Introduction

The introductory chapter provides the historical and cultural contexts to situate the discussions on Victorian women’s travel writing on Meiji Japan in the wider academic debate on the British Empire, Victorian literature, and female travel writing. It provides an overview of Anglo–Japanese relations between 1854 and 1912 to trace shifts in the bilateral relationship and foreground its singularity in a multitude of East–West encounters. It then examines travel writings by both male and female travellers to Meiji Japan and fictional representations of the country in Victorian literature and theatre. It surveys travelogues by a group of female travellers alongside those by diplomats and journalists like Kipling, Japan-related writings by Wilde and Stevenson, and theatrical pieces such as The Mikado. The chapter considers the literary invention of Japan and analyses how women travellers negotiated discursive constraints due to gender and colonialism and challenged mainstream representations of Japan and Japanese people.

Coda

This concluding chapter reverses the perspective of the preceding chapters and explores travel writings of Meiji Japanese women who sailed to Victorian Britain. It focuses on the writings of three Japanese women—namely, Tsuda Umeko, Yasui Tetsu, and Yosano Akiko—with diverse backgrounds and purposes. It picks up testimonies of travelling women in Meiji Japan who encountered British people and culture and unveils cross-racial female intimacy and burgeoning transnational feminist alliance on the issues of women’s education and civil rights. It documents their connections with Victorian female educationists such as Dorothea Beale and Elizabeth Phillips Hughes and discovers a long-forgotten link between Isabella Bird and Meiji women’s education.

NJEGOŠ U NJEMAČKIM PUTOPISIMA SVOGA DOBA NJEGOŠ IN GERMAN TRAVELOGUES OF HIS TIME

Although travelogue is a marginalized literary genre, its role in imagological research is enormous and it cannot be disputed that as a media for studying relations between cultures, it mediated vast knowledge and information that was often taken as the only authoritative one. German travel writings of the 19th century about Montenegro were very scarce until Petar II Petrović Njegoš came to power, and with the change of government in Montenegro, the attitude of foreigners towards it also changed, so travel writers from Germany headed to this South Slavic country. Translations played a great role in arousing the interest of German writers, especially the translation of Karadžić's work "Montenegro and Montenegrins", but also the visit of the Saxon King Frederick Augustus II. The time of Njegoš's rule can be considered the blooming of German travel literature about Montenegro and the time when closer ties were established between these two cultures, which will affect the situation after Njegoš's death, when the most important travel writers of the 19th century came to Montenegro from the German-speaking area. In the German travelogues of Njegoš's time, the writers dealt with numerous topics that clearly reflected the image of the other and not all had the same approach and view of certain phenomena in Montenegrin society. However, the personality of the Montenegrin ruler united them and they all wrote hymns about Njegoš, without exception. He was the personification of kindness and hospitality, erudition and wisdom, masculine beauty and prudence in the German travelogues of his time, he was a reformer and an enlightener, and in every respect he was a symbol of progress.

Chiny wyobrażone – Chiny ucieleśnione. Państwo Środka w polskich i serbskich relacjach z podróży (od XVIII do połowy XX wieku)

The article presents an overview of the issues discussed in Tomasz Ewertowski’s monograph Images of China in Polish and Serbian Travel Writings (1720–1949). It reconstructs the discourse that emerges from the journals as their authors report on their journeys to the Middle Kingdom. The article also analyses the conditioning of the presented attitudes in the context of individual experience. Using imagology-based tools, Ewertowski refers to the mental representations of reality recorded in the text in the form of stereotypically formed ethnotypes. Ewertowski creates a mosaic of the way travellers from the West imagined both Chinese cities and the characteristic features of Far Eastern culture, which is often marked by Eurocentrism and an evaluating attitude towards the Other.