert until only the essential flesh, bone and skin remained' (Thesiger 1991: 67, 102). Most remarkably of all, however, and fairly uncharacteristic for his time, Thesiger was willing to admit that the Bedouin, and the life they lead, may be superior to the life led at home in England. Burton and Lawrence are on occasion reproachful of a way of life that is rendered 'primitive'. Thesiger in contrast is in awe of the Bedouin, humbled as he is by their traditional way of life, and by their incredible toughness in the face of an 'infinity of space [in which] I could see no living thing' (Thesiger 1991: 149). And in Thesiger's constant attempts to test himself on even terms with the Bedouin, _Arabian Sands_ presents us with a striking example of the manner in which the twentieth century would see a radical change in European travel writing's attitude to 'the other', 'the native' and 'the indigenous'. Rather than dismiss them as lower forms of beings, Thesiger reiterates that the indigenous inhabitants of the Empty Quarter are superior to those beyond the desert's edge. 'Only here, on the far side of this great barrier of sand, did the old way of life linger on, little affected _as yet_ by the changes in the north' (Thesiger 1991: 94; emphasis added). What the desert teaches, Thesiger claims, is that 'the old way' is best. Thus the indigenous peoples of the world's remote deserts can, if only temporarily, give us a glimpse of the world as it once was.

We see a similar admiration for the 'old ways' cropping up in almost all late twentieth-century travelogues on the desert. Accordingly, while a range of early twentieth-century texts like R.A. Bagnold's _Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World_ (1935) and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's _Wind, Sand and Stars_ (1939) praised the desert as being the perfect environment in which to test out novel technologies like the motorcar and the aeroplane, the further we move into the century the more stress there is on tradition and the past. Bruce Chatwin's _The Songlines_ (1987), another classic of late twentieth-century desert travel, is a case in point. Although set in Australia and so depicting a very different indigenous desert people, _The Songlines_ repeats many of Thesiger's claims about the ability of desert peoples to offer a means of travelling back in time. Like Thesiger, Chatwin believes indigenous desert peoples to be living in a state of original, prelapsarian bliss untainted by Western civilization and modern technology. 'Man was born in the desert', Chatwin claims, hence in 'returning to the desert he discovers himself' (Chatwin 1989: 65). Obsessed not only with locating the origins of 'man', but also with 'the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness' (Chatwin 1989: 161), Chatwin depicts the desert as the perfect space in which to perform voyages both of discovery and of _re_ discovery. For if the very notion of 'travel' itself, of 'human restlessness', supposedly harks back to the desert, the desert can tell us not only _why_ we travel, but also who _we_ might be in the first place.

Finding oneself is also the reason Robyn Davidson set out to cover, on foot, several thousand miles of the Australian desert. _Tracks_ (1980), the widely lauded travelogue in which Davidson describes her trek across the dry desert interior accompanied solely by a dog and a couple of camels, has become a modern classic of desert travel writing, and of contemporary travel writing more generally. This is partly because it so clearly expresses the manner in which contemporary travel writing distinguishes itself from earlier forms of travel writing. 'In previous centuries, change might be feared or resisted', Tim Youngs suggests, 'but now transformation is often an aim of the quest' (Youngs 2013: 93). Transformation is exactly what Davidson seeks. We see this in Davidson's desire to alert the public to the plight of the Aboriginal people she travels with, but we certainly also see it in her desire to challenge the 'antipodean machismo' (Davidson 1998: 18) that stipulates that a woman cannot possibly test herself, and survive, on a thousand-mile trek across a landscape as harsh and dangerous as the Australian desert. In the latter, we see a desire not only to alter the general perception of women in Australia, but of all women travellers travelling in 'hard' landscapes perceived to be the abode of men, not of women. Unlike female travellers like Blunt, Bell and Stark, all of whom travelled with, and relied on, male companions, it is therefore paramount for Davidson to travel alone. In this, Davidson in a sense re-enacts the heroics of former male travellers like Lawrence and Thesiger, adventurers who tested their self-reliance, courage and endurance when faced by a tough environment. Yet Davidson does not want to turn herself into 'a mythical being who had done something courageous and outside the possibilities that others could hope for', judging this mythologization 'the antithesis of what I wanted to share' (Davidson 1998: 236). Unlike Lawrence and Thesiger, then, travellers who tried their utmost to prove that they were exceptional, Davidson insists she wanted to be average, claiming that if 'I could bumble my way across a desert, then anyone could do it' (Davidson 1998: 236).

The overall message of _Tracks_ in regards of the desert is somewhat ambiguous here. For if Davidson goes to the desert in order to test herself against an environment that is unique precisely in that it is so difficult to travel, does she not diminish the very environment she wants to elevate? Also, if literally 'anyone' can cross the desert, why go there in the first place? In the beginning of the book, Davidson explicitly states that she went to the desert in order to escape the ordinary. And while Davidson is careful to point out that the 'trip had never been billed in my mind as an adventure in the sense of something to be proved' (Davidson 1998: 37), this is exactly what her trip succeeds in doing. If the desert is special because it is 'frightening', but precisely therefore 'produces a sense of potential and possibility [. . .] that may not exist now in any European country' (Davidson 1998: 191), the desert is in effect rendered exceptional. And so, by inference, are the people who live there (Aboriginal people) or travel in it (in this case, Davidson/women travellers).

**The future of desert travel**

'The self in a desert becomes more and more like the desert' (Davidson 1998: 193). In this, the desert is the perfect and authentic counterpoint to the false promises of self offered by the modern world. In the desert, Davidson informs us, she located a sense of self that came 'as close to perfection as I could ever hope to come' (Davidson 1998: 220). Perfection, however, is not what generally speaking characterizes Davidson's travels. One reason that _Tracks_ has become such a classic of contemporary travel writing is that Davidson clearly voices not only her own insecurities, but also the inconsistencies of her reasons to travel. The final lesson taught by her desert trip, then, is that there is no end in sight. There will never be any one reason or rationale that can adequately explain the traveller's complex, and often contradictory, reasons for moving on, or staying put. As Davidson concludes as she exits the desert, 'camel trips, as I suspected all along, and as I was about to have confirmed, do not begin or end, they merely change form' (Davidson 1998: 254).

The overall answer to the question of why travellers go to the desert is complex and not something we can hope to answer in a single chapter. If some are drawn to the desert for its ability to infuse an increasingly unreal, inauthentic and hollow modern life with the real and the authentic, others see the desert as symbolizing the exact opposite of this. For every traveller who views it as an environment uniquely suited for triggering clarity of thought and a sense of purpose and meaning, there are as many claiming the desert is none of these things. The fact remains, however, that the desert continues to exert a powerful pull both on the Western imagination, and on the many actual travellers who visit to the desert in order to locate a seemingly 'authentic' form of travel.

In an increasingly globalized world, where even the remotest part of the Sahara can now be 'visited' on Google Earth and one can with relative ease get to the once fabled and impenetrable desert city of Timbuktu, nowhere is truly remote any longer. Yet if any one place retains the aura of the unexplored and the unmapped, surely it is that of the desert. Defined as 'a blank space' from its inception, the perceived blankness of the desert is precisely what makes it appealing to modern travellers. Besieged at home by an overwhelming amount of stimuli, the contemporary traveller to the desert is more often than not driven by a desire to locate the silence, solitude and tranquillity that is otherwise in such short supply in an excessively mediated world.

**Select bibliography**

Banham, R. (1982) _Scenes in America Deserta_ , Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith.

Blunt, A. (2003) _A Pilgrimage to Nejd: The Cradle of the Arab Race_ , Piscataway: Gorgias Press.

Brent, P. (1979) _Far Arabia: Explorers of the Myth_ , London: Quartet Books.

Burton, R.F. (1964) _Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah_ , New York: Dover Publications.

Chatwin, B. (1989) _The Songlines_ , New York: Penguin.

Davidson, R. (1998) _Tracks_ , 1980, London: Picador.

Dyke, J.C.V. (1999) _The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances_ , Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

El Daly, O. and Starkey, J. (eds) (2000) _Desert Travellers: From Herodotus to T.E. Lawrence_ , Swinton, UK: Astene.

Freeth, Z. and Winstone, V. (1978) _Explorers of Arabia: From the Renaissance to the Victorian Era_ , London: George Allen and Unwin.

Gersdorff, C. (2009) _The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the Construction of America_ , Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.

Haynes, R.D. (1998) _Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hogarth, D.G. (1928) _The Life of Charles M. Doughty_ , Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Khaldûn, Abd-ar-Rahmân Abû Zayd ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn (1989) _The Muqadimmah: An Introduction to History_ , trans. F. Rosenthal, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lawrence, T.E. (1979) 'Introduction', in C.M. Doughty, _Travels in Arabia Deserta_ , New York: Dover Publications.

Lawrence, T.E. (1997) _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ , Ware, UK: Wordsworth Classics.

Limerick, P.N. (1985) _Desert Passages: Encounters with the American Desert_ , Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Manly, W.L. (1982) _Death Valley in '49_ , San José, CA: Classics of the Old West.

Polo, M. (1997) _The Travels_ , Ware, UK: Wordsworth Classics.

Swofford, A. (2004) _Jarhead: A Soldier's Story of Modern War_ , London: Scribner.

Thesiger, W. (1991) _Arabian Sands_ , 1959, London: Penguin.

Tidrick, K. (1989) _Heart Beguiling Araby: The English Romance with Arabia_ , London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

Youngs, T. (2013) _The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mountains

_Simon Bainbridge_

As the natural landscape's highest features, mountains occupy a pre-eminent position in travel writing, inspiring innumerable journeys and written accounts. Rich with symbolic and mythical associations, peaks offer travel destinations, structure narratives, and furnish the challenging goals of pilgrimages and quests. Summits, the loftiest places on earth, afford the culmination of one of the most popular of travel writing's many sub-genres, mountaineering literature, a form now recognized with its own festivals and prizes, such as the Banff Mountain Literature Festival and the Boardman-Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. Other types of mountain writing look beyond the summit, seeking to understand the broader meaning of the earth's most elevated places.

Mountain-travel literature is a highly symbolic, even allegorical, form. Shaped by ascent and descent, confronting the physical and psychological challenges of climbing, mountain literature frequently positions the writer and reader on the summit where they both become subject to altitude's transformative powers. The meeting of traveller and mountain constitutes an interaction of the human and the natural at the geographical extreme and the limits of existence. The place of elevation becomes the site of revelation, a location for the self's triumph or obliteration, the point beyond which further ascent becomes impossible but where communion with the divine seems imaginable. In common with much travel and travel writing, the expedition to a peak frequently becomes an internal journey and a spiritual quest. 'To go step by step across the greatest range on earth to somewhere called the Crystal Mountain, was a true pilgrimage, a journey to the heart', writes Peter Matthiessen of his Himalayan trek in _The Snow Leopard_ (1989: 13). Matthiessen's search is as much for some form of spiritual enlightenment as it is for the elusive creature of his volume's title.

While mountains are an inspiration for travel and travel writing, they also present particular challenges to those who seek to record them. A sense of the mountain's overwhelming, astonishing, or stupefying power was central to the cult of the sublime as it developed in the eighteenth century, and writers frequently remark on the impossibility of describing peaks, the prospects they afford, or the emotions they invoke. Indeed, for both mountaineers and writers, the actuality of mountains has sometimes been beyond their wildest dreams. 'I never knew – I never imagined what mountains were before', exclaimed the poet Percy Shelley of his first view of Mont Blanc in 1816 (Shelley and Shelley 1817: 151), a sentiment echoed just over a century later by the mountaineer George Mallory when he described his first sight of the world's highest peak in 1921:

Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers and arêtes, now one fragment and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared.

(Mallory 2012: 108)

Mountain writing seeks to rise to the chosen peak's imaginative challenge but constantly runs the risk of falling short of the summit, a potential tumbling that has inspired a rich tradition of comic writing, perhaps most famously W.E. Bowman's _Ascent of Rum Doodle_ (1956). Moreover, while mountain expeditions represent a high-risk form of journeying, taking the traveller to the very edge, mountain writing pushes to the limit some of the issues that preoccupy the critical study of travel literature, particularly the formation and privileging of the writer's heroic masculine identity, fashioned through his conquest of the peak and subjugation of the 'other'. In the first part of this chapter, I want to examine the development of mountain-travel writing before, in the second part, examining some of the key ideas it contains and the critical issues it raises.

**The rise of mountain-travel writing**

Mountain-travel literature is a precarious and unstable genre, if indeed the multifarious types of writing that describe experiences of the high places can be classed as a genre or sub-genre at all. Descriptions of moving through elevated terrain are spread across a range of different forms, including letters, journals, reports, essays, guidebooks, and, increasingly blogs, and there are several sub-categories of mountain books. Despite the varied nature of mountain-travel writing, however, it is possible to trace the genealogy of its dominant forms and to examine their development over the last three centuries.

As a number of important studies such as Marjorie Hope Nicolson's _Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory_ (1959) have shown, it was only during the eighteenth century that mountains began to be conceived as specific objects of travel rather than as obstacles to be overcome or skirted around. Prior to this period, other than those who lived or worked in mountainous regions, there were only a few individuals who ventured for pleasure into an environment that was generally viewed as aesthetically repulsive and physically dangerous, the abode of gods and dragons. The Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner, who would later publish an account of his ascent of Mount Pilatus near Lucerne, was one of these rare adventurers, writing in 1541 that

I have resolved for the future, so long as God suffers me to live, to climb mountains, or at all events to climb one mountain every year, at the season when vegetation is at its best, partly for the sake of studying botany, and partly for the delight of the mind and the proper exercise of the body.

(Gribble 1899: 52)

While Gesner's annual journeys were motivated by a combination of scientific curiosity and a search for intellectual and physical well-being, many early accounts of mountain travel describe perilous experiences encountered by accident, such as those that occurred during the crossing of the Alps as part of the Grand Tour. In 1688, the critic and playwright John Dennis described how one such Alpine experience 'produced different emotions in me, _viz_. a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas'd, I trembled' (Thorpe 1935: 463–8). Dennis's account gives an early articulation of the experience of pleasurable terror that would become central to the cult of the sublime, an idea codified by Edmund Burke in his influential _A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful_ (1757). As Burke writes:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the _sublime_ ; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.

(Burke 1990: 36)

Mountains became an increasingly important source of this sublime experience, the terror of which becomes pleasurable, in Burke's account, when experienced from a position of safety.

