Download or read book Representations of the North in Victorian Travel Literature written by Dimitrios Kassis and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-02-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Travel literature has always been associated with the construction of utopias which were founded on the idea of unknown lands. During their journeys in foreign lands, British travellers tended to formulate various critical opinions based on their background knowledge of the country visited. Their attempts to interpret other nations were often misinterpretations of the peoples in question as the Other. At the close of the eighteenth century, when Grand Tourism started to fade away and travelling became a mainstream activity for the middle-class Briton, travel writers attempted to identify with.

Download or read book Icelandic Utopia in Victorian Travel Literature written by Dimitrios Kassis and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-11 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on Iceland as a nineteenth-century utopian locus in the light of racial theories attached to the country’s national framework. In particular, it investigates the ways in which five nineteenth-century travellers define their national identity and gender in relation to Iceland during the Victorian period, during which European nationalism emerges as an idea of paramount importance. Owing to the gradual contemplation of this peripheral word as the cradle of the Germanic nations, Victorian travel writers endeavoured to reconstruct the image of Iceland in accordance with the racial theoretical framework that underlay the nineteenth-century British nation-building agenda.

Download or read book A Highland Tour of Victorian Travel Writing written by Dimitrios Kassis and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-09 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Scotland was persistently viewed as a peripheral region, inhabited by savage Highlanders, epitomising the sublime and the grotesque as well as the distance of the Scottish Other from civilised Europe. However, the rediscovery of the Ossianic tradition, the Scottish link to the Norman invasion and the increasing appeal of Scottish historical narratives to the average Victorian set the pattern for the reconstruction of a literary utopia. Facing the risk of racial segregation due to their Celtic background, a significant number of Scottish writers and theorists succumbed to the rising Anglo-Saxonism, seeking every means to prove their Anglo-Saxon background at the expense of their Celtic roots. This volume includes a set of travel narratives and essays on Scotland, covering a period of more than two centuries (1722-1907). The travellers who flocked to Scotland were either driven by literary aspirations, or were on a mission to explore the country’s wild inhabitants, the Highlanders. In their attempt to define Scottish identity in accordance with the cultural, ideological and political standards of the English, Scottish and American travel writers often adhered to the Othering of the Scottish people, promoting images of backwardness and the sublime.

Download or read book Perceptions of Germany in British Travel Literature written by Dimitrios Kassis and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As part of the “beaten track”, Germany did not conform to the Grand Tourist ideals of eighteenth-century British travellers that were influenced by the spirit of the Enlightenment, and, therefore, sought to trace vestiges of the Greco-Roman cultural tradition in their ventures across the continent. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the German landscape becomes the central theme of British travel discourse, marking the gradual shift of focus from the “saturated” image of classical Greece to the rediscovery of the Old Germanic culture of the sagas. Driven by an antiquarian interest in the German context, British travellers discovered Germany in the wake of the nineteenth century, when the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire not only signalled French expansionism in Protestant Europe, but also stimulated the appetite of the Victorians for the exploration of the German culture in an attempt to define themselves as being of pure Teutonic stock. Given the strenuous struggle of German thinkers to deal with the feelings of humiliation and shame caused by the Napoleonic rule, and, in view of a potential Gallicisation, nineteenth-century Germans mastered the fields of comparative philology and Northern antiquarianism to transform their political weakness into a new cultural paradigm that not only fostered pan-Germanism through the rediscovery of the folk tales and legends of their medieval tradition, but also ascribed to Germany a superior spiritual role, which was later incorporated into the racial discourses of Germany and Britain. This book is concerned with the views of British travel writers, focusing on travel narratives produced from 1794 until 1845. As such, it sheds light on instances which pertain to the representation of Germanness in relation to the British national context.

