“There is Nothing There.” Dmitrii Danilov’s Travel Writing and the Lure of the Russian Provinces

Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s seminal study The Practice of Everyday Life, the author argues that Dmitrii Danilov’s travel writing (Twenty Cities, 2007-2009) reimagines Russia’s symbolic geography by destabilizing the traditional opposition centre – periphery. Rather than depicting the provincial world as either an absurd and horrid world, or as a repository of “true Russianness”, Danilov provides a “decentred” perspective on the provinces that asserts the uniqueness of each city he visits. The novel Description of a City (2012), however, resurrects the more traditional view of the provinces as a world of boredom and cultural lack. To analyse this development the article looks at the central figure of the sluggish traveller-narrator, the employment of “camera-eye narration” and other, mainly linguistic, devices that reaffirm the notion of the provincial city’s “namelessness” as one of its most defining characteristics.

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.

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.

Teaching Writing Skills in English for Tourism by Employing Travel Writing

This chapter examines teaching writing skills in English for Tourism by employing travel writing, which is not only a tool for teaching linguistic skills, but also encourages students to develop research interests and storytelling techniques. When travel writing was introduced to undergraduate and MA students during the English lessons the role of languages in Tourism, Tourism Discourse and Literary Tourism was also discussed with them. As part of the English assignment, students were asked to produce their own travel writing texts, which were discussed, reviewed by their teacher, re-written and – in the case of Master students – at the final stage, also published as an example of a teaching and learning experiment. Thus, this chapter presents travel writing as a successful method of developing travel writing skills inside the English for Specific Purposes classes.