The closing three decades of the eighteenth century witnessed a remarkable expansion of mountain travel and writing, driven by both scientific and aesthetic motivations and facilitated by an expanding infrastructure of roads, accommodation and guiding. In Britain, peaks became an increasingly important part of the developing cultures of antiquarian and picturesque tourism. Thomas Pennant's evocative descriptions of Snowdon ascents in the 1770s inspired numerous other trips and accounts; Thomas West advocated the Lake District over the Alps as a travel destination because its summits were all accessible and provided a position from which 'astonishing' views could be obtained (West 1778: 97). In the Alps, as in Britain, scientific enquiry played an important role in the growth of mountain travel, mountain climbing, and mountain writing. A key figure in these developments was the Genevan naturalist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, who was closely involved in the early attempts to climb Mont Blanc and who himself made the third ascent in 1787. Upon his return from the mountain, de Saussure quickly published his 'Relation Abrégée d'un Voyage à la Cime du Mont-Blanc' ('A Short Narrative of a Journey to the Summit of Mont Blanc', n.d.). This 'Short Narrative', which focused on the climb and lacked the scientific data found in de Saussure's other writings, was widely reproduced and translated and offered a model for the emerging genre of the ascent narrative. Following Saussure, it became standard practice for those who climbed or attempted to climb mountains to publish their 'Narratives' or 'Accounts' in scholarly journals or periodicals or to present their findings to learned bodies such as the Royal Society. Mont Blanc provided a particular focus for this literature of climbing, and alongside individual accounts there also developed the collective history of attempted ascents of the mountain; perhaps the most notable of these was William Coxe's 'chronological account of the principal expeditions, which have at length terminated successfully', included in his _Travels in Switzerland_ (1789) and updated in subsequent editions (Coxe 1789: II, 10).

Saussure's and Coxe's texts are early examples of sub-genres in the literature of mountain travel that have persisted over the following two and a half centuries. The first-hand narrative of an attempt to climb a specific peak has proved one of the most enduring and popular forms of mountain writing. Examples include John Auldjo's lavishly illustrated _Narrative of an Ascent to the Summit of Mont Blanc_ (1827); Maurice Herzog's _Annapurna_ (1954),an account of the first successful climb of an 8,000-metre peak and the bestselling mountaineering book of all time, having sold over 11 million copies; and more recently, Andy Kirkpatrick's prize-winning _Psychovertical_ (2008), in which the author describes his thirteen-day climb of a big wall in Yosemite Valley. Following Coxe, numerous authors have written the histories of the accumulated efforts on particular mountains, one of the most famous examples being Heinrich Harrer's _The White Spider_ (1959), which details the various attempts to climb the north face of the Eiger, including Harrer's own part in the first successful ascent of 1938.

With the growth of mountain travel and especially the increasing popularity of mountaineering in the nineteenth century, specific forms developed for those interested in writing and reading about peaks, passes, and glaciers. 1862 saw the establishment of the _Alpine Journal_ , the annual publication of the Alpine Club, and some of the most notable mountain writings of the Victorian period first appeared in its pages, such as a number of the essays by Sir Leslie Stephen that later formed the classic volume _The Playground of Europe_ (1871). The _Alpine Journal_ continues to this day, covering various aspects of mountain science and culture, but to some extent online sites such as UKClimbing.com, which provide a space for recording and discussing various mountain-related achievements and issues, have now taken up the role fulfilled by the essay in the Victorian period.

Along with Stephen's _Playground of Europe_ , Edward Whymper's _Scrambles Amongst the Alps_ (1871) is frequently seen as one of the most important mountain works of the Victorian period. It exemplifies several dominant features of mountain-travel writing as these have developed since the nineteenth century. One characteristic feature is the volume's visual dimension. Whymper was an engraver by profession, and he illustrated _Scrambles_ with spectacular images of daring exploits as well as striking representations of the Alps themselves. Illustration has been a feature of many mountain texts, from the pioneering lithographs of Auldjo's _Ascent of Mont Blanc_ , through Alfred Wainwright's handwritten and hand-drawn _Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells_ (1955–1966), to the many coffee-table books of mountain photographs available today. In this way, the literature of mountain travel has developed alongside the technology that can visually represent the extraordinary places the writers seek to describe. Whymper's _Scrambles_ also represents a significant portion of mountain writing in offering the first-hand accounts of a figure who had gained fame, or even notoriety, for his climbing exploits. Albert Smith, who made a much self-publicized ascent of Mont Blanc in 1851, was perhaps the first celebrity climber and a number of the most highly regarded examples of twentieth-century mountain writing have been autobiographies or memoirs, including Gaston Rébuffat's _Starlight and Storm_ (1954), Lionel Terray's _Conquistadors of the Useless_ (1961), and Walter Bonatti's _The Mountains of_ _M_ _y Life_ (2010) which collects the Italian climber's writings from the 1940s to 2000. Whymper's own fame arose from his involvement in the triumph and tragedy of the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, when four of his party died, an event that provided both the culmination and conclusion of mountaineering's 'Golden Age'. As a result, _Scrambles_ is again representative of much mountain writing in its focus on misadventure. Mountain literature constantly teeters on the brink of disaster writing and many of the best-selling and most widely-read narratives have described mountain catastrophes: examples include Jon Krakauer's _Into Thin Air_ (1997), an account of the deaths on Everest in 1996 which have often been taken as evidence of the commodification of mountain travel in the modern age, and Joe Simpson's _Touching the Void_ (1998), the title of which exemplifies the genre's fascination with the possibility of death as the cost of ascent.

**Encountering and imagining mountains**

While Krakauer's and Simpson's texts represent an extreme form of travel writing that climbs to geographic and human limits, not all those who have ventured to and inhabited mountain landscapes have felt the need to gain the summit. Indeed, John Ruskin, perhaps the single most influential nineteenth-century commentator on mountain aesthetics, was disapproving of those who regarded the Alps as a 'playground' and criticized Alpinists for treating peaks like 'soaped poles in a bear-garden, which you set yourselves to climb and slide down again, with 'shrieks of delight' " (Ruskin 1903–1912: XVIII, 90). Ruskin, who believed that 'Mountains are the beginning and end of all natural scenery' (ibid.: VI, 418), felt that his beloved Alps were 'on the whole, best seen from below' (ibid.: XXV, 336). For Ruskin, mountain landscapes provided the most inspiring environment for travel and habitation, even without reaching the summits. In the second part of this chapter, I want to explore more broadly why mountains have acquired this significance, looking at some of the major ways in which the journey to the high places has been understood and represented.

Mountains offer a key location in travel writing for a range of physical, emotional, and spiritual experiences, including those of elevation, revelation, transcendence, prospect viewing, and introspection. Across various cultures and religions, peaks have been considered sacred places, making them at once travel destinations and prohibited sites that should remain unprofaned by human presence. The idea of pilgrimage underlies many mountain texts, explicitly or implicitly. In _To a Mountain in Tibet_ , one of the most significant pieces of travel writing of recent years, Colin Thubron undertakes a secular pilgrimage to Mount Kailas in the Himalayas, a sacred Buddhist site, to interrogate the meaning of travel itself. Or as Thubron puts it, 'To ask of a journey _Why?_ ' (2012: 10). In the Western Christian tradition, mountains have been a site of revelation and of the possible encounter between the human and the divine; God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on the top of Mount Sinai and showed him the promised land from the summit of Mount Nebo (or 'Pisgah', as it is sometimes known, the Hebrew word for summit).

For many travel writers, the mountain summit has been the site of religious or spiritual experiences, with the sheer scale and grandeur of mountains providing testimony of divine power. The pioneering climber Conrad Gesner made a direct link between the experience of mountains and the God who created them, writing:

For what, think you, is the pleasure, what the joy of a mind, affected as it should be, to marvel at the spectacle of the mighty masses of the mountains, and lift up one's head, as it were, among the clouds. The mind is strangely excited by the amazing altitude, and carried away to the contemplation of the great Architect of the Universe.

(Gribble 1899: 52)

John Ruskin was even more literal in his linking of mountain forms with religious architecture, describing mountains as the 'great cathedrals of the earth, with their gates of rock, pavements of cloud, choirs ofstream and stone, altars of snow, and vaults of purple traversed by the continual stars' (Ruskin 1903–1912: VI, 425). Indeed, such is the visual and experiential power of mountains, that for some writers they have offered an alternative religion or filled the gap left by a spiritual crisis. Leslie Stephen, for example, an Anglican clergyman until he suffered a loss of faith, maintained that were he to invent a 'new idolatry', he would prostrate himself 'not before beast or ocean, or sun, but before one of these gigantic masses to which, in spite of all reason, it is impossible not to attribute some shadowy personality' (Lunn 1943: 73). Stephen's account of his proposed mountain worship is humorous; he jokes that the mountain's voice, like the Bible, is 'mystic' and has found 'discordant interpreters'. But his comments show that while for some writers mountain travel may be a religious or spiritual experience, for others it is only through the forms or languages of religion that they can come close to capturing the power of the mountains, even if the ultimate revelation the peaks offer is not a conventionally religious one. At the conclusion of _The Living Mountain,_ her celebration of the Scottish Cairngorms written in the 1930s (though not published until 1977), Nan Shepherd states:

I believe that I now understand in some small measure why the Buddhist goes on a pilgrimage to a mountain. The journey is itself part of the technique by which the god is sought. It is a journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain's life, I penetrate also into my own. For an hour I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy, that leap out of the self that makes man like a god. I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. To know Being, this is the final grace accorded from the mountain.

(Shepherd 2011: 108)

It is through the parallel with Buddhist pilgrimage and the language of Christian 'grace' that Shepherd finds a means of articulating the mountain's material, philosophic, and imaginative meaning.

As Shepherd's text illustrates, mountains have provided a significant location in which writers have attained a greater understanding of both themselves and the world around them; as the Scottish mountaineer and writer W.H. Murray has observed, 'our understanding of mountains is broadened and deepened towards the understanding of all things created' (1997: 223). Murray was the inheritor of a Romantic and visionary tradition of mountain writing that can be traced back to the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the English poet William Wordsworth. It was Rousseau who gave one of the earliest and most influential descriptions of the various benefits of peaks as elevated sites that afforded unprecedented prospects in his hugely popular novel _Julie or La Nouvelle Héloïse_ (1761). Writing in the character of his hero Saint-Preux, Rousseau comments:

It seems as if, being lifted above all human society, we had left every low, terrestrial sentiment behind; and that as we approach the ethereal regions the soul imbibes something of their eternal purity. [. . .] Imagine to yourself all these united impressions; the amazing variety, magnitude, and beauty of a thousand stupendous objects; the pleasure of gazing at an entire new scene, strange birds, unknown plants, another nature, and a new world. [. . .] In short, there is a kind of supernatural beauty in these mountainous prospects which charms the senses of the mind both into a forgetfulness of one's self and of everything in the world.

(Ibid.: 114)

This sense of elevated locations as benevolent, which in Rousseau's account is linked to a celebration of them as politically democratic regions, proved highly influential and shaped much subsequent travel writing, including that of the British Romantics William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley and the American Transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is felt particularly strongly in the writing of the Scottish-American naturalist John Muir, famous for his role in the creation of the American National Parks. In _Our National Parks_ (1901), Muir set out to 'show forth the beauty, grandeur, and all-embracing usefulness of our wild mountain forest reservations and parks' (Muir 1903: Preface). The reader was directed as follows:

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grass and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of Nature's darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

(Muir 1903: 114)

Muir's imagery thus presents the mountain environment's benevolent power as a physical, emotional, and even moral force, engendering 'peace' in the climber.

The relationship between the human and the natural is more problematic in other mountain-travel texts, especially in the sub-genre of mountaineering literature. If in Muir's account the human benefits from being subject to nature, some accounts seem to enact a subjugation of the natural world and more generally of the 'other' as encountered in travel. As an activity which involves climbing mountains, and which from its origins has frequently involved the use of local guides to facilitate the ambitious ascents of outsiders, mountaineering and its literature offer extreme illustrations of the ideologies which have often been seen as inherent in travel writing more generally, especially in relation to issues of authorial identity, gender, national purpose, and imperial mission. Conquering a peak can appear an assertion or assumption of power, as indicated by the triumphant comments of Jacques Balmat, one of the first two men to reach Mont Blanc's summit in 1786:

I had got there alone, without other help than that of my own strength and my own will. Everything that surrounded me seemed to be my own property. I was the King of Mont Blanc – the statue of this tremendous pedestal.

(Gribble 1899: 170)

Balmat is empowered by his achievement. By reaching the summit, he feels he owns the landscape, while his physical elevation raises him to a position of sovereignty. Balmat was a local crystal hunter by trade, and his pioneering ascent has been read in relation to the rise of democracy in pre-Revolutionary Europe rather than as an enactment of the imperial or colonial projects with which mountaineering has often been associated (Hansen 2013). However, Balmat's language forcefully illustrates how mountains can be appropriated for individual or national purposes. The summit offers the location for the ultimate 'Monarch-of-all-I survey' scene, to use Mary Louise Pratt's influential term for the elevated enactment of self-aggrandizement and political domination through vision (Pratt 2008: 197). As we have seen, at the level of the individual, this sense of elevation above all others can be traced back at least as far as Rousseau and is a recurrent trope in mountain literature. In his 1961 memoir, the French mountaineer Lionel Terray writes:

To seek out danger is not the object of high mountaineering, but it is one of the experiences that have to be endured in order to deserve the pleasure of raising oneself for an instant above the state of 'crawling larvae'.

(Terray 2001: 355)

Ascent produces transformation and individual aggrandizement, though the elevated state can only be registered through definition against the grub-like state of ground-level existence.

The playful title of Terray's memoir – _Conquistadors of the Useless_ – also draws attention to the complex relationship between mountain travel and the more material expressions of power with which it has often been intertwined. Terray's term 'conquistador' ties mountaineering to the military, exploratory and imperial projects of which it has often been a part, though by adding 'of the useless' Terray distances himself somewhat from this history. Mountain travel and its literature is very strongly allied with histories of exploration, discovery, and territorial control, as is illustrated by the British attempts to climb Everest in the early twentieth century and the German obsession with Nanga Parbat in the 1930s. In such instances, the attempted 'conquest' of a mountain was both practically and symbolically linked with a wider national purpose, an enactment of power not only over the mountain but also over the territory in which it was located. The relationship between imperialism and mountaineering literature has been the subject of a number of fascinating full-length studies (Bayer 2003; Ellis 2002). Here, however, it is perhaps worth drawing attention to how much of the most interesting mountain writing wrestles with the idea of an inherently colonial language of mountaineering and frequently seeks to reject or qualify it. One of the best-known examples of such an engagement with climbing's martial and imperial language comes from George Mallory, who would himself become central to three British attempts to summit Everest in 1921, 1922, and 1924 and who disappeared with his climbing partner Sandy Irvine during the final attempt. In an essay published in the _Alpine Journal_ in 1918, Mallory gave a much fuller explanation of his reasons for mountaineering than he did when he famously quipped that he wanted to climb Everest 'Because it's there.' In his earlier essay, Mallory writes:

How to get the best of it all? One must conquer, achieve, get to the top; one must know the end to be convinced that one can win the end – to know there's no dream that mustn't be dared. [. . .] Is this the summit, crowning the day? How cool and quiet! We're not exultant; but delighted, joyful; soberly astonished. [. . .] Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves. Have we gained success? That word means nothing here. Have we won a kingdom? No [. . .] and yes. We have achieved an ultimate satisfaction [. . .] fulfilled a destiny [. . .] To struggle and to understand – never this last without the other; such is the law.

