Explorations in the Icy North: how travel narratives shaped Arctic science in the nineteenth century

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Janice Cavell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Arctic Science

scholarly journals Dialektik der Erschließung: The German–Austrian Alps between Exploration and Exploitation

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Sean Ireton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Exploration And Exploitation ◽  
Nördliche Kalkalpen ◽  
Austrian Alps ◽  
Limestone Alps ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps

Focusing on the so-called Nördliche Kalkalpen or Northern Limestone Alps of Germany and Austria, I will discuss how human interaction with these mountains during the age of the Anthropocene shifts from scientific and athletic exploration to commercial and industrial exploitation. More specifically, I will examine travel narratives by the nineteenth-century mountaineers Friedrich Simony and Hermann von Barth, juxtaposing their respective experiences in diverse Alpine subranges with the environmental history of those regions. This juxtaposition harbors a deeper paradox, one that can be formulated as follows: Whereas Simony and Barth both rank as historically important Erschließer of the German and Austrian Alps, having explored their crags and glaciers in search of somatic adventure and geoscientific knowledge, these very sites of rock and ice were about to become so erschlossen by modernized tourism that one wonders where the precise boundaries between individual-based discovery and technology-driven development lie. In other words, during the nineteenth century a kind of Dialektik der Erschließung (a variation on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung) manifests itself in the increasing anthropogenic alteration of the Alps.

scholarly journals Arguing with Europe: Eastern Civilization Versus Orientalist Exoticism

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Arabic Translation ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Alphonse De Lamartine ◽  
The People ◽  
Romantic Poet

The French romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine traveled to the East—namely, Syria, Palestine, and parts of the Balkans—in 1832–33, with his wife and daughter. His account of these travels, the Voyage en Orient, was published in 1835 and went on to become one of the major Eastern travel-narratives of the nineteenth century. Edward Said was scathing about it in Orientalism: “What remains of the Orient in Lamartine's prose is not very substantial at all … the sites he has visited, the people he has met, the experiences he has had, are reduced to a few echoes in his pompous generalizations” (179). I would not dissent from this assessment. But Said was not the first to remark on the nature of Lamartine's representations of the Orient. In 1859, twenty-four years after the French poet's visit to the East, a young Beiruti poet and journalist, Khalīl al-Khūrī, made an Arabic translation and commentary, with some sharp criticisms, of one of the poems included in Voyage en Orient.

The Idea of the Chinese Garden and British Aesthetic Modernism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Chang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Western China ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Broad Audience ◽  
Period 1880 ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Chinese Gardens

This chapter argues that a comparative lack of British interest in traditional Chinese gardens during the period 1880-1914, often interpreted as evidence of Japan’s more ready appeal, obscures the complexity of organic exchange going on between Britain and East Asia at this time. Celebrated plant hunters were launching daring expeditions into unexplored Western China; those plants, upon importation, were so successfully and quickly naturalized that they became evidence of the landscape conformity that Japanese designs were held to resist. What’s more, even as these plant hunters were publishing their travel narratives for a broad audience, select British readers were absorbing a very different view of Chinese gardens through the outré works of French and British writers. Spurred by the retranslation of Thomas De Quincey’s works into French, late nineteenth-century French decadents found inspiration in the same provocative elements of Chinese behavior and landscape that British Romantics had found a century before. Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden was read and appreciated by Oscar Wilde, among others, and formed a part of a larger fin-de-siècle European reconsideration of the East. It is the combination of the multiple forms of the Eastern garden that provide a new way of understanding aesthetic internationalism.

Introduction

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy S. Mercer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Celebrity Status ◽  
Nineteenth Century France

Xavier Marmier's vast output, the variety of his achievements, and his celebrity status made him an influential figure in nineteenth-century France. In retrospect, his greatest achievement was probably as an initiator in bringing an awareness of foreign literatures and cultures to France; but his contribution is so vast that it is impossible to summarise it succinctly. Although he is now generally neglected, his name still occurs quite frequently, most often in studies of comparative literature analysing the introduction of a particular author or culture to France. Some of his travel narratives are slowly being recognised today as important social documents of the ways in which people lived in particular countries.

Cycles

2019 ◽  
pp. 153-176
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Botanic Garden ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Natural Histories

This chapter situates William Earle’s 1800 novel Obi within a network of texts—including histories, natural histories, poems, and travel narratives—that surface the novel’s engagement with the profitable business of botanical transplantation which, at the turn into the nineteenth century, depended on connections between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Earle aligns human bodies with plants in order to represent the slave trade as a destructive form of transplantation and amputation. Drawing from Erasmus Darwin’s poem Botanic Garden, the novel Obi advances a “vegetable economy” in which revolution is a natural, botanical response to the violent transplantation project of the Atlantic slave trade. The surprisingly transoceanic and political life of plants during this period therefore forms the backdrop for the novel’s anti-slavery argument, which aligns human bodies with the bodies of plants and understands plantation slavery in terms of botanical transplantation.

Numbers

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-73
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Global Trade ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Regular Practice

This chapter focuses on American mathematical schoolbooks from the age of revolutions, as well as associated genres such as manuals on bookkeeping, navigation, and insurance. Knowledge of these fields was crucial for the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyages of commerce and discovery that connected the Atlantic and Pacific, and these books introduced a wide variety of readers, including women, to the world of global trade. In their attention to the interrelated practices of calculation and speculation, these genres—in dialogue with literature on the lottery—taught readers the narrative dynamics of suspense that also informed the emerging genre of the novel. Like transoceanic travel narratives, novels were the textual companions to capitalism, offering readers regular practice in accommodating the sensations of expectation central to a world increasingly penetrated by global trade and its mechanisms of risk-taking and risk assessment. Novels emerged, in other words, as numberless representations of an increasingly number-driven world.

Narrative

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shared Narrative

This chapter reviews the publication history of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century genre of Pacific travel narratives, and examines its narrative features. During this period, ships moved with increasing regularity on incredibly risky voyages between the world’s oceans. At the same time, novels came to dominate the literary world of fiction. These developments are related by their shared narrative dynamics, especially in the relationship between narrative suspense and numerical speculation, between words and numbers. The short-term risks and losses that attended these voyages were offset by their long-term profits, as the pleasure of accumulation concealed but also depended on the horrors of violence.

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