Download or read book Deconstructions of the Russian Empire in Western Travel Literature written by Dimitrios Kassis and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situated between Europe and Asia, Russia has systematically challenged the European theories attached to nationhood due to its geopolitical and cultural peculiarities. After the rise of European nationalist movements, imperial Russia posed a threat to the very existence of the Germanic empires of Britain, Germany and Austria, and was frequently evoked to epitomise European barbarism, paganism, despotism and the Orient. In its struggle to acquire a new identity, which would bridge the gap with Western empires, Russia could not conform to the rising Anglo-Saxon movements that sought to glorify Nordic supremacy at the expense of the Oriental Other. Drawing upon this binary opposition between the Orient and the Occident, the Russian Empire concentrated on the development of its own nation-building theories, which managed to incorporate the ascending Pan-Slavic wave into its nationalist agenda. The anti-Western rhetoric that often characterised Russian politics contributed to the subversion of the conventional Western perspective of the Orient and the emergence of Eurasianism as a political theory that exalted the different traits of its imperial system. This book sets the focus on the representations of the Russian Empire from 1792 until 1912 in the field of travel literature. To this end, it selects British and American travel narratives of the aforementioned period to explore all aspects of Russian identity and culture. For this reason, it addresses major issues attached to Russian history and culture that were investigated by Western travellers in their attempt to approach the Russian Empire.

Download or read book American Travellers in Scandinavia written by Dimitrios Kassis and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-12 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence of the racial theories of Nordicism and Anglo-Saxonism at the threshold of the twentieth century changed the cultural and political mapping of the world, and gave a new impetus to the construction of national discourses both in Europe and overseas. In its complex situation as a former colony and a rising empire, America strove to forge a new identity based on the biological findings of fresh scientific fields, the so-called “pseudosciences”. In their travel texts, American travel writers wished to revive their ties with the Old Norse world, embarking on trips which aimed to link the discovery of Vinland, by the Vikings, with the nineteenth-century rediscovery of the Old Norse culture, by Victorian and American scholars. This book explores American perceptions of the Nordic countries which contributed to the construction of the nineteenth-century American national identity. The concepts of Nordic unity and the Americanisation of Northern Europe, in response to the increasing immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, are connected to American travellers’ parallel attempt to reflect upon the Nordic societies from a utopian perspective.

Download or read book Europe in British Literature and Culture written by Petra Rau and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-13 with total page 787 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How has Europe shaped British literature and culture – and vice versa – since the Middle Ages? This volume offers nuanced answers to this question. From the High Renaissance to haute cuisine, from the Republic of Letters to the European Union, from the Black Death to Brexit -- the reader gains insights into the main geographical zones of influence, shared intellectual movements, indicative modes of cultural transfer and more recent conflicts that have left their mark on the British-European relationship. The story that emerges from this long history of cultural interactions is much more complex than its most recent political episode might suggest. This volume offers indispensable contexts to the manifold and longstanding connections between British and European literature and culture. This book suggests that, however the political landscape develops, we will do well to bear this exceptionally rich history in mind.

Download or read book Late Victorian Heroic Lives in the Writings of Frank Mundell written by Moniez Baptiste and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-21 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the work of Frank Mundell, a late-Victorian author for the Sunday School Union. Mundell focused on heroism and represented various kinds of heroic deeds and figures, regardless of gender, in his books. Writing for educative, as well as entertaining, purposes, he avoided the use of didacticism and he endeavoured to combine the traditional and the modern in the stories he chose to tell. Mundell’s favourite format was that of the prosopography, putting together several heroic lives or incidents. He was careful to dedicate each of his volumes to one topic in particular, thus distinguishing the different types of heroic deeds from one another. His writings belong to four series, or collections, each highlighting a specific version of heroism, from instances of the mundane performed in a familial context to extraordinary deeds. He wrote about such bold acts as those featuring in the stories of brave firemen fighting devouring flames, fearless sailors in tempestuous seas, determined miners risking their lives to save their comrades, or intrepid explorers facing perils in the wide world. This book analyses each of his publications, highlighting the elements belonging to his representation of heroism as a whole.