(Mallory 2012: 60)

While Mallory invokes the language of conquest, he does so only to reject the idea that the climbing a mountain represents anything other than a victory over oneself.

Mallory's emphasis on the mountain as offering a symbolic challenge and playing a role in the climber's self-realization has become one of the dominant narratives of travel writing. Walter Bonatti, one of the twentieth century's greatest climbers, begins his memoir _The Mountains of_ _M_ _y Life_ by stating that 'Right from the start, the mountains were an ideal school for my development', adding 'Like many people, I had an inherent need to test myself and learn my own capabilities' (Bonatti 2010: xxi). For Bonatti, 'Climbing mountains should signify nothing more than this search for identity', with the life-threatening risks of extreme mountaineering producing 'a profound investigation into your own being' (ibid.: 430–1). This idea of the mountain environment as a place to test and develop character was a particular feature of British travel writing of the Victorian period. In the same era, mountaineering was particularly seen as a means of forging and proving manhood. At the conclusion of _Scrambles Amongst the Alps_ , Edward Whymper identifies what he sees as 'the more serious lessons of the mountaineer'. While Whymper recognizes the physical benefits of climbing and the aesthetic appeal of the mountain environment, he particularly appreciates mountaineering for its formation of masculinity, writing that 'we value more highly the development of manliness, and the evolution, under combat with difficulties, of those noble qualities of human nature – courage, patience, endurance, and fortitude' (Whymper 2002: 379). Here, the landscape of mountain travel provides the location for the development and testing of a heroic male identity; the mountaineer may be a conquistador of the useless, but he is a conquistador nevertheless. And this identity is one the reader can aspire to even if he is no climber himself, for the ascent narrative frequently takes on an allegorical quality, seen most famously in the final line of Herzog's _Annapurna_ : 'There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men' (1954: 287).

The inherently gendered nature of much mountain literature is consolidated by its feminization of the mountain landscape. In his account of making the first ascent of Nanda Devi in 1936, W.H. Tilman plays down the heroic nature of the ascent, writing dryly that when on the summit he and his climbing partner Noel Odell 'so far forgot ourselves as to shake hands on it', but he nevertheless represents their ascent as a masculine conquest of the feminine: 'After the first joy in victory came a feeling of sadness that the mountain has succumbed, that the proud head of the goddess was bowed' (Tilman 2003: 248). However, despite this gendered model of the climber's relationship with the mountain, it is also important to recognize that there is a strong tradition of women's mountain-travel writing, from Anne Radcliffe's 1795 account of her ascent of Skiddaw in 1794, through the letters of Lily Bristow, who climbed with A.F. Mummery in the 1890s (Mazel 1994), to Gwen Moffat's autobiography _Space Below My Feet_ (1961), and the various writers collected together in the anthology _Rocks and Roses: Mountaineering Essays by the World's Best Women Climbers of the Twentieth Century_ (2001). Moreover, works of mountain literature such as Nan Shepherd's _The Living Mountain_ offer an alternative model of the relationship between the writer and the mountain. Shepherd describes how she needed to overcome her early obsession with the Cairngorms' summits in order 'to discover the mountain in itself', adding: 'Everything became good to me, its contours, its colours, its waters and rock, flowers and birds. The process has taken many years, and it is not yet complete. Knowing another is endless' (Shepherd 2011: 108).

Inhabiting the high plateau rather than targeting the peaks, Shepherd evokes her relationship with the Cairngorms as a process of 'knowing another', rather than conquering the other: a profound testimony to the power of mountains and the possibilities of mountain-travel writing.

**Select bibliography**

Bayer, P.L. (2003) _Imperial Ascent: Mountaineering, Masculinity, and Empire_ , Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

Bonatti, W. (2010) _The Mountains of My Life_ , London: Penguin.

Burke, E. (1990) _A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of_ _O_ _ur Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful_ , Oxford: World's Classics.

Coxe, W. (1789) _Travels in Switzerland_ , 3 vols, London: T. Cadell.

Ellis, R. (2002) _Vertical Margins: Mountaineering and the Landscapes of Neo-Imperialism_ , Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Gribble, F. (1899) _The Early Mountaineers_ London: Fisher Unwin.

Hansen, P.H. (2013) _The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering After the Enlightenment_ , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Herzog, M. (1954) _Annapurna: The First Conquest of an 8,000 Metre Peak_ , Oxford: Allen Press.

Lunn, A. (1943) _Mountain Jubilee_ , London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.

Macfarlane, R. (2003) _Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination_ , London: Granta Books.

Mallory, G. (2012) _Climbing Everest: The Complete Writings of George Mallory,_ London: Gibson Square.

Matthiessen, P. (1989) _The Snow Leopard_ , 1998, London: Harvill.

Mazel, D. (1994) _Mountaineering Women: Stories by Early Climbers_ , College Station: TAMU Press.

Muir, J. (1903) _Our National Parks_ , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Murray, W.H. (1997) _Mountaineering in Scotland_ and _Undiscovered Scotland_ , London: Bâton Wicks.

Pratt. M.L. (2008) _Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation_ , 1992, Oxford: Routledge.

Nicolson, M.H. (1959) _Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite_ , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Rousseau, J.-J. (1761) _Julie, or, the New Héloïse_ , trans. W. Kenrick, London.

Ruskin, J. (1903–12) _The Works_ , 39 vols, ed. E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, London: George Allen.

Shelley, M. and Shelley, P.B. (1817) _History of a Six Weeks' Tour_ , London: T. Hookham.

Shepherd, N. (2011) _The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland,_ Edinburgh: Canongate.

Stephen, L. (1946) _The Playground of Europe_ , Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Terray, L. (2001) _Conquistadors of the Useless: From the Alps to Annapurna_ , London: Bâton Wicks.

Thorpe, C.D. (1935) 'Two Augustans Crossing the Alps', _Studies in Philology_ , 32: 463–82.

Thubron, C. (2012) _To a Mountain in Tibet_ , London: Vintage Books.

Tilman, W.H. (2003) _The Seven Mountain-Travel Books_ , London: Bâton Wicks.

Vause, M. (2001) _Rocks and Roses: Mountaineering Essays by the World's Best Women Climbers of the Twentieth Century_ , La Crescenta: Mountain N' Air Books.

West, T. (1778) _A Guide to the Lakes_ , London: Richardson and Urquhart.

Whymper, E. (2002) _Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860–1869_ , Washington DC: National Geographic Adventure Classics.

The Sea

_Steve Mentz_

Two fundamental features of the sea dominate its role in narratives of human travel. First, and most importantly, the sea is a physical environment in which human bodies cannot live. Humans share mammalian ancestry with some aquatic creatures, but we are land animals that cannot endure long immersion. The struggle, tension, and drama of sea travel narratives emerge in response to the basic inability of our bodies to survive the watery element. The second fundamental feature, which works in tension with the first, is the sea's unmatched efficiency for transportation. Buoyancy partly deflects gravity, and the relative lack of friction in the water has for millennia made travel by sea faster, cheaper, and more practical for large loads than land travel. Even today, when air travel has overtaken the transportation of (wealthy) human bodies around our watery globe, container ships still transport the vast majority of mercantile cargo. These two features – the sea as unlivable environment, and the sea as matchless medium for transportation – colour the long and eventful history of sea travel narratives. The most memorable and influential sea stories combine the salt tang of an alien space with the fluid rush of speed. Bringing buoyancy, friction, and mortal threat together writes sea travel as a natural melodrama, with a meta-narrative structure that shows human bodies and technologies straining against mortal limits. An essential feature of human narrative culture since Homer, narratives of sea travel underwrite the place of human bodies on the ocean's global scale.

There are two basic narrative templates for sea voyages: the voyage home and the voyage out. The return voyage, interestingly, has the more ancient pedigree, with Odysseus's long-suffering navigation back to Ithaca in Homer's _Odyssey_ ( _c_. 600 BCE) being both the oldest and most influential sea story in Western literary culture. The voyage out, by contrast, became the dominant seagoing narrative only near the end of the fifteenth century, after the early modern period's discovery of new transoceanic sea-routes heading both East to the Indian and Pacific Oceans and West to the Americas. European sailors would embark across the Atlantic or into the Indian Ocean, and sometimes not return. Colonial settlements such as Boston, New York, Sydney, and Goa testify to the one-way outward bound trajectory of many early modern sea voyages. The classical worldview of Homer required his hero to return to his Greek island home, but the imperialist and expansive view of the early modern period imagined new homes across the sea. Voyages out and back were of course possible in both periods – colonial settlement is very much a feature of antiquity – but the distinction between a global ocean structured as an open opportunity, as Europeans after the fifteenth century saw the New Worlds both East and West, and the more closed structure of classical and Mediterranean cultures during earlier historical periods remains important. Sea travel in antiquity, like space travel today, entailed at least an imaginary leap into unknown realms, and in that context the return home remained essential.

This chapter addresses five major elements of the Western history of sea voyages. While I range from Odysseus to Joseph Conrad in literary context, and from Pytheas of Massalia to William Falconer in historical terms, I do not attempt anything like a comprehensive literary or historical summary. I draw on Robert Foulke's excellent chronology of sea voyage narratives (Foulke 2002: xxi–xxv), but roam freely across a vast ocean of historical, literary, and theoretical texts. My hope is to showcase a series of historical and narrative structures that connect these tales of salt-water adventure with larger literary and cultural histories.

Reclaiming our historic and cultural connections to the sea seems especially urgent in the early twenty-first century. Our economic dependence on the sea remains, but sea travel has been displaced by air and space travel in our cultural imagination. As I have written previously (Mentz 2009), we need to recover a full understanding of the ocean in order to make sense of today's global, postcolonial, and environmental challenges. Sea travel today is not the only way to move oneself between London, New York, Singapore, and Perth, as it was for centuries, but the rhythms, language, dangers, and discomforts of this long-haul voyage have etched themselves into Western cultural history. This chapter provides templates for recovering the place of the sea in global voyaging, and suggests ways of engaging the vast archive of maritime historical and literary sources.

**Odysseus on the God-sea**

Before the beginning, some say, was Ocean. Many ancient creation stories, including the Judeo-Christian narrative, involve the triumph of a masculine God of Earth over feminine and formless Ocean, or Chaos. In this mythic _Chaoskampf_ , the Ocean represents formless pre-matter, a rival and challenge that would be defeated by rising monotheistic religions (Connery 2006). In Catherine Keller's formulation, the Christian account of creation _ex nihilo_ , which became part of the orthodox theological account by the third century BCE, obscures an even older account of creation _ex profundis_ , out of the depths. What Keller calls a 'tehomic theology', from the Hebrew word _tehom_ , or sea, attempts to recover the primeval meaning and presence of the sea from beneath its monotheist suppression (Keller 2003: xvii, 201). According to this view, historical and cultural scholarship can help us recover the feminine world Ocean and its deep presence in our cultural imagination. To sail these waters means returning to the classical age, and taking ship with Odysseus.

As a model for classical-era sea travel, Odysseus's storm-filled voyage juxtaposes admiration for the hero's craft with antiquity's fundamental fear of the ocean. The hero's twelve-year journey home, which for most modern readers is the core of _The Odyssey_ , represents for Homer a punishment for the blinding of Poseidon's son. Odysseus the sailor does not take to the high seas out of wanderlust or to cure his melancholy; he sails out of pain and error. His first appearance in Homer's epic finds him stranded on Calypso's island in tears: 'Off he sat on a headland, weeping there as always, / gazing out over the barren sea through blinding tears' (Homer 1996: 155). While his technical skill with sailing ships, weapons, and language makes Odysseus an ideal type of maritime hero, his poem calls the sea 'barren'. Like his compatriot Hesiod, Homer seems to have believed that the best human lives avoided the ocean. While Homer's epic may not go to the apocalyptic lengths of the Book of Revelations, which asserts that in its vision of 'a new heaven and a new earth [. . .] / there was no more sea' (Rev. 21:1), Homer's poem nonetheless treats sea travel as a labour of toil and misery. Odysseus's maritime skills are necessary to his survival under a divine curse, but they are not sources of pleasure.

If the sea is not a site of pleasure or aesthetic beauty, it does remain for Homer and the premodern age a fundamentally supernatural place. The ocean swims with gods and other divine beings. '[S]torm-tossed great Odysseus' (Homer 1966: 168) escapes the God-sea, but not before he glimpses its divine power. To navigate the ocean represents an act of hubris that should be shunned by wise men, as poets advise from Hesiod to Horace. The sea must be avoided because it is too divine for human trespassing. Perhaps the clearest poetic invocation of the divinity of the great waters appears in the Biblical Psalms. Psalm 107 describes the special intimacy of mariners and the Lord:

They that go down to the sea in ships,
That do business in great waters:
These see the works of the Lord,
And his wonders in the deep.

(Psalms 107:23–24)

The emphasis here on 'business' and 'works' suggests that ancient cultures were aware of the economic importance of shipping. Figures such as Odysseus, Jonah, Noah, and Sinbad the Sailor all frame the sea as a place for more-than-human power and struggle. The expansion of maritime trading networks by the Phoenicians, Romans, and their heirs would supplement divine waters with economic and political concerns.

**Voyaging out**

The name Mediterranean locates the primary waters of Western antiquity inside a terrestrial circle. The Romans called this sea _mare nostrum_ , 'our sea', to emphasize their control of its four corners. Starting with Anaximander of Miletus, the so-called 'father of geography', the waters beyond the Mediterranean were known as _te apeiron_ , the unknown or unknowable (see Olson 2007: 25–30). This undifferentiated no-place parallels the Chaos against which monotheist gods struggled, and also the _tehom_ , which Catherine Keller's theology recovers. As sailors ventured out into to this vast emptiness, it acquired the name _Okeanos_ , or Ocean River. Ancient cartographers imagined that these waters encircled the world. Voyages into the unknown are an important subset of sea voyages in Western culture, particularly during the Age of Exploration when European peoples explored the farthest reaches of the watery globe. The earliest known voyage out of the enclosed Mediterranean was undertaken by the semi-mythical figure of Pytheas the Messalian. This ancient navigator, who probably lived in what is now Marseilles, sailed northwest into the Atlantic sometime around 320 BCE and is supposed to have discovered Ultima Thule (probably Iceland?) and established the location of the celestial pole (Olson 2007: 26). Pytheas's major work, _On the Ocean_ , is lost, though parts of it survive in quotations from other ancient writers. Enough material can be gathered to demonstrate that Pytheas's voyage into the North Atlantic added substantially to the geographic knowledge of his age. Sailing beyond the Pillars of Hercules would remain through the Renaissance a symbol for venturing out into the unknown; Francis Bacon used the image of the Pillars on the cover of his declaration of a new scientific method, the _Novum Organum_ (1620). Ocean voyaging would remain a potent symbol of world-expansion and discovery well into the nineteenth century.

