Search Results (49)

The study of historical monuments within both architectural and literary frameworks reveals a dynamic interplay between scientific observation and artistic interpretation—a vital characteristic of travel writing/the travelogue. This approach, exemplified by British traveler and writer Henry Finnis Blosse Lynch (1862–1913), reflects how factual detail and creative representation are seamlessly integrated in depictions of sites, landscapes, and cultural scenes. This case study highlights Lynch as a pioneering explorer who authored the first comprehensive volume on Armenian architecture and as a writer who vividly portrayed Armenian monuments through both verbal description and photographic imagery, becoming the first traveler to document such sites using photography. Additionally, this paper emphasizes the significance of Lynch’s detailed accounts of architectural monuments, churches, monasteries, cities, villages, populations, religious communities, and educational institutions in vivid language. The careful study of his work can contribute meaningfully to the investigation of the travelogue as a literary genre and to the preservation and protection of the architectural heritage of historical and contemporary Armenia, particularly in regions facing cultural or political threats. Full article

“Know that in place of a heart I carry a tongue,” writes the unnamed poetic speaker of Mexican poet Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead. This documentary poetic text alternates between the voices of Central American immigrants journeying north and a subtle yet bold revision of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’s A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, with some words from the Friar’s 1552 text replaced by other words that reflect the realities of twenty-first century immigrants traveling north. Interspersed with de la Casas’s texts are persona poems in which we are invited to listen to the ghosts of immigrants who have suffered tragic deaths. This essay explores the ways that, crossing borders between time and space while drawing strength from his Christian faith, Rodrigo resists the erasure of Indigenous peoples, honors their journeys, and invites readers into solidarity. Full article

This paper explores Great Basin arid-zone hunter–forager rock art as signalling behaviour. The rock art in Lincoln County, Nevada, is the focus, and this symbolic repertoire is analysed within its broader archaeological and ethnographic contexts. This paper mobilises an explicitly theoretical approach which integrates human behavioural ecology (HBE) and the precepts of information exchange theory (IET), generating assumptions about style and signalling behaviour based on hunter–forager mobility patterns. An archaeological approach is deployed to contextualise two characteristic regional motifs—the Pahranagat solid-bodied and patterned-bodied anthropomorphs. Contemporary Great Basin Native American communities see Great Basin rock writing through a shamanistic ritual explanatory framework, and these figures are understood to be a powerful spirit figure, the Water Baby, and their attendant shamans’ helpers. This analysis proposes an integrated model to understand Great Basin symbolic behaviours through the Holocene: taking a dialogical approach to travel backward from the present to meet the archaeological past. The recursive nature of rock art imagery and its iterative activation by following generations allows for multiple interpretive frameworks to explain Great Basin hunter–forager and subsequent horticulturalist signalling behaviours over the past ca. 15,000 years. Full article

The word “curiosity” has an opaque history with contradictory attitudes and connotations acquired ever since Antiquity. This poses an interesting problem in the case of Leo Africanus, who never uses the word in his Cosmographia de l’Affrica yet exhibits curiosity at every turn as a traveler and a writer. This essay relies on a distinction that Michel Foucault makes regarding types of curiosity: that which produces conventional knowledge (which he rejects) and that which seeks extraordinary knowledge that “enables one to get free of oneself”, resulting in “the knower’s straying afield of himself”. Both as a traveler and a writer, Michel de Montaigne demonstrates that such an attitude was a living reality in sixteenth-century Europe. Montaigne’s many reflections on his “straying afield of himself” provide a bridge to interpreting Leo Africanus’s practices of traveling and writing. Leo’s profession as a diplomat, his economic expertise and his training as an Islamic legal expert all led to his far-reaching journeys, particularly in Islamic Africa but also Asia as of a young age, bringing about his many encounters with historical figures and events while also granting him access to uninhabited nature, as well as every sort of human settlement, from remote villages to great cities. His will to knowledge—curiosity that leads him to ‘stray afield of himself’ by seeking out the unusual and the unknown—proves to be the key to his travel and his writing. Full article

This short concluding chapter reflects on the work of an ongoing collaborative academic project focused on the C18th home tour. Curious Travellers could be described as a ‘crucible’ project—a space in which different media, different perspectives, and different research skills combine and collide. Currently funded by the AHRC, it is a digital humanities project involving TEI tagging and crowd-sourcing, but its foundation is archival research into manuscripts. It is focused through the influential Tours of Wales and Scotland published by the naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant, yet it seeks to unpick the multiple voices and collaborations behind his texts and to explore their legacy in the journeys and texts of others. The creation of new editions continues to generate new topics and research questions, including Anglophone/Celtic-language interactions; the writings of women tourists; the role of material objects (specimens and souvenirs) and of visual culture in knowledge exchange and production. Increasingly, project researchers are relating their work to broader global contexts of colonialism and environmental history. The diversity of the genre has proved hugely stimulating for a range of audiences beyond academia: community engagement and creative practices have been a key feature from the start. There are, of course, challenges—practical, methodological, financial. This reflective piece will acknowledge the constraints, as well as the possibilities, of being multi-stranded, cross-disciplinary—and intermittently funded. Full article