Download or read book International Medievalisms written by Leverhulme Early Career Fellow Mary Boyle and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identifies and investigates international medievalism through three distinct strands: "Internationally Nationalist", "Someone Else's Past?", and "Activist Medievalism". Medievalism - the reception of the Middle Ages - often invokes a set of tropes generally considered 'medieval', rather than consciously engaging with medieval cultures and societies. International medievalism offers an additional interpretative layer by juxtaposing two or more national cultures, at least one of which is medieval. 'National' can be aspirational: it might refer to the area within agreed borders, or to the people who live there, but it might also describe the people who understand, or imagine, themselves to constitute a nation. And once 'medieval' becomes simply a collection of ideas, it can be re-formed as desired, cast as more geographically than historically specific, or function as a gateway to an even more nebulous past. This collection identifies and investigates international medievalism through three distinct strands, 'Internationally Nationalist', 'Someone Else's Past?', and 'Activist Medievalism', exploring medievalist media from the textual to the architectural. Subjects range from The Green Children of Woolpit to Refugee Tales, and from Viking metal to Joan of Arc. As the contributors to each section make clear, for centuries the medieval has provided material for countless competing causes and cannot be contained within historical, political, or national borders. The essays show how the medieval is repeatedly co-opted and recreated, formed as much as formative: inviting us to ask why, and in service of what.

Download or read book Greek Dystopia in British Women Travellers Discourse written by Dimitrios Kassis and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-18 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greece has always occupied a prevalent position in European philosophy. During the Enlightenment, the Greco-Roman culture gained a new impetus, which paved the way for the surge of the Grand Tour and established Italy as a popular travel destination amongst European travellers who yearned to be in close communion with its ancient sites. Unlike Italy, Greece still posed a challenge to the average travel writer, since it functioned as a bridge between Europe and the Orient. The gradual shift of focus from Neoclassical ideals to Northernism, which conveniently conformed to the nation-building Anglo-Saxon paradigm, marked a parallel reversal of cultural order, which resulted in the view of Greece as a land of piracy and banditry, conditions which intensified its perception as the Oriental Other and led British intellectuals to associate the Greek nation with nearby countries on various levels. Considering the parallel emergence of the “pseudosciences”, which venerated the image of the Nordic race and persistently viewed other nations as the Other, Greece was automatically placed as an alien culture in the light of Social Darwinism. During its war of independence, Greece became the subject of ardent political and cultural debates, which favoured its autonomy from the Ottoman yoke, yet undermined its complete transformation into an independent state. The focal point of this book is British women travellers’ perceptions of Greece and the Orient from the late-eighteenth century until the late-Victorian era. The construction of a Greek dystopia will be explored in relation to the historical background that fuelled the negative conceptualisation of the Greek nation as mongrel, unruly, indolent and perilous to the British imperialist agenda. This book, therefore, sheds light on British women travellers’ efforts to subvert patriarchal authority and engage in predominantly male activities, during which they are purposefully or unconsciously led to several misconceptions regarding the Greek cause.

Download or read book Emerging Voices for Animals in Tourism written by Jes Hooper and published by CABI. This book was released on 2024-02-14 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the study of animal-human interactions within the context of tourism has been explored in a greater number and diversity of ways within the last decade, the discourse remains divided between traditional tourism academia and outside disciplines 'looking in'. Tourism academia has borrowed philosophical, ethical, gender studies, sociological, ecological conservation, and economic lenses to explore animals in tourism, however collaboration with authors external to tourism studies remains few. This edited volume strengthens the bridge between tourism academia and other disciplines by highlighting the fresh perspectives, emerging methodologies and innovative interdisciplinary conventions at the forefront of animals in tourism research, whilst critically working towards more ethical human-animal interactions within the tourism and leisure space. Split into four parts 'emerging motivations', 'emerging cultures', 'emerging narratives', and 'emerging reflections', this unique text will be widely applicable to scholars working towards equitable human-animal interactions within tourism.