As European sailors ventured into deep waters after Pytheas, the hubris against which classical authors had cautioned transformed itself into the need to assume risks by travelling by sea. Sea travel became an imperative, not an error. Early modern expansion put Europeans in direct physical contact with more disparate parts of the oceans than ever before. Massively distant geographic features became household names, especially – but not only – among families with naval or mercantile connections. Cape Horn, the Azores, St Helena, Australia: these exotic places acquired meaning and resonance even for people who never left the British isles or North American mainland. The lure of blue water adventure, which seemed so alien to maritime sufferers in the era of Odysseus, came to infiltrate public consciousness and substantially influence popular cultural forms. As Margaret Cohen has shown (2012), sea travel became a staple of popular fiction wherever European readers and printing presses were found.

The voyage of Bartholomeu Dias sheds light on the changes in navigational practices that accompanied the turn to the deep oceans. In 1488, Dias became the first European to sail around the Horn of Africa. His voyage, perhaps even more clearly than the more famous trips of Columbus and Vasco de Gama, represents European culture's direct encounter with the deep sea. The key navigational decision, arguably the definitive maritime innovation during the entire period of early modern navigation, was the so-called _volta do mar_ , or 'turn to the sea'. Knowing that Portuguese ships heading down the African coast had been pushed too close to shore by westerly breezes as they neared the Tropic of Capricorn, Dias sailed west out into the open Atlantic before turning east to round the Cape of Good Hope. (Pedro Cabral was following this route when he reached Brazil in 1500.) Some accounts suggest that Dias discovered the practical value of the westerly turn by accident, after being driven out to sea, but it seems more probable that he anticipated the value of gaining sea room before rounding the Cape. As J.H. Parry emphasizes (1974: 139–145), the decision to head into the deep ocean served to distinguish voyages to the African coast, where the Portuguese had maintained a fort and slave trade since 1478, from the India voyages that would dominate Portugal's maritime expansion in the sixteenth century. The _volta do mar_ distinguishes Atlantic voyages to the coast of Africa from transoceanic ones into the Indian Ocean. This manoeuvre shows, on a geo-symbolic level, that the future of European expansion involved a turn toward sea and away from land. In a navigational decision that broadly coincides with the much-discussed turn into 'modernity' around 1500, Dias's ships chose the ocean as their route into the future.

**Putting girdles round about globes after Magellan**

The spherical nature of the Earth has been a matter of academic knowledge since the earliest astronomical efforts of the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Greeks. Experiential knowledge of the globe's roundness, however, had to wait until one ship out of Ferdinand Magellan's fleet of five limped back to Spain without its admiral in 1522. The relatively quick succession of circumnavigations that followed, with two Englishmen, Francis Drake in 1577 and Thomas Cavendish in 1588, joining the ranks in the sixteenth century, testified to the increasingly known status of the global ocean. As Joyce Chaplin has recently argued, however, the vastness of the Pacific, in particular, was downplayed in the years following the return of Magellan's last ship (Chaplin 2012: 37). Knowledge of the circumnavigability of the watery globe for some time eclipsed practical experience of the oceans, as generations of sailors who suffered from scurvy on transpacific voyages would testify. The telling mismatch between Magellan's fame as the 'first circumnavigator' (which in fact he did not live to be) and his isolated death in the Philippines serves as a rough portent of the difficulties of global navigation in the early Age of Sail.

Circumnavigation and its legends inform the massive surge in sea adventure fictions in the later part of the early modern period. Sea adventure novels thrived as European sailors circled the globe, with anglophone works such as Daniel Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_ (1719), James Fenimore Cooper's _The Pilot_ (1824), and Herman Melville's _Moby-Dick_ (1851) highlighting a long list. These popular fictions communicated facts about the global ocean for armchair readers at home. The details and metaphors of sea travel became recognizable features of popular culture. The symbolic language and geography of the oceans became widely understood. No single geographic location exerted more fascination on readers of sea travel adventures than the forbidding and stormy waters off Cape Horn. The definitive account of this region, noted as such by Herman Melville himself, came in Richard Henry Dana's celebrated memoir, _Two Years Before the Mast_ (1840). Melville, writing in _White-Jacket_ (1850), interrupted his own narrative to advertise Dana's account of rounding the Cape:

But if you want the best idea of Cape Horn, get my friend Dana's unmatchable 'Two Years Before the Mast'. But you can read, and so you must have read it. His chapters describing Cape Horn must have been written with an icicle.

(Melville 2006: 452)

Dana, a Harvard drop-out and first-time voyager, did not circumnavigate the globe, but instead sailed from Boston to California and back, rounding Cape Horn both times. His immensely popular narrative, which influenced generations of writers and sailors, describes an encounter between human bodies and the global ocean in terms that brought the far-away home and epitomized the drama of sailors on the high seas. His popularization of sea adventure would influence generations of writers and readers, including Melville.

Successful voyages like Dana's represent one popular pole of sea travel in nineteenth-century narratives, but at least as popular were tales of disaster and shipwreck. Drawing on ancient narrative templates from Homer and Virgil, these stories of disaster came to be among the most popular elements of maritime culture. As Carl Thompson has described, the growth of maritime employment and widespread interest in sea travel made people 'simultaneously appalled and fascinated by maritime disasters' (2007: 7; see also Thompson 2013). Tragic tales, such as Melville's _Moby-Dick_ , sat alongside triumphant homecomings such as Dana's. Sea travel narratives sat uneasily poised between success and disaster.

The twin models of triumphant exploration and catastrophic shipwreck continue to structure contemporary maritime narratives. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century versions of the sea voyage narrative toggle between distinct structures. Some fictions use sea adventure to represent the struggle of a heroic individual against a hostile and alien cosmos. This structure, which develops out of the Romantic narrative patterns developed in works such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's _Rime of the Ancient Mariner_ (1798), is perhaps best represented recently by Yann Martel's novel _Life of Pi_ (2001), in which an orphan boy shares a life-raft with a Bengal tiger for 227 days in the Pacific. The adventure of the sole survivor allegorizes the plight of the solitary soul in an alien environment, and Martel's novel unfolds a radical individualist approach to surviving shipwreck. Not all sailors, however, are as isolated as Martel's orphan boy, and a second major strand of maritime narrative takes the shipboard community as a model of human social solidarity under stress. Maritime stories of social cohesion or its failure ultimately draw on the 'ship of state' metaphor that has roots in Sophocles's _Antigone_ and received its canonical literary form in Horace's 'O navis' ode (1.14). Modern works in this mode include Gunter Grass's controversial novel _Crabwalk_ (2003), about the sinking of a German passenger liner during the waning months of the Second World War, and Nathaniel Philbrick's _Mayflower_ (2006), which reconsiders one of America's founding maritime myths. Both the individualist and communalist models find literary ancestry in _Moby-Dick_ , with the narrator Ishmael representing a solitary survivor and his captain Ahab, by contrast, embodying the fiery will to consolidate the ship into one common unity. As sea voyage narratives continue to find audiences and engage readers throughout the world, they provide a resonant vehicle for writers to explore the relationship between Romantic fictions of threatened autonomy and political dreams of communal unity.

**Learning the ropes with Ishmael and John Smith**

Dana's passage around Cape Horn highlighted his transformation from ordinary sailor into maritime hero through learning how to perform, and also describe, technical maritime labour. For his narrative, and for the broader cultural meanings of sea travel, the use of technical 'sea terms' served to authenticate the story and the sailor. 'Learning the ropes', which means literally being able to identify the names of the myriad of lines and braces that were used to operate sailing ships, was both a novice mariner's task and a cultural ambition of sea travel literature. In Dana's case, the crucial technical task of his voyage around the Horn, described in painstaking detail, was furling a frozen mainsail with a decimated watch,

so reduced by sickness [. . .] that, with one man at the wheel, we had only the third mate and three besides myself to go aloft; so that at most we could only attempt to furl one yard-arm at a time.

(Dana 1914: 428)

Furling a sail during a storm involves balancing on foot-ropes high above a swaying deck, using both hands to fold or roll the sail up onto the horizontal yard where it could be lashed down. Always a difficult job in high winds, the brutal conditions off the Horn made this task nearly impossible:

the yard over which we lay was cased with ice, the gaskets and rope of the foot and leech of the sail as stiff and hard as a piece of leather hose, and the sail itself about as pliable as though it had been made of sheets of sheathing copper.

(Ibid.: 428)

Performing this task demonstrates the sailors' maritime valour, which Dana describes with an old hand's understatement: 'We had need of every finger God had given us' (ibid.: 428). To work at sea under these conditions proves the Harvard undergraduate to have become a true salt. The technique and technical language he has learned parallel his book's efforts to make sea travel legible to a wide audience.

The practice that Dana and his short-handed watch display during the gale is the skilled labour that Margaret Cohen calls 'craft', a term she borrows from Joseph Conrad (Cohen 2012: 15–58; and see Mentz 2015). Readers of maritime travel narratives learned about craft through the proliferation of technical sea terms in descriptive prose; Dana's short excerpt contains terms such as 'furl', 'yard', 'leech', and 'gasket', all of which have specific meanings on board a sailing ship. As English-language sea travel narratives grew increasingly popular, the semi-opaque language of sailors became central to its appeal. Herman Melville's pedantic ex-school-teacher narrator Ishmael, for example, populates his whaling epic with long discourses about technical aspects of whaling. Chapters on 'Cetology', 'Cutting In', and 'The Try Works', among many others, have long frustrated readers who go to _Moby-Dick_ solely for the adventure story. Melville's point in presenting his narrator as a pedant includes sly joking emphasis on the secret languages of maritime labour and their popularity in tales of sea travel.

The long history of narratives that include technical maritime language runs parallel to a history of maritime dictionaries. Perhaps the greatest of these compilations, William Falconer's _Universal Marine Dictionary_ , published in London in 1769, remains a valuable reference today. The first printed examples of English-language marine dictionaries appeared in the early seventeenth century, in an intricate tangle that reveals the emerging tension between the literary culture that was growing around marine travel and exploration and the technical discourse of professional sailors. The first published dictionary of sea terms in English was John Smith's _Sea-mans Grammar_ , which first appeared in 1626.1 Smith, of Virginia Company and Pocahontas fame, was not himself a sailor – his rank of Captain was earned in land service – but he was well known as a propagandist. The circuitous history of his book, however, shows the sometimes uncomfortable relationship between technical maritime expertise and popularity. Smith, not really a sailor, plagiarized most of his dictionary from the manuscript of Sir Henry Mainwaring, a mariner and pirate whose _Seamans Dictionary_ was written in the early decades of the seventeenth century, but not published until 1644 (see Barbour 1972). A practical sailor with an adventurous life, Mainwaring represents the true mariner that Smith was not (see Harris 2008). Mainwaring's maritime dictionary, the first written but second published in English, shows the halting and inexact relationship between nautical expertise and the English literature of sea travel.

The tension between Mainwaring's expertise at sea and Smith's greater currency as a writer speak to a compelling split between writing and sailing that characterizes much of sea travel literature. Some writers, such as Dana and Melville, purported to write from personal expertise, though each man relied on one novice's voyage. The project of sea voyage literature entails translating the specialized knowledge and practices of sea life into terms comprehensible for landed readers, and for that project it was necessary not to be a 'real salt', like Mainwaring, but only to be able to write like one, as did Melville and Dana. As the Age of Sail waned, sea travel oscillated between practical profession and nostalgic vision.

Recent writing about the maritime world has given rise to new studies of maritime labour and labour conditions in the industrial age, often as ways to make sense of the human side of contemporary globalization. A leading figure in this discourse is the photographer and cultural critic Allan Sekula, whose book _Fish Story_ (1995) mixes photography with essays in cultural criticism to analyse the post-industrial waterfront as a leading edge of contemporary capitalism. His recent film _The Forgotten Space_ (2010), which he co-made with Noël Burch, expands on the same watery territories, with attention to waterfront economies in China, the Netherlands, and southern California. Other recent works, including Horatio Clare's _Down to the Sea in Ships_ (2014) and Rose George's _Ninety Percent of Everything_ (2013), have continued to explore the underside of the global shipping industry. Marc Levinson's _The Box_ (2006), which describes the development and standardization of the modern shipping container, provides essential context for this enterprise. As the ocean recedes from the personal view of many knowledge workers – because we now cross the oceans by plane – these works provide crucial reminders that international trade and capitalism, as Hegel famously noted in the nineteenth century, still float upon the world Ocean.2

**From sail to steam with Joseph Conrad**

The development of steam and, subsequently, diesel engines after the turn of the nineteenth century generated a long-lived nostalgia in sea voyage narratives for the aesthetics and drama of the Age of Sail. No writer expresses this nostalgia with more tragic urgency than Joseph Conrad. A Polish mariner who learned English in his twenties, Conrad's depictions of life at sea span the sail–steam divide, but his heart clearly soars with canvas on tall masts. His autobiographical essays, collected in _The Mirror of the Sea_ (1906), capture his love of working ships and his sense of what was lost with the passing of the Age of Sail.

Conrad's deeply personal _Mirror_ serves historically as a farewell to maritime travel narratives of the Age of Sail. Long before the memoir appeared, Conrad had begun his literary career in an era when England was generally assumed to be a place 'where men and the sea interpenetrate, so to speak – the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning' (Conrad 1995: 9). By the time he published _The Mirror of the Sea_ , by contrast, Conrad recognized the sailing ship as a bare trace of a lost historical past. Conrad's nostalgia for sail expresses itself as a distaste, though not a dismissal, of the labours of steamship captains:

The taking of a modern steamship about the world (though one would not minimize its responsibilities) has not the same quality of intimacy with nature, which, after all, is an indispensable condition to the building up of an art [. . .] It is, in short, less a matter of love.

(Conrad 1988: 26)

Saying farewell to that love and technical craft subtends Conrad's tragic artistry, in the _Mirror_ and his novels alike.

Conrad's Marlow, the narrator of 'Youth' (1902), _Heart of Darkness_ (1902), _Lord Jim_ (1900), and other works, represents a final hero for sea travel narratives in the Age of Sail, although in some cases, including _Heart of Darkness_ , Marlow sailed on steamships. For Conrad, though, Marlow represents the human legacy of the culture of sail. Marlow famously describes the hero Jim in the novel _Lord Jim_ , though disgraced by his abandoning of his passengers aboard the steamship _Patna_ , as 'one of us'; Conrad so names him in his 'Author's Note' and Marlow repeats the epithet in the text (Conrad 1989: 44, 74). For Marlow, and perhaps for Conrad also, no social ties were firmer than 'the bond of the sea' (Conrad 1995: 9). The ghostly narrator, who appears on the margins of Conrad's fiction, represents the author's sense of a fully maritime life, lived during the end of an era. Marlow models a maritime figure that recognizes the losses and disruptions of the new age.

