Notes on the Location of Happiness

This article explores the world making capabilities of travel writing (Goodman 1978; Youngs 2013). The premise is that literary products are key elements in the configuration of the world itself and that specifically authors of travel accounts mediate the world to their readership at home (Archetti 1994). By highlighting three different examples of travel writing, the article discusses the persistent notion of the tropical island as an actually existing paradise on earth. More specifically, the discussion focus around the notion that happiness exists in places to which one can travel to. The examples at hand are two eighteenth century travel logs one French and one English; Louise-Antoine de Bougainville’s from 1772 and William Bligh’s from 1792, while the third and final example is a contemporary Swedish travel piece written by Anders Mathlein and first published in 2001.

On the Translation of Founding Narratives into Cartographic Images: America in Le Testu’s Cosmographie Universelle (1556)

This article analyzes the links between the first travel accounts of the New World and the production of cartographic images of America in Guillaume Le Testu’s Cosmographie Universelle (1556). Produced in 1556 and dedicated to Admiral of France Gaspard de Coligny, the Norman pilot’s manuscript atlas was created in the context of growing French colonial interest in Terra Brasilis. The transposition of America’s founding narratives into cartographic images as presented in Le Testu’s Cosmographie is interpreted here as an act of translation lato sensu. The translation of the continent’s travel accounts in the strictest sense of the word, and the adaptation of New World information to new audiences and political contexts are also examined in the analysis of this manuscript nautical atlas.

Drifting in the World Literary Space

For Hong Kong poet Leung Ping-Kwan (penname: Ye Si, 1949-2013), travel allows him to visit literary capitals, in which his works are translated into local languages. Without regarding himself as merely a Hong Kong writer, Leung intentionally reminisces about his travel accounts in these literary centers, accentuating how his life is permeated by European traditions. This essay examines the trope of travel in Leung Ping-Kwan’s poems along with his prose essays, focusing on the dialectical thinking of centers and peripheries. I contend that the idea of travel points to the poet’s personal experiences as well as his literary endeavors while embarking on his poetic journeys. I adopt the notion of “self-exile” to describe the moment when Leung stays away from his native land and ponders on how Hong Kong Literature – the so-called “small literature” – can raise its visibility if it is presented in the international literary scene. Specifically, he draws several routes to the literary centers, Paris and Berlin in particular. And without simply being assimilated into the dominant literary culture, Leung usually writes in Chinese and tactically inserts the images of Hong Kong while illustrating the European urban imageries.

Following in the Footsteps of Isabella Bird?

Alma Karlin (1889–1950), a round-the-world traveller, intellectual, and writer from Celje, Slovenia, arrived in Japan and lived in Tokyo in the early 1920s, an era which historians consider to be an interim period between the initial expansion of the Japanese Empire to mainland Asia and its end in 1945. The writer’s fascination with the land can be inferred, among other things, from a 35-page description of Japan and the Japanese in her most famous book, Einsame Weltreise. Die Tragödie einer Frau (The Odyssey of a Lonely Woman), and passages in Reiseskizzen (Travel Sketches), an earlier work. The article aims to place these travel accounts in the historical and ideological contexts of their time while highlighting some similarities and differences between the representations of the land and its people by Karlin and those by Isabella Bird (1831–1904). Although Karlin makes no explicit reference to the famous British traveller in her writing on Japan, the article demonstrates that she must have known about Bird’s book Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. It is, above all, her decision to introduce her (German) readers to topoi that were typical of Victorian women’s travel writing which suggests that Karlin partly based her image of Japan, if not even the itinerary of her journey there, on Bird’s bestselling work. Nevertheless, Karlin does not seem to have conformed to the then dominant orientalist discourses on Japan, her representations generally showing none of the Western arrogance that was so typical of her fellow travellers of both sexes.

Mujer que sabe viajar: autorrepresentación y subjetividad femenina en Cartas a Ricardo, de Rosario Castellanos

This paper reflects on the relationship between the female traveling experience and the epistolary genre through a reading of Rosario Castellanos’s Cartas a Ricardo as travel literature. The aim is to analyse the hybrid nature of the letter as a genre that allows the exploration of ideas and confessing or revealing affects during particular processes of constructing female subjectivities. Different than conventional travel chronicles, it is argued that the travel accounts transmitted through the female epistolary genre can throw light on physical and emotional displacement, but also on the intellectual and creative work of women in (self)censored or repressed environments. It is concluded that for Castellanos both traveling and writing are conscious acts of intellectual and gender freedom.

Western Travellers in the Caucasus. Georgia’s Highways and Byways: Hotels, Inns & Taverns in the 19th Century

Drawing on a wide range of French, English and Russian-language printed source material, the paper deals with the travel accounts of Western visitors to Georgia and the Caucasus in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the everyday practical experience of travel, it outlines the birth of the hotel trade in Tbilisi. After c. 1850, with the building of a railroad, “civilizational” standards began to improve, and over the years Tbilisi hotels were described as being as “good as any European establishment”.Under the heading of provincial travel, the paper addresses the issue of general supplies, provisions and self-catering, modes of transportation, the state of the roads, and the network of postal-stations, whose erratic services were supplemented by the omnipresent, albeit highly unreliable, wayside inn or dukhan. Coming to the Caucasus and Georgia on specific assignments (diplomatic, political, military, commercial, or scholarly) the authors of travelogues bring their prior expectations, nurtured by ancient myths, ancient literature, and a study of earlier travel accounts, with which they engage in textual dialogue. In their sundry reflections and musings they seldom fail to enthuse on the tourist potential of Georgia in particular, and the Caucasus more generally.