Featured Books
Travels with a Tangerine : a journey in the footnotes of Ibn Battutah by
Ibn Battutah set out in 1325 from his native Tangier on the pilgrimage to Mecca. By the time he returned twenty-nine years later, he had visited most of the known world, travelling three times the distance Marco Polo covered. Spiritual backpacker, social climber, temporary hermit and failed ambassador, he braved brigands, blisters and his own prejudices. The outcome was a monumental travel classic. Captivated by this indefatigable man, award-winning travel writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith set out on his own eventful journey, retracing the Moroccan's eccentric trip from Tangier to Constantinople. Tim proves himself a perfect companion to this distant traveller, and the result is an amazing blend of personalities, history and contemporary observation.
Location: Mugar Stacks G490 .M295 2012Publication Date: 2012
Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West by
Few figures from history evoke such vivid Orientalist associations as Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant, explorer, and writer whose accounts of the "Far East" sparked literary and cultural imaginations. The essays in Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West challenge what many scholars perceived to be an opposition of "East" and "West" in Polo's writings. These writers argue that Marco Polo's experiences along the Silk Road should instead be considered a fertile interaction of cultural exchange. The volume begins with detailed studies of Marco Polo's narrative in its many medieval forms (including French, Italian, and Latin versions). They place the text in its material and generic contexts, and situate Marco Polo's account within the conventions of travel literature and manuscript illumination. Other essays consider the appropriation of Marco Polo's narrative in adaptations, translation, and cinematic art. The concluding section presents historiographic and poetic accounts of the place of Marco Polo in the context of a global world literature. By considering the production and reception of The Travels, this collection lays the groundwork for new histories of world literature written from the perspective of cultural, economic, and linguistic exchange, rather than conquest and conflict.
Location: Mugar Stacks G370.P9 M374 2008 and OnlinePublication Date: 2008
Hajj : global interactions through pilgrimage by
Every year, in the last month of the Islamic calendar, millions of Muslims from around the world come together in Mecca to perform the Hajj, the pilgrimage that all capable Muslims should perform at least once in their lives. In 2013, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden organised the exhibition Longing for Mecca. The Pilgrim's Journey. The chapters in this volume are the outcome of the two-day symposium on the Hajj, which was held at the museum in connection to the exhibition. The central theme that runs through the book is how Hajj practices, representations of Mecca and the exchange of Hajj-related objects have changed over time. The chapters in the first part of the book discuss religious, social, and political meanings of the Hajj. Here the relationship is addressed between the significance of pilgrimage to Mecca for the religious lives of individuals and groups and the wider contexts that they are embedded in. Together, these anthropological contributions provide insights into the effects on Hajj practices and meanings for present-day Muslims caused by current dimensions of globalisation processes. The second part of the book takes material expressions of the Hajj as its starting point. It explores what Hajj-related artefacts can tell us about the import of pilgrimage in the daily lives of Muslims in the past and present. The contributions in this part of the volume point out that Mecca has always been a cosmopolitan city and the nodal point of global interactions far exceeding religious activities. Together, the chapters in this book depict the Hajj ritual as a living tradition. Each with its own focus, the various contributions testify to the fact that, while the rites that make up the Hajj were formulated and recorded in normative texts in early Islam, details in the actual performance and interpretations of these rites are by no means static, but rather have evolved over time in tandem with changing socio-political circumstances.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2015
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One Islam, Many Muslim Worlds Spirituality, Identity, and Resistance across the Islamic World by
By all measures, the late twentieth century was a time of dramatic decline for the Islamic world, the Ummah, particularly its Arab heartland. Sober Muslim voices regularly describe their current state as the worst in the 1,400-year history of Islam. Yet, precisely at this time of unprecedentedmaterial vulnerability, Islam has emerged as a civilizational force strong enough to challenge the imposition of Western, particularly American, homogenizing power on Muslim peoples. This is the central paradox of Islam today: at a time of such unprecedented weakness in one sense, how has theIslamic Awakening, a broad and diverse movement of contemporary Islamic renewal, emerged as such a resilient and powerful transnational force and what implications does it have for the West? In One Islam, Many Worlds of Muslims Raymond W. Baker addresses this question.Two things are clear, Baker argues: Islam's unexpected strength in recent decades does not originate from official political, economic, or religious institutions, nor can it be explained by focusing exclusively on the often-criminal assertions of violent, marginal groups. While extremists monopolizethe international press and the scholarly journals, those who live and work in the Islamic world know that the vast majority of Muslims reject their reckless calls to violence and look elsewhere for guidance. Baker shows that extremists draw their energy and support not from contributions to thereinterpretation and revival of Islamic beliefs and practices, but from the hatreds engendered by misguided Western policies in Islamic lands. His persuasive analysis of the Islamic world identifies centrists as the revitalizing force of Islam, saying that they are responsible for constructing amodern, cohesive Islamic identity that is a force to be reckoned with.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2015
Britain Through Muslim Eyes: literary representations, 1780-1988 by
What did Britain look like to the Muslims who visited and lived in the country in increasing numbers from the late eighteenth century onwards? This book is a literary history of representations of Muslims in Britain from the late eighteenth century to the eve of Salman Rushdie's publication of The Satanic Verses (1988).