The final decades of the eighteenth century saw the significant expansion of botanical propagation and collections across the globe, both as an aesthetic corollary and to provide the underpinning resources for imperialism. The focus of this article is the development of the network between botanists in India and England in the 1790s through the correspondence between William Roxburgh (1751–1815), superintendent of the Botanical Garden in Calcutta from 1793, and Sir James Edward Smith (1759–1820), who as Sarah Law notes, was ‘a focus of correspondence with every serious botanist in the world’ (Law, 2007, 184). Such networks were sustained by letters describing the plants and the treatment they needed, the habitat from which they had been taken, and details of how they had been collected and packed. Epistolary writing between plant hunters and British collectors can be understood, I suggest, as a form of travel writing. This is a form in which correspondence builds connections and relationships between fellow scientists and enthusiasts and the fragmentary focus on place, and the mobility of humans is replaced by close attention to the aesthetic and biological details of plants and the best ways of securing their successful transport across the globe. Using an ecocritical frame, this article explores the position of plants and biological specimens themselves as travellers and considers the ways in which their care and preservation have been articulated through sociable correspondence. Full article

This article argues that a focus on the day excursion as a particular form of journey, with its inherent limits in relation to scale, distance, and duration, enables us to bring recent critical thinking on microtravel as a form with “foundations in the depth or intensity of description” into dialogue with scholarship that has given sustained attention to modes of descriptive practice that were specific to eighteenth-century British literature and the narrative representation of interior domestic space. The three English travellers under consideration are John Loveday (1711–1789), Dorothy Richardson (1748–1819), and Caroline Lybbe Powys (1738–1817). All made numerous home tour journeys of different kinds but never published their records of their travelling in their lifetimes. All displayed sustained interest in interior description, whether that was for the purpose of antiquarian research, as was the case with Loveday, and to some extent, Richardson, or as a means of collecting, arranging, and performing domestic aesthetic sensibility, as in the writing of both Richardson and Powys. The small local journeys analysed here speak of privileged leisure: the accounts offer experimentation in the narration of journeys made within limits, but those limits are rarely of opportunity. Yet these young travellers still negotiate authority: in the practice of day excursioning, and in writing up those experiences, we see each traveller utilising this compact form to find opportunities for self-assertion, employing the formulaic structures of antiquarian record and country house catalogue in order to articulate an independent curatorial voice. Full article

Thinking about how animals are categorised in Mungo Park’s journey into the interior of Africa provides a deeper understanding of their significance in the early exploration experiences of Africa by Europeans during this era. As it stands, there certainly exists a small but growing body of animal criticism in literary studies, and what can be suitably described as the animal turn is certainly gaining momentum more broadly within twenty-first century literary criticism and debate. However, there has been scant scholarly research on this theme of animals within eighteenth-century travelling practices. In recent times, the scholarship on Park’s journey has been highly particular; new understandings of Park’s trip are still being reached. Considering such specificity, an examination of Park’s narration of nonhuman animals during his trip will not only provide original insight into this aspect of his African experience but also interpret the ways that his narrative differentiates and categorises the various animal experiences he had whilst in Africa. Full article

This essay explores the mid-eighteenth-century travel experience of Scottish writer Anne Macvicar Grant [1775–1838]. Grant is perhaps best known for her late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel writing and anthropological discourse focussed primarily upon the Scottish Highlands. Yet, the majority of Grant’s childhood was spent in Albany, New York. After she had established herself as a writer and published various texts dealing with her more recent experience in the Scottish Highlands, in 1808, Grant published Memoirs of an American Lady, a semi-biographical account of her childhood spent in the multicultural contact zone of a British military outpost. There are two key issues that this essay explores. First, I discuss the process of memory. Unlike intentional travelogues of the time, Grant’s text was not compiled with the aid of a diary or ledger. Grant’s entire account comprises memories of events that occurred over forty years in the past. Part of this essay then discusses the potential fallibilities of the fragility of human memory upon the traveller. While it may be anticipated that this first issue is detrimental to the account of the traveller, the second key issue that I explore is arguably advantageous to Grant’s account. The extent to which Grant, throughout her life, immersed herself within various marginalised communities undoubtedly allows for the production of a more nuanced and balanced account of external cultures than was the custom at the time. What complicates this account is the mixing of memory and cultural immersion. In her writing around the Scottish Highlands, Grant frequently relies upon her experience of certain cultures as a child to explain and convey her understanding of the different marginalised communities she encounters as an adult. Integral to this essay is the fact that this mixing of memory and cultural exposure also occurs the opposite way around. In the Memoirs, the writer’s recollections of the Mohawk or the Kanien’kehà:ka people and colonial Dutch communities as a child seem to be coloured and subjected by her more recent experience of the Highland people. Full article

In 1806, Charles Fothergill, a young man with a strong interest in natural history, set out on a seven-month tour of Orkney and Shetland. His goal was to write a book about the islands that would emulate the work produced by the earlier traveller Thomas Pennant on Wales and mainland Scotland. Despite his ambition, Fothergill never succeeded in completing his book. His surviving manuscripts, which range from a rough working journal covering one part of his journey to some comments on botany that seem ready to go to press, suggest some of the difficulties that he might have found both in constructing a coherent narrative of his travels and in recreating a version of Pennant’s antiquarian and scientific travels at a time when tastes in travel writing were shifting to focus more on the pleasures of landscape and aesthetics. Full article

