The Wondrous Road: Archaic Travel Narrative

2021 ◽  
pp. 203-265
Keyword(s):  
Travel Narrative

“An Unquestionable Source?”

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-179
Author(s):  
John Cyril Barton
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
Old World ◽  
Spanish Inquisition ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Benito Cereno ◽  
The Town ◽  
Parallel Action

This essay is the first to examine Melville’s “The Town-Ho’s Story” (Chapter 54 of Moby-Dick [1851]) in relation to W. B. Stevenson’s then-popular-but-now-forgotten British travel narrative, Twenty Years’ Residence in South America (1825). Drawing from suggestive circumstances and parallel action unfolding in each, I make a case for the English sailor’s encounter with the Spanish Inquisition in Lima as important source material for the Limanian setting that frames Melville’s tale. In bringing to light a new source for Moby-Dick, I argue that Melville refracts Stevenson’s actual encounter with the Inquisition in Lima to produce a symbolic, mock confrontation with Old-World authority represented in the inquisitorial Dons and the overall context of the story. Thus, the purpose of the essay is twofold: first, to recover an elusive source for understanding the allusive framework of “The Town-Ho’s Story,” a setting that has perplexed some of Melville’s best critics; and second, to illuminate Melville’s use of Lima and the Inquisition as tropes crucial for understanding a larger symbolic confrontation between the modern citizen (or subject) and despotic authority that plays out not only in Moby-Dick but also in other works such as Mardi (1849), White-Jacket (1850), “Benito Cereno” (1855), Clarel (1876), and The Confidence-Man (1857), wherein the last of which the author wrote on the frontispiece of a personal copy, “Dedicated to Victims of Auto da Fe.”

Perpindahan dan Perubahan : Transportasi dalam Struktur Naratif Riwayat Perjalanan ke Amerika di Era Viktorian

Metahumaniora ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Ari J. Adipurwawijdana
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Henry James ◽  
World View ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
Transportation Infrastructure ◽  
Material Base ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
Infrastructure System ◽  
The Subject

ABSTRAKRiwayat yang disajikan penulis Britania era Viktorian tentang perjalannnya ke Amerikamengasumsikan adanya sebuah jaringan prasarana transportasi. Sistem transportasiterkait dengan riwayat perjalanan (travel narrative) dalam tiga hal, yaitu (1) sebagaibasis material bagi perjalanan, (2) sebagai substruktur riwayat, dan (3) sebagai pokokpembicaraan dalam riwayat itu sendiri. Buku Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)merupakan model bagi cara infrastruktur transportasi menentukan aspek naratologis,yaitu urutan dan perspektif dalam struktur naratif riwayat perjalanan. Karya tersebut jugamenyajikan transportasi sebagai pokok pembicaraan dalam teksnya itu sendiri walaupun tidaksejauh sebagaimana yang tampak pada The Amateur Emigrant (1895) karya Robert LouisStevenson. Dalam hal ini, The American Scene (1907) karya Henry James juga relevankarena, walaupun tidak secara gamblang membicarakan transportasi sebagai topik dantidak pula menampakkan ciri-ciri riwayat perjalanan, karya tersebut merepresentasicara wawasan Britania-Amerika trans-Atlantik dianggap sebagai sesuatu yang lumrah.Wawasan ini juga memandang menganggap perjalanan trans-Atlantik sebagai semacamperjalanan menembus waktu, yang menunjukkan ketidaknyaman para penulis Britaniaabad kesembilanbelas terhadap transformasi sosial ke masyrakat demokratis yangdirepresentasi secara metaforis oleh pemahaman mereka tentang Amerika.Kata kunci: catatan perjalanan Viktorian, transportasi, wisataABSTRACTNarratives presented by Victorian British writers about their travels to America assume theavailability of a transprtation infrastructure system. Such a system is related to the travelnarrative in three things, namely, (1) as a material base for travel, (2) as a narrative substructurehistory, and (3) as the subject-matter of the narratives. Fanny Trollope’s Domestic Mannerof the Americans (1832) is a model for the way transportation infrastructure determinesnarratological aspects, namely order and perspective in the structure of the travel narrative.The piece also presents transportation as a subject-matter in its text although it does notgo so far as do Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant (1895). In discussingtransportation Henry James’ The American Scene is also relevant because, despite it’s notexplicitly speaking of transportation as a topic nor does it show the convential characteristicsof the travel narrative, the work represents a British-American trans-Atlantic world viewas a given. This world view also considers trans-Atlantic travels as a kind of voyage acrosstime, implying the discomfort of nineteenth-century British writers concerning the socialtransition into a democratic society represented by America as a metaphor.Keywords: Victorian travel narrative, transportation, tourism