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2015
Sojourner in Islamic Lands by
Sojourner in Islamic Lands takes us on a journey from Kazakhstan in the far north of Central Asia, across the mountains to the former Soviet Union, then south to Iran just below the Caspian Sea. Russell Fraser follows the ancient Silk Road wherever possible. For centuries the Silk Road was the primary commercial link between Europe and Asia, with much of it over desert sands and accessible only by camel. Building on history and personal experience, Fraser's narrative describes this vast territory with an eye to geography, artistic culture, and religion over more than two thousand years.The book that he gives us depends first of all on travel, but the author's eye is on an interior landscape, and he focuses on the influence of religious ideology on the cultural landscape of Central Asia. Delving deeply into art and architecture, he takes them to be Islam's most significant creative expressions. Although Islam is currently the predominant religion in the region, the book also examines the two other belief systems with modern-day followers--Christianity and an antireligious sect Fraser calls secular progressivism.His aim is to present Islam to Western readers by describing its achievements during the High Middle Ages and comparing and contrasting them with those of modern Islam. The book offers insights into the history of a major world religion through the eyes of a well-known literary scholar on a journey through exotic parts of the world. He steeps us in the latter, inviting the reader to share the journey with him and participate in the sensations it gives rise to.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2014-01-06
Viewing the Islamic Orient: British travel writers of the nineteenth century by
The Islamic Orient studies the travel accounts of four British travelers during the nineteenth century. Through a critical analysis of these works, the author examines and questions Edward Said's concept of "Orientalism" and "Orientalist" discourse: his argument that the orientalist view had such a strong influence on westerners that they invariably perceived the orient through the lens of orientalism. On the contrary, the author argues, no single factor had an overwhelming influence on them. She shows that westerners often struggled with their own conceptions of the orient, and being away for long periods from their homelands, were in fact able to stand between cultures and view them both as insiders and outsiders. The literary devices used to examine these writings are structure, characterization, satire, landscape description, and word choice, as also the social and political milieu of the writers. The major influences in the author's analysis are Said, Foucault, Abdel-Malek and Marie Louise Pratt.
Location: Mugar Stacks DS61.85 .L35 2006Publication Date: 2006
Discourses of Difference: an analysis of women's travel writing and colonialism by
First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Location: Mugar Stacks PR788.T72 M5 1991Publication Date: 1991
Travel Narratives
The Travels of Marco Polo by
First published in 1931. None of the manuscripts which have come down to us represent the original form of Marco Polo's narrative, but it is clear that certain texts are closer to the lost original than others. Entrusted with the task of preparing a new Italian edition of Marco Polo, Benedetto discovered many unknown manuscripts. He carefully edited the most famous of the manuscripts (the Geographic text) and collated it with the other best known ones. #65533; An invaluable index has been added to Aldo Ricci's of Benedetto's text, which includes all the identifications made in the Geographic text and also later editions by Marsden (1818), Pauthier (1865) and Yule (1871). #65533; The difficulty of following Polo on his many journeys has also been simplified by the process of distinguishing between those places on his main route to China and his return journey by sea to Persia and those places which he visited during his stay in China and those he never visited at all.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2004
Two Arabic Travel Books by
wo Arabic Travel Bookscombines two exceptional exemplars of Arabic travel writing, penned in the same era but chronicling wildly divergent experiences.Accounts of China and Indiais a compilation of reports and anecdotes on the lands and peoples of the Indian Ocean, from the Somali headlands to China and Korea. The early centuries of the Abbasid era witnessed a substantial network of maritime trade-the real-life background to the Sindbad tales. In this account, we first travel east to discover a vivid human landscape, including descriptions of Chinese society and government, Hindu religious practices, and natural life from flying fish to Tibetan musk-deer and Sri Lankan gems. The juxtaposed accounts create a jigsaw picture of a world not unlike our own, a world on the road to globalization. In its ports, we find a priceless cargo of information; here are the first foreign descriptions of tea and porcelain, a panorama of unusual social practices, cannibal islands, and Indian holy men-a marvelous, mundane world, contained in the compass of a novella.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2014-01-01- Kitāb Masālik wa-mamālik taṣnīf ibn Hawqal = The oriental geography of Ebn Haukal, an Arabian traveller of the tenth century. Translated from a manuscript in his own possession, ... by Sir William Ouseley by A translation of a book of maps prepared by A.hmad ibn Sahl Balkh⁻i in the early 10th century, revised with extended descriptions written by Ibr⁻ah⁻im ibn Mu.hammad I.s.takhr⁻i ca. 951; another revision was prepared ca. 977 by Mu.hammad Ibn .Hawqal.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 1800