The arrival of steam and later diesel engines changed but did not eliminate the romance of sea travel. A very popular subset of modern sea travel novels remains firmly wedded to the maritime adventure plots of the Age of Sail, and particularly to the physical conditions of Nelson's Royal Navy. The greatest of these adventure tales comprises the twenty-volume saga of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels (1969–1999), though O'Brian builds on the popularity of C.S. Forester's Hornblower series, among others. Joshua Slocum's _Sailing Alone Around the World_ (1900) gave rise to a still-thriving tradition of yachting memoirs. This adventure-driven genre also includes more thoughtful and scholarly works by modern sailors, such as Jonathan Raban, whose engaging first-person memoir of his voyage up the northern Pacific coast of North America reflects on the historical accounts produced by earlier sailors such as George Vancouver, whose expedition of 1791–1795 shadows Raban's late-twentieth-century voyage (Raban 1999). A semi-parodic subset of contemporary sea travel narratives describes the misadventures of a modern sailor's journeys, of which Redmond O'Hanlon's comic venture **s** into the rough waters of the North Atlantic are a clear example (O'Hanlon 2005). The continuing popularity of sea travel, despite its less prominent place in the contemporary social world, speaks to the enduring power of its cultural legacy.

**Conclusion: into the sea of air**

The fate of sea travel narratives after the Wright brothers and the Apollo lunar voyage remains uncertain. Sailing remains a popular recreation, and the success of modern novelists from Forester to O'Brian suggests no lack of interest in nostalgic tales about the heroic Age of Sail, particularly in England. But the question remains, have the innovations of air and space travel radically changed the romance once associated with the sea? Or does the sea remain somehow distinct, in its global ubiquity?

Rather than offer a prediction or attempt a catalogue of modern sea stories, I close by proffering a very brief representative figure: Captain James T. Kirk of the _Starship Enterprise_. In many ways, Kirk appears indistinguishable from an exploring captain of the Age of Sail: his mission to 'explore', his structured authority on board his ship, and his eroticized charisma all emerge from the template of the sea-captain. The terminology of the starship, its 'bridge' and 'engine room', duplicate the structures of early twentieth-century naval ships, as does the language of navigation during episodes of _Star Trek_. My point is not really that Kirk's space travellers appear to be reconfigured forms of sea travel, though I do believe that largely to be true, but that the narrative template of the sea voyage remains alive and well in the new media technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Sea travel no longer sits at the centre of our culture of travel, but its forms sometimes are closer to the surface than we might think.

**Notes**

1 The earliest edition of Smith's dictionary was titled _An Accidence or the pathway to experience_ , 1626; subsequent revised editions used the more popular _Seamans Grammar_.

2 In his _Philosophy of Right_ (1821), Hegel noted that the sea was 'the natural element for industry'. On this statement and maritime culture, see Cohen 2010: 1–14.

**Select bibliography**

Barbour, P.L. (1972) 'Captain John Smith's Sea Grammar and Its Debt to Sir Henry Mainwaring's Seamans Dictionary', _The Mariner's Mirror_ 58(1): 93–101.

Chaplin, J. (2012) _Round About the Earth: Circumnavigations from Magellan to Orbit_ , New York: Simon and Schuster.

Clare, H. (2014) _Down to the Sea in Ships_ , London: Chatto and Windus.

Cohen, M. (2010) _The Novel and the Sea_ , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Connery, C. (2006) ' _There was No More Sea_ : The Supersession of the Ocean, from the Bible to Cyberspace', _Journal of Historical Geography_ 32: 494–511.

Conrad, J. (1988) _The Mirror of the Sea_ , Marlboro, IL: Marlboro Press.

Conrad, J. (1989) _Lord Jim_ , New York: Penguin.

Conrad, J. (1995) _Youth; Heart of Darkness; The End of the Tether_ , New York: Penguin.

Dana, R.H. (1914) _Two Years Before the Mast_ , London: Dent.

Foulke, R. (2002) _The Sea Voyage Narrative_ , London: Routledge.

George, R. (2013) _Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate_ , New York: Metropolitan Books.

Grass, G. (2003) _Crabwalk_ , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Harris, G.G. (2008) 'Mainwaring, Sir Henry(1586/7–1653)', _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online. Available at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/38733 (accessed22 May 2014).

Homer (1966) _The Odyssey_ , trans. Robert Fagles, New York: Penguin.

Keller, C. (2003) _Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming_ , London: Routledge.

Levinson, M. (2006) _The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger_ , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Martell, Y. (2003) _Life of Pi_ , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Melville, H. (2006) _Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick_ , New York: Library of America.

Mentz, S. (2009) _At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean_ , London and New York: Continuum.

Mentz, S. (2015) _Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719_ , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

O'Hanlon, R. (2005) _Trawler: A Journey Through the North Atlantic_ , New York: Knopf.

Olson, G. (2007) _Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason_ , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Parry, J.H. (1974) _The Discovery of the Sea: An Illustrated History of Men, Ships, and the Sea in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries_ , New York: Dial Press.

Philbrick, N. (2006) _Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War_ , New York: Viking.

Raban, J. (1999) _Passage to Juneau: A Sea and_ _I_ _ts Meanings_ , New York: Pantheon.

Sekula, A. (1995) _Fish Story_ , Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag.

Sekula, A. and Burch, N. (2010) 'The Forgotten Space', Brooklyn: Icarus Films.

Slocum, J. (1900) _Sailing Alone Around the World_ , New York: Century Company.

Thompson, C. (ed.) (2007) _Romantic-Era Shipwreck Narratives: An Anthology_ , Nottingham: Trent Editions.

Thompson, C. (ed.) (2013) _Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day_ , New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
INDEX

_Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars_ ,

accelerated sublime

acceleration –

_An Account of Denmark_

_Accounts of Several Curious Voyages_

Achebe, Chinua

Achilles Tatius

Ackerley, J.R. –

Ackermann, Jessie

Acosta, José de

_Across Asia on the Cheap_

Acuna, Christoval de ,

Adamnan, Bishop

Addison, Joseph ,

Adiche, Chimamanda Ngozi –

adrenaline aesthetics

_The Advancement of Learning_

_Aeneid_ , –

Aesthetics of Diversity

Afghanistan –, –

_Afghanistan_

African American travel writing –, , ,

African Association

_An African in Greenland_ ,

_An African in Paris_

African travel writing , –

invisible travellers –,

Afropolitan

AIDS

Aitken, Bill

_Ajax_

Akali, Kamla

al-Zayani, A.

_Alexander Romance_

_All the Roads are Open_

Allan, David

_Almost Sleeping My Way to Timbuktu_

_Along the Way_

amateur travel reviews –

ambassadorial activity , , , , , ,

_Ambiguous Adventure_

_America, Their America_ ,

American Beat Generation –, , ,

_The American Buccaneers_ –

American epistemologies

_The American Journey_

_American Notebooks_

_American Notes_

_Americanah_ –

Amicus, Edmondo de

Ammon, Richard

_Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya_

_Among the Russians_

Amundsen, Roald

_An Area of Darkness_ ,

_Anabasis_ ,

Anand, Mulk Raj

ancient Egypt, travel writing in

ancient Greece, travel writing in –

ancient Mediterranean, travel writing in –

ancient Rome, travel writing in –

Andersen, Hans Christian –,

Anderson, Rudolph

_An Angkor Pilgrim_

Anson, George

Antarctic _see_ Polar regions

_Anthology of New Black and Malagasy Poetry_

anthropology, fabrication in –

anti-colonial critique, travel writing as –

anti-conquest , ,

anti-tourism ,

anti-travel writing –

Antonius, George

Apian, Peter

Apollonius of Rhodes

Applebaum, Anne ,

Apuleius

_The Arab Awakening_

_Arabia Through the Looking Glass_

_The Arabian Nights_

_Arabian Nights_ tropes –

_Arabian Sands_ , , –

Arabic travel writing

1798–1916 –

beginnings to 1798 –

defeat, discovery and awakening –

period of self-assurance –

to 1916 –

Arago, François

Arctic _see_ Polar regions

_Arctic Dreams_ ,

_Arctic Explorations_

_Are You Two...Together? A Gay and Lesbian Guide to Europe_

Aristophanes

Armitage, Simon

Armstrong, Hamilton Fish

Armstrong, Neil

_Around the World in Eighty Days_ ,

Arrian –

ars apodemica , ,

_The Art of Travel_

Ascham, Roger

Ashcroft, Bill

assemblage

_The Atlantic Sound_

_Atlantic Sound_

attentive walking

Atterbom, Per Daniel

_The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s_

Auden, W.H. , , , , –

Audouard, Olympe , , –

Augustine

Auldjo, John ,

Austen, Jane

Australian Society of Travel Writers

autobiographical writing –, –, , , ,

_Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man_

_The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah_

autobiography term

autoethnography

_Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, a Timeless Voyage from Paris to Marseilles_

autopsia , ,

Ayton, Richard –

Aziz, Barbara Nimri

Babur, Zahiruddin Mohammad ,

Back, George

Bacon, Francis , , , , , ,

Badone, Ellen

_Baedeker_ guides

Baggesen, Jens ,

Bainbridge, Beryl

Bakhtin, M.

Balmat, Jacques

Banham, Reyner

Bar-Yosef, Eitan

Barents, William

Barnes, Djuna

Barr, Pat

Barrett, Charles

Barrington, Daines

Barrow, John , –, ,

Barthes, Roland , ,

Bassnet, Susan

battlefield tourism

Baudrillard, Jean , ,

_Beagle_ voyage , ,

Bean, C.E.W.

Beat writers _see_ American Beat Generation

_The Beaten Track_

Beauvoir, Simone de , , , ,

Beavis, Sarah

Beckford, William , , ,

Bedford, Sybille –

Beebe, Kathryne

Begum, Gulbadan

Behar, Ruth

Behdad, Ali –,

Behn, Aphra

Bei Yuanchen

_Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution_

belatedness mood

Bell, Claudia

Bell, Gertrude , , , ,

Bellow, Saul

Belzoni, Giovanni Battista

Benjamin, Walter

Benson, Ross –

Benterrak, Krim

Berchtold, Count Leopold

Berger, John ,

Bernier, Francois

Berry, Mary Elizabeth

Best, George

Bhahba, Homi –

_Bhartavarsa_

_Bhishm Parva_

_Bhuparikrama_

big game hunting –

_Big Trips: More Good Travel Writing_ –

Bird, Isabella , , , , , –, , ,

Birkett, Dea ,

Birtles, Francis

_Black Bazaar_

_Black Lamb and Grey Falcon_

Blanton, Casey xvi

Bledsoe, Lucy –

blogs –

Australia

Blond Eskimos

Blunt, Lady Anne ,

Boccaccio, Giovanni

body, and travel , –, –

Boehmer, Elleke ,

Bohls, Elizabeth

Bon, François

Bonatti, Walter

Bonnin, Margriet

Bonpland, Aimé , ,

Bonsel, Waldemar

Bontekoe, William

_Book of Marvels and Travels_ ,

book reviews

_Book of Travels_

_Book of the Tughluqs_

_The Bookseller of Kabul_ ,

border crossing –

Borgomano, Madeleine

Börne, Ludwig

Botton, Alain de ,

Bougainville, Louis Antoine de ,

Bouguer, Pierre

Bouras, Gillian

Bourdieu, Pierre

Bourlès, Jean-Claude

Bouvier, Nicolas , , , , –,

Bowes, Gemma

Bowman, W.E.

Boyle, Robert ,

Bozic, Magda

Bracewell, Wendy , ,

Bradford, William ,

Brandt, Pamela Robin

Brasca, Santo –

Brewster, Anne

Brewster, David –

_Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies_

_A Briefe and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia_

Brinkmann, Rolf Dieter , –, , –

Bristol Library Society

_Britannia_

_British Critic_

Brodsky, Joseph

Brody, Hugh ,

Brown, William Wells

Bruce, James ,

Brutti, Lorenzo ,

Bryan, Gregory

Bryce, James

Brygg, Thomas

Bryson, Bill , , , , –, ,

buccaneering –, ,

Buffon, Comte de

Bunn, David

Bunyan, John

Burchell, William , –,

Burke, Edmund

Burke, Peter ,

_Burmese Days_

Burroughs, Edgar Rice

Burroughs, William ,

Burton, Richard , , , –,

Busbecq, Ogier Ghislain de

bushcraft

Butcher, Tim

Butler, Judith

_Butter Chicken in Ludhiana_

Buzard, James xvi, , , , ,

Byler, Darren

Byron, Lord , ,

Byron, Robert , , ,

Calderón de la Barca, Frances , ,

_Callirhoe_

_Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing_ xvi

Camden, William

_Camera Lucida_

Cameron, Verney

Camino de Santiago

Camoes, Luis Vaz de ,

cannibalism , , ,

Canning, George –

_Canterbury Tales_

Caparrós, Martín

_Cape Cod_

capitalism, and travel

capitalist vanguard

Capodilista, Gabriele

captivity narratives , , , ,

Caputo, Philip , , ,

Carey, William

Caron, François

Carpenter, Edward

_The Carpet Wars_ ,

Carr, Helen

Carruthers, Mary

Carvalho Chipenda, Eva de

Casas, Bartolomé de las

_Casement Report_

Casement, Roger ,

Cassady, Neal

Castaneda, Carlos –

Castle, Terry

Catherwood, Frederick

Cavaliero, Roderick

Cavendish, Thomas

Cecil, Sir Robert

Çelebi, Evliya , –

celebrity travellers ,

Celtic fringe

Cendrars, Blaise –

Certeau, Michel de , ,

Césaire, Aimé , –

Chamisso, Adelbert von

Chaplin, Joyce

_Characteristicks_

Chard, Chloe –, –

Chariton

Chateaubriand

Chatwin, Bruce , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , , , ,

Chaucer, Geoffrey ,

Cherry-Garrard, Apsley

Chevalier, Michel

_Childe Harold_ ,

China travel –, –

17/18th century –

19th century –

20th century –

chinoiserie

Christian Arabs

Christian ethology

Christian pilgrimage –, –

Christian travel , , ,

_see also_ pilgrimage

_Chronicles of Tripura_

Churchill, John ,

cisgender

_The City Where No One Dies_

civilization, critique of

Clapperton, Hugh

Clark, J.P. ,

Clark, Steve , ,

Clark, Victor S.

Clark, William –,

_Cleitophon_

_Cleopatra's Wedding Present: Travels through Syria_ , –

Clifford, James , , ,

Clifford, Nicholas

Clune, Frank ,

_Coasting_ –

Cobbett, William

Coca-colonization

Coetzee, Carli

Coetzee, J.M.