‘Peripateticating among the mountains’: Robert Southey and the Aesthetics of Pedestrian Motion

Romanticism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-87
Author(s):  
Jonathan Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
Travel Narrative ◽  
Lake District ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
Insight Into

Robert Southey's first published text about the Lake District, the faux travel narrative Letters from England (1807), inaugurated what became a lifelong concern with this landscape, one with pedestrianism at its very core. Ostensibly the work of the Spanish tourist Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, Southey's Lakeland tour narrative depended on his own Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797) – his Iberian countryside ramblings serving as a blueprint to frame his alter ego's engagement with the Lakes on foot. The motif of the outlandish Spaniard in the English fells as a turnaround of the foreign Englishman walking in Iberia, I argue, was exploited by Southey to outgrow the limitations of the picturesque as a mode of understanding and appreciating landscape. These two texts offer an insight into the direction of thought at work in peripatetic practice, evincing a markedly pedestrian Southeyan gaze that highlights each place's potential to hold multiple meanings.

scholarly journals Orientalist Representation of Nepali People, Culture and Landscape: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Kincaid’s Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 24-40
Author(s):  
Shuv Raj Rana Bhat
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Jamaica Kincaid ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Imperial Politics ◽  
The Himalaya ◽  
The Way

Partly drawing on postcolonial rhetorics and partly drawing insights from critical stylistics and critical discourse analysis, this paper basically explores how Antigua-born-American writer Jamaica Kincaid rhetorically constructs Nepal in a disguised form of a travel writer through her travel narrative Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya. Even though Kincaid is best known as an anti-imperialist, the way she longs for the Garden of Eden and represents Nepali landscape, people, and culture posits that her travel to Nepal is threaded with the rhetoric of Othering, metropolitan culture, and imperial politics. In particular, she looks at the travelled places and people with an imperial eye: nomination, surveillance, negation, debasement, and binary rhetoric.

scholarly journals Writing when Being Undone by Travelling. Travel Narrative between ‘Reliance’ and Resilience

Viatica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilles LOUŸS
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
Left Behind

Many travels end badly: Nicolas Bouvier reported in Le Poisson-Scorpion his terrible stay in the island of Ceylon (now called Sri-Lanka) in 1955. Michel Vieuchange died at the end of his 1930 hike through the Moroccan desert, and twenty years later Raymond Maufrais knew the same fate in the Guyana jungle. Whereas these two only left behind daily logs of their travels, Nicolas Bouvier elaborated a fully literary work from his Ceylonese shipwreck. Despite their differences, these three documents introduce the issue of how one can report a traumatic experience. This paper analyses the value of writing in the light of the concepts of “reliance” and “resilience”.

scholarly journals Pleasure and Instruction: Generic Conventions in Emma Hart Willard’s 
Journal and Letters, from France and Great Britain

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-61
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Rutkowska
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
New Type ◽  
Distinguishing Features

The purpose of the present paper is to analyse epistolary and descriptive conventions in Journal and Letters, from France and Great Britain (1833) by Emma Willard. The article argues that Willard attempts to combine the standards of 18th-century travelogue with its emphasis on instruction with a new type of autobiographical travel narrative which puts the persona of a traveller in the foreground. In this respect, Willard’s Journal and Travels, for all its didacticism, testifies to an increasing value attached to subjective experience, which was to become one of the distinguishing features of nineteenth-century travel writing.

The White Lady Travels: Narrating Fez and Spacing Colonial Authority in Edith Wharton's In Morocco

Hawwa ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lhoussain Simour
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
And Control

AbstractForegrounding Orientalism as a system of thought that has produced constructed images and disfigured discourses about Europe's Other, this paper is primarily concerned with the practice of delineating landscape and manipulating the space of Fez in Edith Wharton's In Morocco. It starts with a rereading of Edward Said's model of analysis and then moves to an investigation into how this travel narrative displays, vulgarizes, and reproduces one of the strategies characteristic of colonial discourse: the mapping of the colonial space, specifically through the inscription of self and Other power relations, fueled up by a will to knowledge and control over new territories. It also attempts to read Wharton's narrative against Sara Mills' argument, which claims that it is gender rather than genre that is at the genesis of colonial heterogeneity.

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