- The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain's 1869 book The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrims' Progress is a humorous travelogue of a voyage Twain undertook two years earlier. He'd sent letters to the newspapers about his steamship voyage through Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land, commenting the whole way in his honest, funny, and sardonic style. Only a few years after the Civil War, this six-month voyage on the steamer "Quaker City" was arranged by famous pastor Henry Ward Beecher and General Sherman (neither of whom made the trip). Mark Twain was among this flock of American tourists as they visited the great sites such as the Louvre in Paris, Florence, and Rome; and a meeting with Czar Alexander II in the Crimea. But Twain being Twain, he ripped into his fellow passengers for their narrow-minded perspectives, Americans who think they're worldly because they've read a few guide books. The title however suggests that the passengers are just that: Innocents. Without the benefits of radio, television, or internet, Americans at this point had only learned of the world through books, primarily European, and only those rich enough to travel had much fresh insight on other cultures. The Innocents Abroad is a part of a collection of Twain's travelogues, including "Roughing It," "Following the Equator," and "Life on the Mississippi.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2013
The Travels and Journal of Ambrosio Bembo by
In 1671, Ambrosio Bembo, a young nobleman bored with everyday life in Venice, decided to broaden his knowledge of the world through travel. That August he set off on a remarkable, occasionally hazardous, four-year voyage to Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and the Portuguese colonies of western India. His journal, now translated into English for the first time, is the most important new European travel account of western Asia to be published in the past hundred years. It opens an extraordinary perspective on the Near East and India at a time when few Europeans traveled to these lands. Keenly observed and engagingly written, Bembo's vivid account is filled with a high sense of adventure and curiosity and provides intriguing descriptions of people, landscapes, food, fashion, architecture, customs, cities, commerce, and more. Presented here with the original illustrations and with a rich introduction and annotations, this lively and important historical document is at last available to scholars, students, and armchair travelers alike.
Location: Mugar Stacks DS47.2 .B46 2007Publication Date: 2007
Fresh Air Fiend: travel writings, 1985-2000 by
In this remarkable collection of essays and articles written over the last fifteen years, Paul Theroux demonstrates how the traveling life and the writing life are intimately connected. Not simply an escape from the mundane, travel has always been a creative act for Theroux. His journeys in remote hinterlands and crowded foreign capitals provide the necessary perspective to "become a stranger" in order to discover the self. Wonderfully broad in scope, thought, and feeling, Fresh Air Fiend touches down on all five continents and floats through most of the seas in between. From the crisp quiet of a solitary week spent in the snow-bound Maine woods, to the expectant chaos of Hong Kong on the eve of the Hand-over, to a small Pacific island where atomic bombs were detonated, Theroux is the perfect guide -- casually informative, keenly observant, wry, and entertaining. As Time has written, Theroux "serves as both the camera and the eye, and both the details and the illusions are developed with brilliance." He also reaches back into his past to tell of his earliest ventures into Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer, treats us to insightful readings of his favorite travel books, and reveals the fascinating stories behind some of his own. Fresh Air Fiend is a companion volume to Theroux's earlier, much beloved Sunrise with Seamonsters, but this is his first collection devoted completely to travel writing, for which the author of such classics as The Great Railway Bazaar and Riding the Iron Rooster is justly famous. Traveling with Theroux is a literary adventure of the first order, never a languid luxury cruise, always an insightful journey to the heart and soul of a place and its people. Fresh Air Fiend is the ultimate good read for anyone fascinated by travel in the wider world or curious about the life of one of our most passionate travelers.