In this paper, the authors present the possibilities of transnational networking and developing innovative cultural routes through participatory research and creative presentations of European cultural heritage in special collections of Adriatic libraries. The purpose of the research, conducted in the framework of the course Travel Writing and Cultural Routes, was to identify collections that contain travel writing material related to the broader Euro-Mediterranean area and to enable its better visibility through the digitization and creation of new European cultural routes. The students, with the help of librarians at the University Library in Pula, explored special collections, such as the Marine Library, and proposed the creation of new cultural routes, following the itineraries of European travel writers in the Adriatic. The conducted research indicated collections and materials in heritage institutions (archives, libraries and museums) in Pula and Istria relevant to the topics of cultural routes and travel in Europe, as well as regional multicultural history. Libraries in Istria and Dalmatia have valuable collections of rare archival material related to European travels to the Adriatic. The cataloguing and digitisation of rare travel texts has the potential to raise awareness of these collections, adding to their significance for academic research and heritage-based tourism. Full article

This paper examines the writings of European travelers, chaplains, and resident doctors on pandemics in the Mediterranean regions from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Using French comparative literary theory, the article highlights how Muslim communities in Egypt, Turkey, Aleppo, and Mecca were stereotyped based on their belief in predestination, their failure to avoid contamination, and their lack of social distancing during plague outbreaks. This paper argues that travelers were influenced by Renaissance humanism, Ars Apodemia, religious discourses, and texts, such as plague tracts, model town concepts, the book of orders, and tales, and that they essentialized Mediterranean Islamicate societies by depicting contamination motifs supposedly shaped by the absence of contagion theory in prophetic medicines. Regarding plague science, this paper concludes that Christian and Muslim intellectuals had similar approaches until the Black Death and that Arabs were eclectic since the Abbasid period. This paper further maintains that the travelers’ approaches fostered chauvinism and the cultural hegemony of the West over the Orient since the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, driven by eschatology, conversion, and power structure narratives. Full article

This contribution compares the final sections of Acts of the Apostles and Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Through this comparison, I aim to show that these two writings resemble one another in their attention to travel as a literary theme. Both Acts and Life employ this theme to communicate their message and, in their narrative endings, set up their implied readers as travelers who are meant to continue the journeys of the protagonists in these writings. At the same time, Acts and Life differ in how exactly they envision their readers to continue the journeys of their protagonists. I will argue that these similarities and differences can be explained by the shared social and intellectual climate that Acts and Life inhabit: both writings result from discourses on travel and self that were rife among intellectuals in the Roman Empire in the first three centuries of our era, irrespective of their ethnic, legal, or cultural affiliations. Full article

This paper is an exploration of play in tourism. It is situated in an approach to play and toys informed by phenomenological perspectives and theoretical insights drawn from existential anthropology. It argues that tourism and play are intimately linked and outlines the ways in which connections between the two have been made. This paper focuses on a particular practice of play in travel—one that involves the use of a toy. Using the notion of ‘toy tourism’, I examine the ways in which touristic practices associated with play are brought into being in the moment of doing. The research is located in the resorts of Palmanova and Magaluf on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. I conducted the research using a doll from the Barbie Fashionista range, who I named Mordaith. I outline how and why Mordaith became my travel companion and the experience and events associated with my time with her in the resorts. This paper recounts the story of what happened when I brought about the play of toy tourism in Mallorca. It is an experimental approach that unfolds in the writing as much as in the gathering of information during fieldwork. I argue that what play is, and what a toy is, are neither fixed nor graspable objectivities. Rather, both toy and play, and, thus, toy tourism, emerge in my embodied imaginative understanding of what touristic and toy tourism practices are, as well as the actual embodied and emotional movements of employing a toy in practice. Full article

There are not many high-precision, portable digital compass solutions available right now that can enhance combined navigation systems’ overall functionality. Additionally, there is a dearth of writing about these products. This is why a tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) sensor-based high-precision portable digital compass system is designed. First, the least-squares method is used to compensate for compass inaccuracy once the ellipsoid fitting method has corrected manufacturing and installation errors in the digital compass system. Second, the digital compass’s direction angle data is utilized to offset the combined navigation system’s mistake. The final objective is to create a high-performing portable TMR digital compass system that will enhance the accuracy and stability of the combined navigation system (abbreviated as CNS). According to the experimental results, the digital compass’s azimuth accuracy was 4.1824° before error compensation and 0.4580° after it was applied. The combined navigation system’s path is now more accurate overall and is closer to the reference route than it was before the digital compass was added. Furthermore, compared to the combined navigation route without the digital compass, the combined navigation route with the digital compass included is more stable while traveling through the tunnel. It is evident that the digital compass system’s design can raise the integrated navigation system’s accuracy and stability. The integrated navigation system’s overall performance may be somewhat enhanced by this approach. Full article