Download or read book Images of Irishness in Nineteenth Century Travel Literature written by Dimitrios Kassis and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its annexation to the British Crown, Ireland has never ceased in forming the subject of an ardent national debate in Great Britain which resulted in the demonisation of the Celtic race as subaltern and backward. In its effort to forge a national identity, the British Empire adopted several collective identities on the basis of the racial and cultural findings of the 1850s which gave a new impetus to the systematic view of England as a typically Anglo-Saxon culture, staunchly opposed to the alleged Celtic backwardness and the rebellious spirit of the Irish. In view of the rising anti-Irish wave of sentiment in the British imperialist imagination, Irish nationalism was manifest through a series of uprisings, the majority of which sought to link the country to its ancient Celtic heritage. The Celticist movements of Young Ireland and the Irish Revival revealed the need of Irish Nationalists to acquire a new, collective identity, which proved to be a strenuous task, given the complex historical and ethnic background of the Irish. This book investigates the extent to which Irish identity is affected by the racist and nationalist discourses of the nineteenth century which emerged to either defend or oppose the image of Ireland as a cultural construct. The travelogues explored here include some of the most fundamental representations of Ireland by prominent Irish and British travel writers, whose impressions of the island might be linked to the utopian and dystopian dimensions of the country.

Download or read book London s Urban Landscape written by Christopher Tilley and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: London’s Urban Landscape is the first major study of a global city to adopt a materialist perspective and stress the significance of place and the built environment to the urban landscape. Edited by Christopher Tilley, the volume is inspired by phenomenological thinking and presents fine-grained ethnographies of the practices of everyday life in London. In doing so, it charts a unique perspective on the city that integrates ethnographies of daily life with an analysis of material culture. The first part of the volume considers the residential sphere of urban life, discussing in detailed case studies ordinary residential streets, housing estates, suburbia and London’s mobile ‘linear village’ of houseboats. The second part analyses the public sphere, including ethnographies of markets, a park, the social rhythms of a taxi rank, and graffiti and street art. London’s Urban Landscape returns us to the everyday lives of people and the manner in which they understand their lives. The deeply sensuous character of the embodied experience of the city is invoked in the thick descriptions of entangled relationships between people and places, and the paths of movement between them. What stories do door bells and house facades tell us about contemporary life in a Victorian terrace? How do antiques acquire value and significance in a market? How does living in a concrete megastructure relate to the lives of the people who dwell there? These and a host of other questions are addressed in this fascinating book that will appeal widely to all readers interested in London or contemporary urban life.

Download or read book Re Mapping Centre and Periphery written by Tessa Hauswedell and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2019-03-25 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians often assume a one-directional transmission of knowledge and ideas, leading to the establishment of spatial hierarchies defined as centres and peripheries. In recent decades, transnational and global history have contributed to a more inclusive understanding of intellectual and cultural exchanges that profoundly challenged the ways in which we draw our mental maps. Covering the early modern and modern periods, Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery investigates the asymmetrical and multi-directional structure of such encounters within Europe as well as in a global context. Exploring subjects from the shores of the Russian Empire to nation-making in Latin America, the international team of contributors demonstrates how, as products of human agency, centre and periphery are conditioned by mutual dependencies; rather than representing absolute categories of analysis, they are subjective constructions determined by a constantly changing discursive context. Through its analysis, the volume develops and implements a conceptual framework for remapping centres and peripheries, based on conceptual history and discourse history. As such, it will appeal to a wide variety of historians, including transnational, cultural and intellectual, and historians of early modern and modern periods.