Location: Mugar Stacks PS3570.H4 F74 2000Publication Date: 2000
Women Travel Writers
- Discourses of Difference: an analysis of women's travel writing and colonialism by Location: Mugar Stacks PR788.T72 M5 1991Publication Date: 1991-12-13
Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women's Travel Writing by
Women experience and portray travel differently: Gender matters - irreducibly and complexly. Building on recent scholarship in women's travel writing, these provocative essays not only affirm the impact of gender, but also cast women's journeys against coordinates such as race, class, culture, religion, economics, politics, and history. The book's scope is unique: Women travelers extend in time from Victorian memsahibs to contemporary #65533;road girls#65533;, and topics range from Anna Leonowens's slanted portrayal of Siam - later popularized in the movie, The King and I, to current feminist #65533;descripting#65533; of the male-road-buddy genre. The extensive array of writers examined includes Nancy Prince, Frances Trollope, Cameron Tuttle, Lady Mary Montagu, Catherine Oddie, Kate Karko, Frances Calder#65533;n de la Barca, Rosamond Lawrence, Zilpha Elaw, Alexandra David-N#65533;el, Amelia Edwards, Erica Lopez, Paule Marshall, Bharati Mukherjee, and Marilynne Robinson.
Location: Mugar Stacks PR778.T72 G46 2004Publication Date: 2004
Women and the Politics of Travel, 1870-1914 by
The accepted critical view that late nineteenth-century women travelers were poor carbon copies of male originals has been increasingly shown to be invalid. Late nineteenth-century women's travel literature adhered to a particular worldview as it presented a woman's viewpoint. Closely tied to the given reality of mainstream late Victorian culture, such literature nearly always reflected contemporary social concerns closely related to late nineteenth-century British imperialism. Nonetheless, this work argues that in mapping out a particular performance space for themselves, late nineteenth-century women's travel and travel literature revealed changes in the way society thought about women.
Location: Mugar Stacks PR788.T72 A53 2006Publication Date: 2006- Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818 by British readers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries eagerly consumed books of travel in an age of imperial expansion that was also the formative period of modern aesthetics. Beauty, sublimity, sensuous surfaces, and scenic views became conventions of travel writing as Britons applied familiar terms to unfamiliar places around the globe. The social logic of aesthetics, argues Elizabeth Bohls, constructed women, the labouring classes, and non-Europeans as foils against which to define the 'man of taste' as an educated, property-owning gentleman. Women writers from Mary Wortley Montagu to Mary Shelley resisted this exclusion from gentlemanly privilege, and their writings re-examine and question aesthetic conventions such as the concept of disinterested contemplation, subtly but insistently exposing its vested interests. Bohls' study expands our awareness of women's intellectual presence in Romantic literature, and suggests Romanticism's sources at the peripheries of empire rather than at its centre.Location: Mugar Stacks PR778.T72 B64 1995Publication Date: 1995-10-19
Contemporary Travel Writing
The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing by
To what extent do best-selling travel books, such as those by Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, Bruce Chatwin and Michael Palin, tell us as much about world politics as newspaper articles, policy documents and press releases? Debbie Lisle argues that the formulations of genre, identity, geopolitics and history at work in contemporary travel writing are increasingly at odds with a cosmopolitan and multicultural world in which 'everybody travels'. Despite the forces of globalization, common stereotypes about 'foreignness' continue to shape the experience of modern travel. The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing is concerned with the way contemporary travelogues engage with, and try to resolve, familiar struggles about global politics such as the protection of human rights, the promotion of democracy, the management of equality within multiculturalism and the reduction of inequality. This is a thoroughly interdisciplinary book that draws from international relations, literary theory, political theory, geography, anthropology and history.
