“Pretty as a Picture”

Journeys ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-106
Author(s):  
Imene Gannouni Khemiri
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Aesthetic Sensibility ◽  
Travel Accounts

Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest in travel writing, postcolonialism, and landscape politics. However, studies of travel writing addressing the notion of the picturesque have not yet explored the idea of aesthetic sensibility in British travel narratives in the Regency of Tunis. This article examines the aesthetics of the picturesque in three British travel accounts: Grenville Temple’s Excursions in the Mediterranean: Algiers and Tunis (1835); Robert Lambert Playfair’s Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce in Algeria and Tunis (1877); and Henry Spencer Ashbee and Alexander Graham’s Travels in Tunisia (1887). These travelers used the picturesque in different but interlinked ways; they oscillated between finding the uncanny landscape an object of delight where it conformed to British aesthetic doctrine and an object of derision where they noted aesthetic deficiencies. By the turn of the nineteenth century, this picturesque way of seeing shifted into an Orientalist desire for “Otherness.”

scholarly journals The Politics of Travel: The Travel Memoirs of Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin and Sake Dean Mahomed

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. p66
Author(s):  
Amrita Satapathy
Keyword(s):  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Politics Of Representation ◽  
The West ◽  
Comparative Analyses ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Indian Immigrant ◽  
Aesthetic Sensibility

Representation of the East in 18th century western travel narratives was an outcome of a European aesthetic sensibility that thrived on imperial jingoism. The 18th century Indian travel writings proved that East could not be discredited as “exotic” and “orientalist” or its history be judged as a “discourse of curiosity”. The West had its share of mystery that had to be unravelled for the curious visitor from the East. Dean Mahomed’s The Travels of Dean Mahomed is a fascinating travelogue cum autobiography of an Indian immigrant as an insider and outsider in India, Ireland and England. I’tesamuddin’s The Wonders of Vilayet is a travel-memoir that addresses the politics of representation. These 18th century travelographies demystify “vilayet” in more ways than one. They analyse the West from a variety of tropes from gender, to religion and racism to otherness and identity. This paper attempts a comparative analyses of the two texts from the point of view of 18th century travel writing and representations through the idea of journey. It seeks to highlight the concept of “orientalism in reverse” and show how memoirs can be read as counterbalancing textual responses to counteract dominant western voices.

scholarly journals ROMANIAN TRAVELLERS TO ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. NATIONAL SPECIFICITY IN ION CODRUDRĂGUȘANU’S TRAVEL ACCOUNTS

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-33
Author(s):  
Mihaela Culea ◽  
Andreia-Irina Suciu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Contact Interaction ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Theoretical Data ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Cultural Contact ◽  
Textual Study ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Travel Accounts

The complexity of the travelling experience cannot be understood outside the scope of culture (see, for instance, Schulz-Forberg 2005) and travelling is thus often discussed in relation to the human being‟s thirst for knowledge, intellectual or spiritual enlightenment, aesthetic refinement, often as a result of cultural contact, interaction, transfer or exchange. The travelling experiences of Romanian travellers to England through the centuries have been inspired by many of these goals. This paper focuses on the travel accounts of a little known Romanian traveller to England in the nineteenth century, namely, writer, teacher, journalist and politician Ion Codru-Drăgușanu (1818–1884). His travel accounts reveal that travelling was perceived as a source of intellectual improvement, maturation, cultural development, interaction and exchange, as a process of gaining knowledge, an experience also counterbalanced by a tourist‟s adventure dominated by curiosity, pleasure and amusement. In order to reveal how this shift takes place and the multi-fold significance of the travelling experience as such, the paper‟s structure combines theoretical data with textual study and seeks to rediscover forgotten personalities of the Romanian culture who made English-Romanian encounters more numerous and productive. Firstly, the paper presents the conceptual distinctions between the term traveller and other related words, such as voyager, tourist, pilgrim, explorer, or migrant. Secondly, it makes a brief overview of travelling in history and of travel writing with the purpose of contextualizing Codru-Drăgușanu‟s travels. Thirdly, the synoptic presentation of the literary background related to travels to and from Romania in the nineteenth century as well as the brief review of the historical and cultural context specific to England in that period assist us in our exploration of the written accounts of travels recorded by CodruDrăgușanu in his Peregrinul transilvan. 1835–1848 (The Transylvanian Traveller. 1835– 1848).

Narrating Travel, Narrating the Self: Considering Women‘s Travel Writing as Life Writing

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoë Kinsley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Travel Accounts

This article considers the ways in which eighteenth-century womens travel narratives function as autobiographical texts, examining the process by which a travellers dislocation from home can enable exploration of the self through the observation and description of place. It also, however, highlights the complexity of the relationship between two forms of writing which a contemporary readership viewed as in many ways distinctly different. The travel accounts considered, composed (at least initially) in manuscript form, in many ways contest the assumption that manuscript travelogues will somehow be more self-revelatory than printed accounts. Focusing upon the travel writing of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Katherine Plymley, Caroline Lybbe Powys and Dorothy Richardson, the article argues for a more historically nuanced approach to the reading of womens travel writing and demonstrates that the narration of travel does not always equate to a desired or successful narration of the self.