Download or read book Portraits of Wollstonecraft written by Eileen M. Hunt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-09-21 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Tablet's Books of the Year 2021 Portraits of Wollstonecraft collects and introduces 102 texts and artifacts that document Mary Wollstonecraft's public reception in art, literature, philosophy and feminist politics. Each portrait is a milestone in her depiction in culture. From William Blake's 1803 poem 'Mary' to Maggi Hambling's contentious sculpture in 2020, these sources validate the monumental place Wollstonecraft holds in not just one but many canons. The color images in Part I: Public Sightings trace her earliest reception in portraiture, from 1785 to 1804, with detailed analysis paired with each of the illustrations. Arranged chronologically, these landmark images are followed by the reviews of Wollstonecraft's books that appeared during her lifetime in Jamaica, Madrid, Amsterdam and London. Part II: Global Afterlives, examines her multifarious posthumous reception and features diary entries, excerpts from English-language biographies, letters, articles and introductions to her books. From Olive Schreiner's introduction to the Rights of Women composed in Cape Town in 1889 to the translator's preface to the first Czech edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1904, they showcase an impressive sweep of cross-cultural perspectives on her life and writings. The sources in Part III: Making an International Icon chart the depth and breadth of her legacies on a global scale. Feminists, philosophers, and social scientists-from Ruth Benedict to Virginia Sapiro to Amartya Sen-have written and spoken with conviction about the emotional power of looking into the eyes of the author of the Rights of Woman. This section includes major thinkers from across the 19th and 20th centuries who responded to Wollstonecraft's theories on virtue, love, gender, education, and rights: Mary Shelley, Emma Goldman, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Susan Moller Okin, Barbara Johnson and Martha Nussbaum. We see how Wollstonecraft gained traction in feminist politics, both as a philosopher and as a transcultural icon of the cause, beginning with English suffragist Millicent Fawcett's centennial edition of the Rights of Woman in 1891 and extending through feminist art in The Paris Review during the age of #MeToo. Assembling responses from Ireland, Continental Europe, North and South America and across the former colonies of the British Empire, this one-of-a-kind collection tells a compelling story of Wollstonecraft's watershed contributions to human rights debates throughout the modern and contemporary world.

Download or read book Glimpses of the Bulgarian Other in British Travel Literature written by Dimitrios Kassis and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-07 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until its emancipation from the Ottoman yoke, Bulgaria always occupied an unprivileged and unfavourable position in British imagination, from the very first mention of the country in Western travelogues. However, since the late eighteenth century, the Bulgarian nation has been subjected to the scrutiny of the British traveller owing to its proximity to other nations whose national struggles received more prominence, and consequently overshadowed the Bulgarians’ National Renaissance, such as Serbia and Greece. This volume concerns all the depictions of Bulgaria as a dystopian land from the eighteenth century until the country’s emergence as an important military power after its Liberation movement in 1878. In these travel narratives, the notion of the Bulgarian nationhood is described as an antithesis to idea of the civilised British, but also as a threat to the stability of the Ottoman Empire. With the rapid decline of the latter, from a mere Ottoman province, Bulgaria gradually transforms into a nation whose National Revival efforts come to the fore to question the British and Ottoman depictions of the Bulgarian nation as subaltern and uncultivated.

Download or read book Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel written by Barbara Franchi and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Victorian travellers define and challenge the notion of Empire? How did the multiple forms of Victorian travel literature, such as fiction, travel accounts, newspapers, and poetry, shape perceptions of imperial and national spaces, in the British context and beyond? This collection examines how, in the Victorian era, space and empire were shaped around the notion of boundaries, by travel narratives and practices, and from a variety of methodological and critical perspectives. From the travel writings of artists and polymaths such as Carmen Sylva and Richard Burton, to a reassessment of Rudyard Kipling's, H. G. Wells's and Julia Pardoe's cross-cultural and cross-gender travels, this collection assesses a broad range of canonical and lesser-studied Victorian travel texts and genres, and evaluates the representation of empires, nations, and individual identity in travel accounts covering Europe, Asia, Africa and Britain.