Location: Mugar Stacks G465 .L57 2006Publication Date: 2006-11-02
Modernist Travel Writing: intellectuals abroad by
As the study of travel writing has grown in recent years, scholars have largely ignored the literature of modernist writers. Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad, by David Farley, addresses this gap by examining the ways in which a number of writers employed the techniques and stylistic innovations of modernism in their travel narratives to variously engage the political, social, and cultural milieu of the years between the world wars. Modernist Travel Writing argues that the travel book is a crucial genre for understanding the development of modernism in the years between the wars, despite the established view that travel writing during the interwar period was largely an escapist genre--one in which writers hearkened back to the realism of nineteenth-century literature in order to avoid interwar anxiety. Farley analyzes works that exist on the margins of modernism, generically and geographically, works that have yet to receive the critical attention they deserve, partly due to their classification as travel narratives and partly because of their complex modernist styles. The book begins by examining the ways that travel and the emergent travel regulations in the wake of the First World War helped shape Ezra Pound's Cantos. From there, it goes on to examine E. E. Cummings's frustrated attempts to navigate the "unworld" of Soviet Russia in his book Eimi,Wyndham Lewis's satiric journey through colonial Morocco in Filibusters in Barbary,and Rebecca West's urgent efforts to make sense of the fractious Balkan states in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. These modernist writers traveled to countries that experienced most directly the tumult of revolution, the effects of empire, and the upheaval of war during the years between World War I and World War II. Farley's study focuses on the question of what constitutes "evidence" for Pound, Lewis, Cummings, and West as they establish their authority as eyewitnesses, translate what they see for an audience back home, and attempt to make sense of a transformed and transforming modern world. Modernist Travel Writing makes an original contribution to the study of literary modernism while taking a distinctive look at a unique subset within the growing field of travel writing studies. David Farley's work will be of interest to students and teachers in both of these fields as well as to early-twentieth-century literary historians and general enthusiasts of modernist studies.
Location: Mugar Stacks PN56.T7 F36 2010Publication Date: 2010
Adapting Shahrazad's Odyssey: the female wanderer and storyteller in Victorian and contemporary Middle Eastern literature by
Adapting Shahrazad's Odyssey: The Female Wanderer and Storyteller in Victorian and Contemporary Middle Eastern Literature focuses on a comparative study of the figure of the female traveler and storyteller in nineteenth-century Victorian literature and contemporary Anglophone Middle Eastern writing. Eda Dedebas Dundar's cutting-edge study is the first to discover a strong link between traveling texts and the traveling women in fiction, analyzing the ways in which she is molded by her previous exposure to stories. This unique and interdisciplinary book explores the relationship between traveling and writing through the incorporation of various disciplines, including gender studies and postcolonial studies. Through close analysis, the author illuminates three main concepts: travel as a metaphor for rewriting, the female wanderer as the reworked adaptation of Odysseus and Shahrazad, and the notion of adaptation as a metatextual travel between Victorian and contemporary, nostalgia and progress. Scholars whose areas of expertise include nineteenth- and twentieth-century global Anglophone literature as well as travel writing and gender studies will find this text of particular interest. Moreover, this book further highlights fields of study in the humanities, including literature, gender studies, and civil liberties, aimed at an academic audience interested in travel narratives, women's writing, postcolonial literature, women's studies, and human rights. This text will be of special interest in courses such as Victorian women's writing, Victorian children's literature, global Anglophone literatures, women writers from the Middle East, and literary adaptation and appropriation.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2015
Moving Lives: twentieth-century women's travel writing by
As technological advances increased the ease, speed, and reach of transportation, more and more women took to the air, to the road and the rail, and headed for points elsewhere. As they mastered new modes of mobility and then narrated their journeys, these women travelers left cultural ideas of femininity as sedentary, subordinate, and constrained in the dust. In Moving Lives Sidonie Smith explores how women's travel and travel writing in the twentieth century were shaped by particular modes of mobility, asking how the form of travel affected the kind of narrative written. Alexandra David-Neel journeying on foot across the Himalayas; Robyn Davidson on her camel in the outback of Australia; Amelia Earhart, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Beryl Markham climbing into the cockpit of their airplanes; Mary Morris riding a train from Beijing to Berlin; Irma Kurtz taking a Greyhound into the bellies of American cities and towns -- of these and other women, Smith asks: What do they make of their travels? Howdo they enact the dynamics of and contradictions in the drift of identity? Are they defined by the experience -- or do they define the meaning of a particular mode of transport in new and different ways, and in doing so, disentangle travel from its masculine logic? Unique in its focus on the relationship of women in motion, technologies of motion, and autobiographical practices, Moving Lives will interest readers across a broad spectrum of disciplines, as well as those who are simply intrigued by travel narratives.
Location: Mugar Stacks G465 .S627 2001Publication Date: 2001