Cohen, Margaret ,

Colclough, Stephen

Cold War –,

Cole, Teju

_Collection of Voyages and Travels_

collective memory

colonial discourse

colonial identity

colonial spatial relations, and gender

colonization, long-distance voyages –

Columbus, Christopher ,

comic travel writing ,

_Coming of Age in Samoa_

Commelin, Iaak

_Commentary on the Waterways Classic_ –

_A Compendious History of the Indian Wars_

compensatory Eurocentrism

_The Comprehensive Gazetteer of the Great Qing Realm_

Condamine, Charles-Marie de la

condemnation of travel/travel writing , , –, –

_The Condition of the Working Class in England_

_Confessions_

_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_

Congo Atrocities

_Connemara_ trilogy

_Conquistadors of the Useless_

Conrad, Joseph , , , , , , , , , –

Conrad, Peter

contact zones , , –,

_Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America_

_Conundrum_ ,

Cook, Frederick

Cook, James , , , , –, , –, ,

Cook, Thomas , , ,

Cooke, Edward

Cooper, James Fenimore

Corbett, Jim

Cormick, Craig

corporeality –, ,

Corrigan, Peter

Cortázar, Julio , ,

Coryat, Thomas

cosmopolitan vision –

countertravelling ,

Courmenin, Louis Deshayes de

Coxe, William

Crang, Mike

Crantz, David

_Creating Memorials, Building Identities_

_Critical Review_

Cromer, Lord

Cronin, Michael

cross-cultural dressing –

cross-dressing –,

_Crossing Over: A Mexican Migrant Family on the Migrant Trail_

Crowther, Samuel Ajayi

cult of the sublime

cultural attitudes, to travel/travel writing –

cultural history –

cultural memory ,

cultural relativism

Cultural Revolution, China

culture, quasi-ekphrastic descriptions of

Cunningham, Peter

curiosity

_A Curious Life for a Lady: The Story of Isabella Bird_

Curle, J.H.

Curzon, George

da Gama, Vasco

Dadié, Bernard

_Daily Record of Northern Travels_

Dallam, Thomas

Dalrymple, William –, ,

Dampier, William , , , , –

Dana, Richard , –

Daniel, Abbot

Danish travel literature –

_Daphnis and Chloe_

_Dark Continent: My Black Arse_

dark tourism xvii, , , , –

Darlington, Jennie

Darnton, Robert

Darwin, Charles –, , ,

d'Aunet, Léonie

David Nèel, Alexandra

Davidson, Linda

Davidson, Peter –, –

Davidson, Robyn , , , , , , , , , –

Davis, Mrs. –

Davis, Winston

_Death in Persia_ , –

_Death Valley_

_Decades of Asia_

_Decameron_

decolonization and Cold War –

deep travel

defamatory reviews

Defoe, Daniel , –, , ,

denial of coevalness , ,

Dennis, John

Denyer, Simon

Derrida, Jacque

_Description of the East, and some other Countries_

_Description of Egypt_

_Description of Greenland_

_Description of a Journey Through Germany and Switzerland_

_Description of a Journey to Kashi_

_Description of the Kingdom of Japan_

_Description of the World_ ,

desert travel , , –, –, –

_Destination Nowhere_

_The Devil's Highway_

Dewey, John

dialectics of reinforcement

Diallo, Bakary

_Dialogue on the Picturesque and Beautiful_

diaristic travel blogs –

_Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu_ ,

_Diary of a Trip South_

Dias, Bartholomeu

Diaz del Castillo, Bernal ,

Dickens, Charles , –, , , –, –, , , , ,

Dieulafoy, Jane

Diodoros

Dion of Prusa –

disability, and travel –

disaster tourism –

_Discourses_ –

discovery –, –

Antarctic exploration ,

criticism of

death/martyrdom

early modern –

Enlightenment –

explorer hero –

imaginary cartographies

medieval –

_see also_ scientific exploration

Diski, Jenny , ,

Dispute of the New World

_A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis_

diversality

Doctorow, E.L.

_Don't Get Too Comfortable_

_Don't Sleep, There are Snakes_

Doré, Gustave , –

Doughty, Charles Montagu ,

Douglas, Heidi

Douglas, Norman

_Down Under_

_Downcast Eyes_

Downing, Clement

Drake, Sir Francis , , ,

_Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents_ , ,

dromology

Du Bois, W.E B.

du Bos, Jean-Baptiste

du Halde, Jean Baptiste

Duff Gordon, Lucie ,

Duffy, Enda ,

Dunlop, Carol ,

Duppa, Brian

Dupree, Louis

Durrell, Lawrence

Dussert, Éric ,

Dutton, Denis

Dyer, Geoff

Dzumhur, Zuko

Eakin, Paul John

Eastern fantasies –

_Eat Pray Love_

Eberhardt, Isabelle , , , ,

_Ecuador_

edgelands

Edwards, Amelia

Edwards, Justin

Egede, Hans

Egeria

Egypt

ancient –

British control of –,

and antiquarianism

Egyptian travellers –,

_Eight Records of Yongzhou_

eighteenth-century travel –,

El Dorado , ,

_El Interior_

Eliot, T.S. , , ,

Elis, Henry

Elliott, John –

Ellis, Malcolm

_Émile_

_Empire of Signs_

empiricism , , –,

_Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature_

_Encyclopédie_

_Endeavour_ journal

Engels, Friedrich

_English Journey_

_English Review_

English Romantic travelogue

_The Enigma of Arrival_

Enlightenment epistemologies

Enlightenment travel writing , , –, , –, , –, ,

environmental crisis

_Eothen_ ,

_The Ephesian Tale_

epistolary writing

_Equipée_

Ercilla, Alonso de

_Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ ,

_Essay to Direct and Extend the Inquiries of Patriotic Travellers_

ethico-fictive ethnography

ethics, and travel writing –

_The Ethics of Travel_

_Ethiopian Tale_

ethnographic impulse, in travel writing ,

ethnographic picturesque

ethnography ,

Euben, Roxanne xvii

_Euboian Oration_ –

Europe –

_Europe on $5 a Day_

_The European Tribe_

European voyages of discovery –

Everett, Daniel ,

exotic animal hunting –

_The Expedition of Humphry Clinker_

Experimental travel

exploratrice sociale

exploration _see_ scientific exploration

explorer/traveller distinction

explorers _see_ discovery

Exquemelin, Alexandre –

extreme adventurers –

extreme travel

Fabian, Johannes , ,

Fabri, Felix , ,

fabulation, ethics of –

fact/fiction

in dark tourism

early travel

in travelogues –

Falconer, William

Fallowell, Duncan –

Fan Chengda –

Fanshaw, Sir Richard

Farewell, Christopher –

Farley, Paul

_Farthest North_ –

Fay, Eliza

Feifer, Maxine ,

female/feminist _see_ women

Fermor, Patrick Leigh ,

_Ferroscape_

fiction

and anthropology –

in dark tourism

and travel writing –

in travelogues –

fictocriticism ,

Fiennes, Celia , –

Fiennes, William

_Finding the Worth While in the Orient_ –,

_First Footsteps in East Africa_

Fish, Stanley

Fisher, Michael –

Fitzsimons, Simon

Flannery, Tim

Fleming, Peter ,

Fletcher, Giles

_Fodor's_ guides ,

Foigny, Gabriel de

_For Love and Money_

_Forbidden Journey_

Forsdick, Charles

Forster, E.M.

Forster, Georg , , , –,

Fortune, Robert

Foster, Shirley ,

Foster, Stephen Wayne

Foucault, Michel , , ,

Fowler, C. ,

Franceschimus de Pontrenato –

Francis, Gavin –, –

Franck, Harry ,

Franklin, Sir John , , , , ,

Frater, Alexander ,

Freeman, Derek

French Romantic writers –

French-Sheldon, May

Freud, Sigmund ,

Frey, Nancy

Frobisher, Martin

_Frogs_

Frommer, Arthur

Fuller, Chet , –

Fuller, Margaret

Fussell, Paul , , , ,

Gage, Thomas

Galton, Francis

Gao Xingjian

Gaoudel, Illo

Garber, Marjorie

Garrett, L. xix

Gaunt, Mary

gay travel writing –, , –

_Gay Travels in the Muslim World_

gender

as marketing tool

stereotypes

and travel writing –

gender blurring

_General Heads for a Natural History of a Country_

generalization/stereotyping –

_Generall Historie of the Turkes_

genre

in Chinese travel writing

and experimentation

_Geographia_

geographical zones, as analytical tools , –

geography, and historiography –

George, Susan

Gerbi, Antonello

Germany, and travel literature , –

Gesner, Conrad ,

Ghose, Indira

Ghosh, Amitav , , , –, , ,

Ghosh, Tanushree

Gide, André ,

Gilbert, Elizabeth

Gilpin, William ,

Gilroy, Amanda

Ginsberg, Allen ,

Giovanni da Montecorvino

Giovanni da Pian Del Carpini

Gitlitz, David

global environmental crisis

_The Global Soul_ ,

Global South

Globalization , –,

and tourism –

Godinho, Nicolao

Godwin, Peter

Goethe –,

_Going As Far as I Can: The Ultimate Travel Book_ –

Goodman, David

Gordon, Deborah

Gourevitch, Philip

Graböis, Aryeh ,

Graham, Maria –,

Graham, Robert Cunninghame

Gramsci, Antonio

Grand Tour –, , , –, , , ,

Graulund, Rune

_The Great Australian Loneliness_

_The Great History_

_The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia_

_Great Railway Journeys_

Greek novels –

Green, Roger

Greenblatt, Stephen ,

Greene, Graham –, , , , ,

Greenwald, Jeff

Grewal, Inderpal ,

Grieg, Paula

Gu Yanwu ,

Guevara, Ernesto Che

guidebooks –, , , , –,

_Gulliver_ magazine

_Gulliver's Travels_

Gurría Quintana, Angel

Gutjhar, Paul

habitus concept

Haggard, Henry Rider ,

Hakluyt, Richard –, –, , , , ,

_Hakluytus Posthumous_

Hajjn , ,

Halberstam, Jack/Judith , –

Halbwach, Maurice

Haley, Alex

Hall, Charles

Hall, Joseph ,

Hall, Laina ,

Hall, Rodney

Halperin, David –

Hammond, Andrew

Hanbury-Tenison, Robin

_Handbook for Travellers on the Continent_

_Happy Pilgrimage_

harems , , ,

Harff, Arnold von ,

Hariot, Thomas

Harrer, Heinrich

Harriot, Thomas , ,

Harris, Alexander

Harrison, Jane Ellen –

Hartlib, Samuel

_The Harz Journey_

Hatfield, William

Hawkesworth, John , –,

Haynes, Rosslynn D.

Hearne, Samuel –, , ,

_Heart of Africa_

_Heart of Darkness_ , , ,

Heat-Moon, William Least

Heine, Heinrich –,

Heliodoros

Helmriech, William B.

Hennepin, Louis

Herbert, Sir Thomas

heritage syndrome

Herodotus –, ,

Herzog, Maurice –

Hesiod

Hezser, C. xix

Hijri calendar

Hill, Barry –

Hill, Ernestine

_The Hills of Adonis_

_Hindoo Holiday_

_Hints on Emigration to the Cape of Good Hope_

Hirschfield, Magnus

_Historical Relation of Ceylon_

_Historie_

_Histories_

historiography

and geography –

_History of America_

_History of Arabic Geographical Writings_

_History of British India_

_History of Greenland_

_The History of Sexuality_

_History of Travel Literature in China_

_Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy_

HIV

Hodges, William

Holland, Patrick , , , , , , , , ,

Holman, James

Holy Land

Europeans in –, , , –

_see also_ Middle East

_Homage to Barcelona_

_Homage to Catalonia_

_Homeric Hymn to Demeter_

home tour , , –,

in Latin America

Hood, Robert

Hooper, Edward

Horace

Horne, Donald

Horowitz, Alaxandra ,

Horwitz, Tony ,

Hottentots

_How I Found Livingstone_ –

_How the Other Half Lives_

Howell, James

Huggan, Graham xix, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hughes, Langston

Hughes, Robert

Hugo, Victor

Hulme, Peter xvi, ,

Humboldt, Alexander von , , –,

hunter-naturalists

hybridity –, , , , ,

Hynes, Samuel ,

hyphenated identity

Ibn Battuta , ,

Ibn Khaldûn –

_The Ice Museum_ , , –

iconotexts

_The Idea of North_ , –,

Idinopulos, Thomas

Idriess, Ion

illness, and travel –

imaginative geography xix, , –,

Europe –

imagined geography

_Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation_ –, , ,

imperial picturesque –

imperialism ,

_Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality_ –

_In An Antique Land_ , , –, ,

_In Darkest Africa_ ,

_In Patagonia_ , , , , , , , , –,

_In Russia_

_India: A Wounded Civilization_

India travel –

_An Indian Journey_

Indian languages

_Indian Nocturne_ , , , –

Indian translations –

Indian travel/travel writing

600 BCE to 1500 –

1525–1800 –

1800–1947 –

1947 to present day –

and USSR

war literature

Indigenous Australia –

_Indika_

industrialized tourism

informal empire

_An Inland Voyage_

_Innocents Abroad_ ,

interculturality

_Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oloudah Equiano_

intermedial texts

_Into the Heart of Borneo_

_Introduction to Cosmology_

Invisible Borders project

Irigary, Luce

ironic adventurers –

Irving, Washington , ,

Iser, Wolfgang

Isherwood, Christopher , , –

Islam, and homosexuality

Islam, Sayed M.

_The Isle of Pines_

_Israel: A Travel Survival Kit_ –

_An Italian Dream_

_Italian Journey_ , –

itineraries, as analytical tools –

itinerarium ,

_Itinerary to the Sepulchre of Our Lord Jesus Christ_

Iverson, Shannon Dugan

Iyer, Pico , , , , , , , –

Jackman, Brian ,

Jackson, H.J.

Jacob, Christian

Jacobs, M. xix

Jacobson, Howard

Jagose, Annamarie ,

James, Thomas

Jamie, Kathleen

_Japanese Chronicle_

Japanese travel writing –,

_Jarhead: A Soldier's Story of Modern War_ –

Jarvis, Robin

Jauss, Hans Robert

Jay, Martin

Jerrold, Blanchard , –

Joao de Barros

Jobson, Richard

John Murray

John of Plano Carpini

Johnson, Clare

Johnson, James Weldon

Johnson, Samuel , –

Johnston, Harry H.