Book Reviews

Transfers ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 146-166
Author(s):  
Johannes Görbert ◽  
Russ Pottle ◽  
Jeff Morrison ◽  
Pramod K. Nayar ◽  
Dirk Göttsche ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
Alexander Von Humboldt ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Review Finding ◽  
University Of Massachusetts

German Literary Anthropology: Across Cultures, Across Genres Stefan Hermes and Sebastian Kaufmann, eds., Der ganze Mensch – die ganze Menschheit: Völkerkundliche Anthropologie, Literatur und Ästhetik um 1800 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 318 pp., 10 illustrations, €89.95What’s Old Is New Again, Mostly Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, eds., New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 325 pp., $90Complex Journeys around the World and through Literary and Intellectual Traditions around 1800 Johannes Görbert, Die Vertextung der Welt: Forschungsreisen als Literatur bei Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt und Adelbert von Chamisso. Weltliteraturen/World Literatures, Schriftenreihe der Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien, vol. 7 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), vi, 426 pp., 8 illustrations, €109.95Travel as Cultural Work Gary Totten, African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 170 pp., $26.95Colonial Encounters between Africa and Europe—with Special Reference to Austria and Switzerland Manuel Menrath, ed., Afrika im Blick: Afrikabilder im deutschsprachigen Europa, 1870–1970 (Zurich: Chronos, 2012), 329 pp., €43Social Formations and Literary Forms in Long Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing Mary Henes and Brian H. Murray, eds., Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 248 pp., 21 illustrations, $95Travel Accounts of Polar Regions and Colonial Discourse Mike Frömel, Off ene Räume und gefährliche Reisen im Eis: Reisebeschreibungen über die Polarregionen und ein kolonialer Diskurs im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2013), 288 pp., €29.50.“Imagined Geographies” and the Navigation of British European Identity Katarina Gephardt, Th e Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789–1914 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 248 pp., 15 illustrations, $104.95Terminal and Threshold: Experiencing the Airport Christopher Schaberg, Th e End of Airports (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 216 pp., 25 illustrations, £13.99NOVEL REVIEW Finding Purity Jonathan Franzen, Purity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 563 pp., $28

scholarly journals THE MERCURIO GUNFLINTS: A TECHNO-TYPOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL ASSESSMENT

2016 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 363-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Biagi ◽  
Elisabetta Starnini ◽  
Carlo Beltrame
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Size And Shape ◽  
Manufacturing Technique ◽  
The North ◽  
Major Significance ◽  
Cultural Assessment ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Napoleonic Era ◽  
Small Finds

The discovery of the wreck of the brig Mercurio, which sank in 1812 in the waters of the north Adriatic, is of major significance for the study of Italic Kingdom vessels from the Napoleonic era. The underwater excavations carried out in 2004–11 led to the recovery of many small finds, among which are several gunflints of different size and shape. The Mercurio gunflints were produced mainly from blades using a technique in use in Britain and France, but also in the workshops of the Lessini Hills around Ceredo (Verona province, northern Italy). We suggest that the flint employed for their manufacture probably came from Monte Baldo, in the Trentino, or perhaps from the River Tagliamento, in Friuli. We can exclude the possibility that the specimens recovered from the shipwreck were made from French flint because of the typically north Italian manufacturing technique and the character of the grey Treveti-derived flint. Given the complexity of the period during which the Grado (or Pirano) battle took place, the study of even such small items can contribute to a better interpretation of the dramatic events that characterised the beginning of the nineteenth century in that part of the Mediterranean.

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.

Surgeon Captain Sheldon F Dudley and the person to person spread of brucellosis by inhalation

2010 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-187
Author(s):  
H V Wyatt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Confined Spaces ◽  
The Mediterranean

AbstractAnalysis of brucellosis epidemics in ships of the Mediterranean fleet in the nineteenth century are most easily explained by aerosol transmission in grossly overcrowded, hot and humid confined spaces.

“The Blackness of Darkness”

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-22
Author(s):  
Lara Langer Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Tourist Attraction ◽  
White Writers ◽  
The World ◽  
Newspaper Articles ◽  
Travel Accounts

Abstract This article considers Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave as an unexpected site for nineteenth-century theorizations of racialized Blackness. Mammoth Cave became a major tourist attraction in the 1840s, generating a host of guidebooks, travel accounts, magazine illustrations, panoramas, newspaper articles, and fiction. Crucial to its fame was the fact that the guides who led visitors through the cave were enslaved men. This article argues that white writers responded to the guides’ knowledge of the cave by reframing it as affinity. In doing so, they transformed Mammoth Cave’s subterranean darkness into a manifestation of racialized Blackness. But the writers’ racialization of Mammoth Cave also had a tendency to slip out of their control. As they associated its spatial darkness with racialized Blackness, the literal underground of Mammoth Cave flickered into an underground that was more than literal—a mysterious Black formation, of unguessed dimensions and certain danger, beneath the world as they knew it. Finally, the article asks what we can glean from the literature of Mammoth Cave about the body of Black thought it sought to disavow: the alternative relations between race and the underground that the guides theorized through their own subterranean explorations.

Port Said and Ismailia as Desert Marvels: Delusion and Frustration on the Isthmus of Suez, 1859-1869

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 622-647
Author(s):  
Lucia Carminati
Keyword(s):  
Red Sea ◽  
Suez Canal ◽  
Coastal City ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Northern Shore ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Port Said ◽  
Travel Accounts

In April 1859, one hundred and fifty laborers gathered on Egypt’s northern shore. When pickaxes first hit the land to be parted from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, not only was the Suez Canal initiated, but the coastal city of Port Said was also born. Two more cities, Ismailia (1862) and Port Tewfik (1867), were later founded along the waterway. This article analyzes the ways in which the environment of the isthmus of Suez changed upon the digging of the canal as well as the ideas that germinated around such changes. By relying on published memoirs, travel accounts, and archival documents, I explore how Western contemporaries viewed the isthmus desert and constructed narratives around the urbanization and the peopling of the area. I argue that they sanctioned the myth that Western initiative alone could transform the isthmus sands into flower gardens, thus disregarding realities on the ground.

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