Subject Area: Literature - Travel Literature

British Travel Writers in China - Writing Home to a British Public, 1890-1914

Dupée, Jeffrey N.
2004 0-7734-6497-2 364 pages
The travel writers, or travel savants, as they are characterized in the work, rarely traveled alone but typically promoted a travel persona of the idealized solitary traveler derived from deeply engrained traditions in Western travel literature. Such solitary projections were mitigated by a narrative device that envisioned traveling companions in the form of an imaginary British readership. They sought to bring to their readers parts and elements of China not yet visited or profiled by Western writers. A critical component of the study engages travel encounters, namely the crowds, servants, official, transportations forms, inns, foods, dangers, and hardships of the road. Such encounters invoked fascination and wonder, but also engendered fear, aversion, and irritation – responses central to the norms of travel writing and the travel savant’s identity that invariably colored the representational process, reinforcing existent stereotypes about China and the Chinese

Cultural other in Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives

Cabañas, Miguel A.
2008 0-7734-5240-0 336 pages
This book explores issues of representation and cultural negotiation in nineteenth-century travel narratives, focusing on writers from the United States who traveled to Latin America and Latin American writers who traveled to North America. Such a cross-cultural study of travel literature reveals the discursive processes of national formation in both the United States and Latin America. This book contains eight black and white photographs.