Jones, Rebecca

Jonge, Cornelis Matalief de

Jonson, Ben –,

Jordan, Rosa

Jordis, Christine –

Jose, Nicholas –

_Journal of an Expedition up the Niger and Tshadda Rivers_

_Journal de Route_ –, , , , –

_Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile_

_Journey From Paris to Jerusalem_

_Journey into Russia_

_A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794_

_Journey to the Northern Ocean_ –

_Journey to the Orient_

_Journey to a War_

_Journey Without Maps_ –, ,

_Journey of a Woman to Spitzberg_ –

_Journeys_ xvi

Judah, Tim

Justel, Henri

Justice, Elizabeth

Kadushin, Raphael –, –

Kaempfer, Engelbert

Kalidasa

Kalm, Linnaeus Per

Kane, Cheikh Hamidou

Kane, Elisha Kent

Karchkovski, Ignati Iulianovich

Kaufman, Paul

Kavenna, Joanna , –, –

Kaye, John William ,

Keeling, William

_Keep the River on Your Right_

Keller, Catherine ,

Kempe, Margery , ,

Kendall, Gillian

Kerner, Justinius ,

Kerouac, Jack –, ,

Kerr, Douglas

Kerr, Heather

Khair, Tabish –, ,

Khumalo, Sihle

Kieran, Dan

Kincaid, Jamaica –, ,

_King Solomon's Mines_ ,

Kinglake, Alexander ,

Kingsley, Mary , , , , , ,

Kipling, Rudyard

Kirkland, Caroline , ,

Kirkpatrick, Andy

Kirsch, Stuart

_Kirtilata_

Kirtland, Helen Johns

Kirtland, Lucian Swift –,

Kisch, Egon

Kitson, Peter

Knight, Francis

Knivet, Anthony

Knolles, Richard ,

Knox, Robert

Kogalniceanu, Mihail

_Korea and her Neighbours_

Korte, Barbara xvi, ,

Koster, Henry –,

Kowalewski, Michael ,

Kpomassie, Tété-Michel ,

Krakauer, Jon , –

Kremmer, Christopher , –

Kristeva, Julia

Kritikos, Herakleides

Kroetsch, Robert

Kuehn, Julia

Kumar, Amitava

_Kumarasambhava_

_Kyng Alisaunder_

_La Araucana_

La Roche, Sophie

_Labels_

Lacarrière, Jacques ,

_Lady of the Lake_

Lamb, Christina , –

Lander, Richard

Landriani, Antonio

landscape descriptions, in prose –

Lane, Edward William

Lapierre

Larpent, Anna –

Las Casas, Bartolomé de

Lassels, Richard

Late Modernism

Latin America –

independence/post-independence –

_see also_ Spanish Conquistadors

Laudonnière, René de

Lawrence, D.H. , , ,

Lawrence, T.E. , , , ,

Lawson, Henry

Lawson, John

Lawson, Mark

Le Blanc, Jean-Bernard

Le Breton, David

_Le Guide bleu_

Le Guin, Ursula

Leask, Nigel

Least Heat-Moon, William , , ,

Lebel, Roland –

Ledyard, John

Lee, Laurie

Leed, Eric

Léry, Jean de

lesbian travel writing –, ,

Lessing, G.E.

_Letter from Iceland_

_Letters of a Frenchman_

_Letters from China and Japan_

_Letters from Egypt_

_Letters from Iceland_

_Letters from India_

_Letters on a Journey to the Gotthard_ –

_Letters Written in France_

_Leucippe_

Lévi-Strauss, Claude , , , ,

Levin, Stephen

Lewis, Matthew

Lewis, Meriwether –, ,

Lewis, Norman

LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual and queer) travel –, , –

Li Ciming ,

Li Daoyuan –

_Life of Apollonios of Tyana_

_Life of Babur_

_Life of Hamayun_

_Life of Pi_

life writing –

Ligon, Richard , –

_Lila Charitra_

Lindsay, Claire , ,

linguistic experimentation, in travel writing

Linnaeus, Carl , , ,

Lisle, Debbie , –,

_Literature, Writing and Anthropology_ –

Lithgow, William ,

Liu, Alan

Liu Zongyuan –

_Lives of the Sophists_

_The Living Mountain_

Livingstone, David , , –, ,

Locke, John ,

Loingsigh, Aedìn Nì xvii

_London: A Pilgrimage_ , –

_London Chronicle_

London, Jack , –,

_London Labour and the London Poor_

_London Orbital_

_Lonely Planet_ guides , –, , ,

_Lonesome Traveller_

_The Long March: An Account of Modern China_

_Long Walk_

Longos

Loomis, Chauncey

Lopez, Barry , , ,

López de Gómara, Francisco

López Ropero, María Lourdes

_The Lost Continent_

_The Lost Tribe_ –

Loti, Pierre , –,

Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna

Lu You

_The Luciads_

Lucian ,

Lunn, Joe

Luongo, Michael

Lyall, John
Ma Jian

Mabanckou, Alain

Macartney, George

MacCannell, Dean , –, –, , ,

McClintock, Leopold

McCulley, Kate –

Macdonald, Sarah

McElroy, Colleen

Macfarlane, Robert

McGirr, Michael

McGrath, Melanie , ,

Mackenzie, Alexander ,

MacKenzie, John

MacLaren, I.S.

MacLean, Gerald

MacNeice, Louis ,

_Madame Chrysanthème_ –

Maffei, Giovanni Pietro

Magellan, Ferdinand , , –

_Mahabharata_ ,

Mahood, Kim –

Maillart, Ella ,

Mainwaring, Sir Henry

Makusa, Ham

Mallon, Thomas ,

Mallory, George –, –

Mandelli, Giovanni

Mandeville, Sir John –, –, , , , –,

Manly, William Lewis

Mao, Douglas

_Maps and Dreams_

Marcus, George , ,

marginalia

Marlatt, Daphne

Marrash, Francis

_The Married Man_

Marriott, Edward –

_The Marsh Arabs_

Martell, Yann

Martens, Friedrich

Martineau, Harriet ,

Martinez, Reuben

marvellous monstrosity

masculinity in travel/travel writing –, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mason, A.E.W.

Maspero, François –

mass tourism –, , –

master-of-all-I-survey _see_ monarch-of-all-I-survey

Matar, Nabil xvii,

Matthiessen, Peter , , , ,

Maugham, William Somerset

Mayhew, Henry

Mayle, Peter

Mayo, Katherine

_Me Talk Pretty One Day_

Mead, Margaret

mechanization –, , ,

medical tourists

medieval travel writing, Europe –

_Meghadutam_

Mehta, Suketu

Mei Xinlin ,

Meier, Albrecht

Melman, Billie

Melville, Herman ,

memoirs ,

_Memories of Germany and Italy_

memory-work

_Men and Women: The World Journey of a Sexologist_

Mentz, Steve

Mercator, Gerardus

Meredith, Louisa

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice

Meshullam of Volterra ,

_Metamorphoses_

_Method of Describing Regions, Towns and Cities_

Métin, Albert

Meunier, Jacques –

Mexico, and literary travel –

Miall, David

Michaelis, Johann David

Michasiw, Kim Ian

Michaux, Henri

Middle East –

middle passage

_The Middle Passage_

_Midnight in Sicily_

Mignolo, Walter ,

Mikes, George

Mill, James

Miller, Arthur

Miller, Carolyn

Miller, Sam

_A Million Mutinies Now_

Mills, Sarah xvi, , ,

mimetic capital

Ming dynasty , ,

mirabilia genre

_The Mirror of the Sea_

Mishra, Pankaj –

Mission Press, Sarampore

_The Missionaries_

missionary accounts , ,

_Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa_ , ,

Mitchell, Sir Thomas

mixed-media book

mobile memoirs –

_Moby-Dick_ ,

_Modern Book, or Roman Journey_

modern travel writing, 1950 to present day –

Modernist travel writing –

_Mogreb-El-Acksa_

Molesworth, Robert

monarch-of-all-I-see/survey , , , , ,

Monbiot, George ,

_The Monk_

monolingualism

Monroe Doctrine

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley ,

_Monthly Review_

moon exploration

Moore, Tim

Morath, Inge

More, Thomas , ,

Morgan, Susan

_Mornings in Mexico_ ,

Morris, Jan/James , , , ,

Morrison, George

Mort, Graham

Moss, Robert Tewdwr , –

_Mother India_

Mouchard

_Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory_

mountain illustrations

mountain travel –, , , , –

Moura, Jean-Marc

Moynagh, Maureen ,

Mudimbe, V.Y.

Muecke, Stephen ,

Muir, John ,

Müller, Wilhelm

Mundy, Peter

Münster, Sebastian ,

Murphy, Dervla

Murray, John III

Murray, W.H.

Musaka, Ham

Muslim travelogues

_My Arctic Journal_

Mzansi Girl blog

Naipaul, V.S. , , , , , , , , , ,

Nansen, Fridtjof –

Narayan, Uma

Nares, George

_Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea_

Nashe, Thomas

nativist travel writing

_Natural History_

natural man concept

nature travels –

NCH (New Cultural History) –,

Near-Eastern, European and home travels –

Nenzi, Laura xvii, xix

neocolonial writing

Nerval, Gérard de ,

Nettlebeck, Amanda

Neville, Henry

New Cultural History –

new spatiality

New Travel Writing

_New Voyage Round the World_ , ,

_The New York Nobody Knows_

Newby, Eric , , , ,

_News from Tartary_

Nicander, Karl-August

Nicolai, Friedrich

Nicolay, Nicholas de ,

Nicolson, Marjorie Hope

Niebuhr, Carsten , –

Nile River, source of ,

_The Nine Heavens_

Nishimura Misu

_No Road (Bitumen All the Way)_

Nobile, Umberto

Noble Savage stereotype

non-places

Nooteboom, Cees

Nordau, Max

north

idea of –,

_see also_ Polar regions

_North America_

North America –

_Northanger Abbey_

Northwest Passage , , ,

nostalgia –

_Notebook on the Return to the Native Land_ , –

_Notes of a Journey through France and Italy_

_Notes and Sketches_

_Nouvelle Revue Française_

_NRF (La Novelle Revue)_

_Nuh-Sipihr_

OAFIE (Office of Armed Forces Information and Education) –

objections, to travel writing , –

O'Brian, Patrick

ocularcentrism, as Eurocentrism –

Odonais, Jean Godin des

_Odyssey_ , –, –

Oehlenschläger, Adam

_Of the Holy Places_

_Of the Ruse Common Wealth_

_Of Travel_

O'Hanlon, Redmond , , , , ,

_The Old Patagonian Express_

_The Old Ways_

Oldenburg, Henry

Ollivier, Bernard ,

_Olson's Orient Guide_ ,

_On the Cities in Greece_

_On His Return_

_On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes_

_On the Ocean_

_On Photography_

_On the Road_ –,

_On the Syrian Goddess_ ,

_One Hot Summer in St. Petersburg_

Ong, Walter J.

_Open City_

Opening of China

oral culture

Orientalism –, , , , –,

_Orientalism_ xvi, xix, , , , , –, –

_Orientations: An Anthology of East European Travel Writing in Europe_

_Orlando_

_Oroonoko_

O'Rourke, P.J.

Ortelius, Abraham

Orwell, George ,

_Other Routes_ ,

Ottoman Empire

growth of –

threat of

Ottomania

_Our National Parks_

Oyono, Ferdinand

Pagden, Anthony

_Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape_

Palin, Michael ,

_The Palm-Wine Drinkard_

parachute journalism

Paradoxical Geographies, of social and political , –

Park, Mungo , , , ,

Parker, Mary Ann

Parkes, Fanny

Parry, Edward

Parry, J.H.

Parry, William

passport regulations

Pater, Walter

Paterson, William

_Patron de New York_

Pausanias –,

Peary, Robert

Pedelty, Mark

pedestrianism , –, ,

Pennant, Thomas ,

_The Pennyles Pilgrimage_

_People of the Abyss_ , –,

_People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations_ ,

_People of India_ tropes –

_Pereginaçao_ –

performative mask

performativity

periegesis –

_Periegesis of the Inhabited World_

periplous –

_Periplous of the Black Sea_

_Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799–1804_

Petherick, John

Petherick, Katharine

Petrarch

Petronius –

Petsalis-Diomides, Alexia

Pettinger, Alasdair

Pfieffer, Ida

Pfister, Manfred

phenomenological approach, to travel writing

Philip, M. NourbeSe

Philippines, Kirtland's guide to –

Phillips, Caryl –, , , –

_Philosophical Transactions_ ,

Philostratos

Phocas, John

photography –

phototextual narrative

Pickford, Susan

_Pictures from Italy_ , , ,

_Pictures of Travel_ –

picturesque , –, , ,

imperial picturesque –

picturesque tourism/travel , –

Pigafetta, Antonio

_Pilgrimage_ , ,

pilgrimage , , , , , –, –, –, –, –, , , , –

in America

in India –, ,

Angkor

by Sikhs

by women , , , –

dangers of

guidebook –

Ise shrine, nineteenth century Japanese –

medieval –, –

metaphorical , –, , , ,

practices

sacred/secular distinction –

and spiritual enrichment

virtual –

_see also:_ hajj

_Pilgrimage of Egeria_

_The Pilgrim's Progress_

Pillars of Hercules –

_The Pilot_

Pinto, Fernao Mendes –

Piozzi, Hester Thrale

Pitman, Thea

Pitts, Joseph

Plaatje, Sol

_Place Matters_

_The Places In Between_ ,

plain style

_Planetarity_

planetary consciousness

_Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel and Imaginative Geography_ ,

Pliny

Plutarch

_Pocket Guide to Viet-nam_ –,

Pococke, Richard

Polar regions , , , , , , , , , –

Arctic sublime ,

re-enactment journeys –

science/research

sovereignty

transportation

polite postcolonialism

_Political Tourism and Its Texts_

Polo, Marco , , , , , , –, –,

Poma de Ayala, Felipe Guaman

Poplak, Richard ,

Porter, Dennis xvi

_Portrait of Speelman, a Hottentot_

post-tourists , –

postcolonial antidisciplinarity

postcolonial backgrounds, writers from

postcolonial critiques, of travel writing –

postcolonial modes, of travel writing –, –, , –

postcolonial studies xvi-xvii, –, , ,

postcolonial term –, –

postcolonial travellers –, , –

postmodern era

postmodern sensibility –

postmodernization, of travel writing –

Pound, Ezra

Powell, John Wesley ,

_The Practice of Everyday Life_

Pratt, Mary Louise xvi, xvii, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Praz, Mario

_The Present State of the Ottoman Empire_

Price, Uvedale

Priestley, J.B.

_Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation_ –, ,

_The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation_

principle of attachment

privateers –

_Problem of China_

professional travel bloggers –

Progressive Writers Association

_Prometheus Bound_

propemptikon poems

_The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France_ –

Ptolemy

Puar, Jasbir K.

Pullman, Ethan

_Purchas His Pilgrimages_ , ,

Purchas, Samuel , , , , , , ,

_Pushing Against the Black/White Limits of Maps_

Pytheas of Massilia ,

Qian Qianyi

Qing dynasty , ,

queer travel _see_ gay travel

Quincey, Thomas de

Raban, Jonathan , , –, , ,

race, scientific theory of

racism –

in Australia

Radcliffe, Ann

railroad nerves

_The Railway Journey_

railway travel ,

Britain –

India

Rakoff, David

Ralegh, Sir Walter , , –

_Ramayana_ ,

_Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official_

Ramusio, Giovanni Battista

_Random notes on the human face_

_Rare Adventures and Painfull Peregrinations_

Rasmussen, Knud

Rawlins, John

Ray, Romita

Reader, Ian

reader-response criticism

readers

as collateral damage

researching –

readership –, –

_Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology_

reception theory –

receptive fallacy

_Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland_ –

_Record of Five Terraces Mountain_

_Record of Grasping the Carriage Reins_

_Record of a Little Hillock West of Flat-Iron Pool_ –

_Record of Passing into Shu_

_Record of a Trip to Baochan Mountain_

_Record of a Trip to Stone Bell Mountain_

_Records of the Buddhist Kingdoms_

_Records of the Western Kingdoms during the Great Tang_

_Red Dust: A Path Through China_

_RED (Reading Experience Database)_

Reeves, William Pember

Reinhold, Johann

_A Relation of a Journey begun Anno Domini_

_Relation of Seaven Yeares Slaverie under the Turkes_

_Relation of a Voyage to the Levant_

_Remarks on Several Parts of Italy_

_Reminiscences of a Student's Life_

Renna, Thomas

_Reveries of a Solitary Walker_

reverse travelling , ,

reviewing, as travel blogging –

_Revolt in Syria: Eye-Witness to the Uprising_

_The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration_

rhetorical modes , , –, , , , , , ,

_The Rhine_

Rice, Alan

Richards, David

Riddell, Carol

Riddle, T.E.

