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The first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates. The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives, with their distinctive representations of identities, places, and cultures, respond to today's globalized, high-speed world characterized by the dual mass movements of tourism and migration. Yet a corresponding cutting-edge discussion of twenty-first-century travel writing in German has until now been missing. The fourteen essays in Anxious Journeys...
Travel Writing and Re-Enactment: Echotourism explores the popular subgenre of travel narratives that re-enact historically prominent journeys. Drawing on philosopher Walter Benjamin, this monograph reads such re-enactments as quests for aura in which travellers seek to capture a sense of distinction and historical profundity. Travel Writing and Re-Enactment frames the re-enactment of past journeys in a number of contexts, including Benjamin’s writing on mechanical reproduction, Judith Butler’s work on gender performance, and postmodern parody. Echotourist journeys are surprisingly contingent and precarious, and force travellers to navigate historical changes involving empire, gender, and travel practice in densely performative ways. Through close readings of contemporary travel narratives, this monograph considers the legacies of Lord Byron, Charles Darwin, Graham Greene, Mary Kingsley, and Ernest Shackleton, among others. Travel Writing and Re-Enactment examines the way literary re-enactment expresses, and sometimes confounds, the desire to find meaning through travel in the contemporary world.
The intellectual and cultural impact of British and Irish writers cannot be assessed without reference to their reception in European countries. These essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, record the ways in which W. B. Yeats has been translated, evaluated and emulated in different national and linguistic areas of continental Europe. There is a remarkable split between the often politicized reception in Eastern European countries but also Spain on the one hand, and the more sober scholarly response in Western Europe on the other. Yeats's Irishness and the pre-eminence of his lyrical work have posed continuous challenges. Three further essays describe the widely divergent reactions to Yeats in his native Ireland, during his lifetime and up to the most recent years.
Broadly this book is about the Arabian desert as the locus of exploration by a long tradition of British travellers that includes T. E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger; more specifically, it is about those who, since 1950, have followed in their literary footsteps. In analysing modern works covering a land greater than the sum of its geographical parts, the discussion identifies outmoded tropes that continue to impinge upon the perception of the Middle East today while recognising that the laboured binaries of “East and West”, “desert and sown”, “noble and savage” have outrun their course. Where, however, only a barren legacy of latent Orientalism may have been expected, the author...
This book breaks new ground in considering the nature and function of anthologies of poetry and short stories in twentieth-century Portugal. It tackles the main theoretical issues, identifies a significant body of critical writing on the relationship between anthologies, literary history and the canon, and proposes an approach that might be designated Descriptive Anthology Studies. The author aims to achieve a full understanding of the role of anthologies in the literary polysystem. Moreover, this study considers anthologies published in Portugal in the early years of the twentieth-century, the influential figures who made them, the works they selected, and who read them. It also focuses on ...
An important new reading of Portugal's greatest poet.
Travel writing has gained new appeal, and writers from the British Isles have been particularly productive and successful in this genre. This volume provides a concise introduction to the basic characteristics and historical development of travel writing as it has emerged in the British Isles from the Middle Ages to the present day. Examples considered include many classics such as Defoe, Sterne and Smollett, Isabella Bird and Mary Kingsley, Chatwin and Raban, and also lesser known representatives. Types of travel writing discussed include pilgrims' itineraries, exploration writing, tourist accounts as well as postmodern varieties.
The present work deals with the representation of trauma and violence in coming-of-age stories written by African-American and Afro-Caribbean women authors in the United States. The kinds of violence explored in this work are related to the post-colonial condition the women protagonists experience, in which racism, sexism, classism, among other kinds of discrimination, are co-created in an intersectional experience of oppression. The titles analyzed in this work are: Lucy (1990), written by Jamaica Kincaid; Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), written by Edwidge Danticat; Bone Black – Memories of Girlhood (1996), written by bell hooks; and God Help the Child (2015), written by Toni Morrison. The B...
This thoughtful examination of a century of travel writing about the American West overturns a variety of popular and academic stereotypes. Looking at both European and American travelers’ accounts of the West, from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, David Wrobel offers a counter narrative to the nation’s romantic entanglement with its western past and suggests the importance of some long-overlooked authors, lively and perceptive witnesses to our history who deserve new attention. Prior to the professionalization of academic disciplines, the reading public gained much of its knowledge about the world from travel writing. Travel writers f...