XL342: Travel Writing and the Muslim World

By all measures, the late twentieth century was a time of dramatic decline for the Islamic world, the Ummah, particularly its Arab heartland. 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.

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).

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.

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.

Discourses of Difference unravels the complexities of writings by British women travellers of the `high colonial' period. Using feminist discourse theory, Sara Mills analyses the writings of three women travellers - Alexandra David-Neel, Mary Kingsley and Nina Mazuchelli. Her examination of agency, identity, and the contemporary social environment, is an important and inspiring step forward in post-colonial cultural and literary theory.

First published in 1931. 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.

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.

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.

In 1671, Ambrosio Bembo, a young nobleman bored with everyday life in Venice, decided to broaden his knowledge of the world through travel. 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.

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.

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 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. 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.

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. 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.

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'.

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.

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. 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.