Riegel, Caroline

Riis, Jacob

_The Rings of Saturn_ , , ,

rites of passage

_Road to Europe_

_The Road to Oxiana_ , ,

_The Road to Wigan Pier_

_Rob Roy_

Robb, Peter

Roberts, Michael Symmons

Robertson, William –,

_Robinson Crusoe_ , –, ,

Robinson, Tim

Roe, Paddy ,

Rogers, Shef

Rogers, Woodes

_Rogue Nation_

_Roissy Express: A Journey through the Paris Suburbs_

Romantic empiricism

Romantic literary travel books –

Romantic travel narratives , , –, ,

Romanticism , –, –, –, , –, , –, –

Rome, as pilgrimage destination

_Rome, Glimpses_ , , , –

_Rome and its Men and Women_

Roosevelt, Theodore ,

Rose, Jonathan

Roseman, Sharon

Ross, James Clark

Rouch, Jane ,

Rouch, Jean , , –

Rousseau, G.S.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques –, , , –

_Routes and Detours_

_Roving through Southern China_

Rowlandson, Mary

_Royal Charter_ shipwreck –

Royal Geographical Society , ,

Royal Society , ,

Rubiès, Joan Pau ,

Ruffin, Jean-Christophe

_Rural Rides_

Rushdie, Salman , ,

Ruskin, John , , –

Russell, Bertrand

Rustichello de Pisa

Rutilius

Ryan, Simon ,

Rycaut, Sir Paul ,

sacred/secular distinction –

_Sad Tropics_ , , ,

Said, Edward xvi, xvii, xix, –, , , , , , , , , –, , –, ,

St Birgitta of Sweden

St Clair, William

Saint-Pol-Roux

Salak, Kira

_Samararasa_

_Samurai Trails_

Sancho, Ignatius

Sandys, George ,

Sanjay

Sardar, Ziauddin

Saro-Wiwa, Ken

Saro-Wiwa, Noo

satire –

_Satires_

_Satyricon_ –

Saussure, Horace-Bénédict de

Scheineman, Diane

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang

Schlegel, Friedrich –

Schlunke, Katrina

Schmitt, Cannon , –

Schneebaum, Tobias

Schouten, William Cornelison

Schwarzenbach, Annemarie , –

scientific exploration –, , , –, , , –, , ,

scientific rationalism

Scoresby, William

_The Scorpion Fish_ ,

Scott, Robert Falcon , ,

Scott, Walter

scramble for Africa

sea adventure novels

_Sea and Sardinia_

sea travel , , , , –, –, –, –, –, –

_Sea of Words_

_Sea-mans Grammar_

_Seamans Dictionary_

seaside towns

Sebald, W.G. , , , , , ,

Second Sophistic ,

second-person narration

Sedaris, David

seeing-for-one's-self

seeing-man

Segalen, Victor , ,

Sekula, Allan

_Selection of Travel Records from Successive Eras_

self, in travel writing , –, , , –, , , , –, , , , –,

self-biography term

self-ironization

self-mockery

Selkirk, Alexander

Semeonis, Symon

Sen, Simonti xvii

sending-off poems

Senghor, Lamine

sensibility approach –, –,

sensory immersion

sentimentalism –, , , ,

_A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Mr Yorick_ , ,

Seth, Vikram ,

_Settlers and Convicts_

_The Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ , , , ,

_Seven Sacred Rivers_

_The Sewing Circles of Herat_ ,

sexual experimentation, in travel writing

sexuality, and travel writing , , –, –

Shackleton, Ernest

_Shadow Pictures of Travel. By the Shadow Showman Luchs_

Shaftesbury, third Earl of ,

Shakespeare, William ,

Shand, Mark

Shapin, Steven

Sharma, Parvez

Shehadeh, Raja

Shelley, Mary

Shelley, Percy

Shepherd, Dawn

Shepherd, Nan ,

Sherer, John

Sherley brothers

shipping industry

shipwreck narratives , , –, –

_Shipwrecked Sailor_

_A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies_

_A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark_

_A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush_ , ,

Sierstad, Asne ,

sight sacralization

Simpson, Colin

Simpson, Joe

Sinclair, Iain , ,

Sitwell, Osbert

_Six Voyages_

_Sketches of Etruscan Places_

slavery , , , , –, –

and dark tourism –

Sleeman, William Henry

Slocum, Joshua

slow travel , ,

slum tourism , –

_A Small Place_ ,

Smedley, Agnes

Smith, Adam

Smith, Albert

Smith, Captain John ,

Smollett, Tobias , ,

Snow, Edgar

_Snow Geese_

_The Snow Leopard_ , ,

social Darwinism

social status, and dark tourism

Solinus

Solnit, Rebecca

_Something to Declare: Good Lesbian Travel Writing_

Song dynasty , , ,

_The Songlines_ , , ,

Sontag, Susan

sophists

Sophocles

Sorbiere, Samuel

_Soul Mountain_

_South_

South Asia –

_The Southern Land, Known_

_Southern Memories_

_The Sovereignty and Goodness of God_

spa towns

_The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism_

Spanish Conquistadors , , , , –

Spanish scientific expeditions

Sparrman, Anders –

_Speed_

Speke, John Hanning

Spielvogel, Nathan

Sprat, Thomas

Spurr, David ,

Squires, Claire

Staal, Paul

Staden, Hans

stadial theory , , , ,

Stanhope, Lady Hester

Stanley, Henry Morton , , , –

_Star Trek_

Stark, Freya , , ,

Starke, Mariana

Starr, Stephen

_States of Desire: Travels in Gay America_ , , ,

Stefansson, Vilhjalmur ,

Stein, Gertrude

Steinbeck, John

Stephen, Sir Leslie , ,

Stephens, John Lloyd

Stephenson, P.R.

Sterne, Laurence , , , ,

Stevenson, Robert Louis –, ,

Steves, Rick ,

Stewart, Rory ,

Stillingfleet, Edward

Stone, Maureen –

_Story of Sinuhe_ –

_Story of Wenamun_ –

_Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America_

strategic authority –

_Strength-Kindness_

_Studies in Travel Writing_ xvi

Sub-Saharn Africa –

Suleri, Sara ,

_Sultan to Sultan_

_Sultan-Nameh_

_Summer on the Lakes_

Sutherland, Halliday

Swift, Jonathan , ,

Swofford, Anthony –

Sykes-Picot Agreement , , ,

synecdoche –,

_The System of Nature_ ,

Tabucchi, Antonio , , –, –

Tagore, Rabindra Nath

_The Tale of the Ten Princes_

Tanabe, George

Tang dynasty , , ,

Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste ,

Taylor, John

_The Teachings of Don Juan_ –

technology –

tehomic theology

_Telemachia_

Teltscher, Kate , ,

Telugu, Enugula Veeraswamyya

_The Tempest_

Teng, Emma Jinhua xvii,

Tenreiro, Antonio

Terray, Lionel

Terry, Michael

thanatourism

_see also_ dark tourism

Thapar, Romila ,

_Theatre of the World_

_Theory of Moral Sentiments_

Theroux, Paul , , , , –,

Thesiger, Wilfred , , , –

Thevenot, Jean

Thévenot, Melchisédech , ,

Thevet, André

_They Conquered the World: Great Women Adventurers_

Thomas Cook _see_ Cook, Thomas

Thompson, Carl , , , ,

Thompson, Era Bell

Thompson, Joseph

Thomson, John

Thoreau, Henry David

Thorne, Robert

_Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel, and on Sketching Landscape_

_Three Men in a Float_

_Three Years in Europe, or Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met_

_Through the Brazilian Wilderness_

_Through the Dark Continent_

Thubron, Colin , , , , ,

Thurin, Susan

Tichi, Cecilia

Tiffin, Helen

Tilman, W.H.

Tilney, Helen

Timberlake, Henry –

_To a Mountain in Tibet_

Tocqueville, Alexis de ,

Todorova, Maria

Tóibín, Colm

_A Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Britain_

_A Tour of the Yamuna_

tourism , –, , , , ,

anti-tourism ,

attack on

in China

gay and lesbian tourism

and globalization –

and immigration

modern , –, –,

negative connotations –,

picturesque tourism , –,

sterotype of –,

use of term , ,

virtual tourism –

_see also:_ dark tourism, Grand Tour, home tours

tourism niches

tourism/travel distinction –, , –

tourist gaze

touristic exploration

Tournefort, Joseph

_Towards the Blue Horizons_

_Tracks_ , , , , –

trade, long-distance voyages –

transculturation

transmodernity

transnational sexualities –

_Travel Account and Menus of a Pilgrimage to Ise_ –

_Travel Account of a Pilgrimage to Ise_

travel blogs –

travel diaries

travel journals , –

travel letters

travel memoirs

travel methods –

_Travel Secrets_

travel writing, adoption of term

_Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit_

_Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary_ –

travelling body –

_Travelling cultures_

_Travelling Sketches_

_Travels_

_Travels in Arabia Deserta_ ,

_Travels in Asia_

_Travels in Asia, Africa and Europe during the Years 1799–1803_

_Travels in Britain_

_Travels in Central Africa_

_Travels with Charley_

_Travels in China_ ,

_Travels in the Congo_

_Travels with a Donkey_ –,

_Travels in France_

_Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa_ ,

_Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa_ , –

_Travels into the Interior of Africa_

_The Travels of Marco Polo_ ,

_Travels in the Mughal Empire_

_The Travels of Sir John Mandeville_ ,

_Travels in Switzerland_

_Travels in a Thin Country_

_Travels Through Arabia, and Other Countries in the East_ –

_Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile_

_Travels in West Africa Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons_ ,

TripAdvisor –

_Triste Tropiques_ , , , ,

_Tristessa_

Trivedi, Harish

Trollope, Anthony ,

_True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados_

_True North: Travels in Artic Europe_ , –,

_True Stories_ ,

Tucker, Bill

Tuninetti, Ángel

_Tunis Hours_

_Turkish Embassy Letters_

_Turkish Tales_

Turner, J.M.W.

Turner, Victor

Tutuola, Amos

Twain, Mark ,

_Two Leaves and a Bud_

_Two Treatises of Government_

_Two Years Before the Mast_

_Two Years in New South Wales_

_Uganda's Katakiro in England_ ,

Ultima Thule xix, –,

_Unbeaten Tracks in Japan_

unconscious drives

_Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India_

_Universal Marine Dictionary_

untourists

_Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys_

Urbain, Jean-Didier

urban walking

Urrea, Luis Alberto –

Urreta, Luis de

Urry, John

USA _see_ North America

_Utopia_ , ,

utopian impulses

Utterback, Kristine

Vaca, Cabeza de ,

_vagabondage_ ,

van der Post, Lauren

Van Dyke, John C.

Van Gelder, Lindsy

van Linschoten, Jan Huyghen

van Noort, Olivier

Vandera, Alonso Carrió de la

Varenius, Bernhard

Veer, Gerrit de ,

Venuti, Lawrence

veracity, of travel writing –

Verne, Jules ,

vertical travel

Vespucci, Amerigo , ,

Vicinus, Martha

_Video Night in Kathmandu_ , –

Vietnam –

violence of the letter

Virgil , –

Virilio, Paul

virtual travel ,

_Vishnu Purana_

_A Visit to Don Octavio_ –

_The Visit to the Top of the Mountain_

_The Visitor: An African Woman's Story of Travel and Discovery_

visual culture, and travel writing –, –

visual quality, in Chinese travel writing

_Vitesse_

_Voyage of the Argo_

_Voyage of the Beagle_ , ,

_The Voyage of the "Discovery"_

_The Voyage of the "Fox" in the Arctic Seas_

_Voyage of Italy_

_A Voyage Round Great Britain_ –

_A Voyage Round the World_ , , ,

_The Voyage and Shipwreck of the Great Ship Sao Paulo_

_Voyage to Russia_

voyages and travel genre –

_Voyages and Travels_

vulgar travellers

Wadia, Ardaser

Wagner, Peter

Wainaina, Binyavanga

Wainwright, Alfred

Waldseemüller, Martin

_Walkabout_ magazine

_Walking Home_

walking tours _see_ pedestrianism

Walkowitz, Rebecca

Wallace, Alfred Russel

_Wanderings in the Holy Land_

_Wanderings in Northern China_

war correspondents, and travel writing –

_War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents_

Ward, Russel

_Warhaftige Historia_

_The Waste Land_ , , ,

_Watermark_

Watson, John Forbes

Watsuji Tetsuro –

Watts, Richard –

Waugh, Evelyn , , ,

_The Way of the World_ , ,

_Ways of Seeing_

_A Week at the Airport_

_Wentworth Street, Whitechapel_

West, Rebecca ,

West, Thomas

Western hegemony

_Western Islands of Scotland_

Western travel writing (1450–1750) –

Western travel writing (1750–1950) –

Wey, William ,

Wharton, Edith

_What Is Cultural History?_

Wheeler, Maureen

Wheeler, Sara , , , ,

Wheeler, Tony

_Where the East Begins_

White, Edmund , , –,

_White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa_

Whymper, Edward ,

Wicquefort, Abraham de

Wilde, Oscar

Wilkinson, J.

William of Rubruck ,

Williams, Duncan –

Williams, Helen Maria

Williams, Patrick

Wilson, Jan

Wollstonecraft, Mary

_Woman in China_

women

and colonialism ,

as explorers

female solidarity –

feminist geography

feminist imperialists –

feminist literary criticism

feminist projects

and Latin American travel

letters and diaries

and mountain travel

pilgrimages by , –

pioneer

scientific travel

_Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics_

women travellers , , , –, –, –, , , –, , –

and authority –

women's travel writing xvi-ii, –, –, , , , , –, , –, , , , , –,

_Women Writing Culture_

_Women's Orients_

_Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing_ –, –

wonders of the East genre

Wood, Thomas

Woolf, Virginia ,

Wordsworth, Dorothy , –,

works of art –

_Works and Days_

_The Worst Journey in the World_

Wright, Richard

_Writing Culture_ , ,

Xavier, Francis

Xenophon ,

Xu Xiake –

_The Yangtse Valley and Beyond_

Yared, Nazek Saba

Ye Youming

_A Year in Provence_

Yellow Peril

Yi-Fu Tuan

youji writing –, , , , , –

Young, Arthur

Young Germany

Youngs, Tim xvi, , , , , , , , ,

Yu Zhanghua ,

Yuan Mei

Zhang Dai

Zhang Longxi

Ziadeh, Nicola

Zika, Damouré –, , , –, –

zones, as analytical tools , –

_Zong!_

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook