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Between 1916 and 1919, thousands of Anzac troops visited the port cities of Durban, Cape Town and, to a lesser extent, Freetown on their way to Europe during the First World War. Their impressions were recorded in diaries or letters back home, and published in local papers. Identity formation, race, and the colonial encounter have thus far taken centre stage for understanding Anzac experiences as 'soldier tourists.' This paper argues that ideas about 'modernity,' progress,' and the built environment were equally part of the colonial encounter for these soldier sojourners as they visited these African ports cities. With details on urban sanitation, housing, architecture, infrastructure, transport and population, Anzac assessments of these urban spaces were informed not only by travel writing conventions and literary tropes of Africa, but by city guide books and hegemonic trans-empire discourses about the 'ideal' modern city.' The latter however, was not independent of ideas of race, but rather interacted with, and was often shaped by, a sense of white, Anglophone, superiority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women who wrote amidst their travels in the Caribbean and Mexico in the early nineteenth century were uncommon. Yet there they were, traveling and contributing through their actions and words to colonial and imperial processes, exercised through their daily relationships in local environments. The purpose of this article is to explore one theme in their private writings—the way they established their transient homes—and in doing so, consider the connection between their travels and colonial hierarchies. Household management, defined broadly as those activities related to establishing and maintaining the domestic space, provides a helpful window through which to compare traveling women's experiences. I argue that the traveling women enacted household management in similar ways, contributing to the crossroads of existing hierarchies based on race and class. Using a historian's perspective informed by feminist and transatlantic approaches, this project centers the private writings of four North Atlantic women, Maria Nugent, Margaret Curson, Frances Calderón de la Barca, and Susan Shelby Magoffin, who each traveled in the Caribbean and/or Mexico in the early nineteenth century. Examining household management as portrayed in the traveling women's private writings highlights the locational specificities that gave power to—and limited the power of—a ubiquitous, but never universal, colonial white womanhood in the Americas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood's co-authored travelogue, Journey to a War (1939), as a product of the interwar global left culture, exemplified by the Popular Front campaign that spanned Europe and Asia (1936–1939). Set out to observe and report on the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), a less popular but more exotic alternative to the contemporaneous Spanish Civil War, the two writers found themselves caught in the impossible task of reconciling the ravages of war with images of Shangri-La that mediated Popular Front discourses on wartime China. Nonetheless, Auden and Isherwood's difficult negotiations with Orientalist discourses also made the text a generative site for translations, exchanges and appropriations. This essay offers an account of the travelogue's composition and contemporary reception in China, how it became a composite, mobile text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not I But the Wind... and Leftover Life to Kill, the somewhat obscure mid-twentieth-century memoirs by Frieda Lawrence and Caitlin Thomas, were written, at least in part, in the countries that the authors eventually made their permanent home: New Mexico and Italy, respectively. While neither was marketed as a 'travel book', both works share many of the characteristics identified in the critical literature on women's travel writing, such as the way the memoirs were received as emotional outpourings with little authority outside the personal sphere and little of interest aside from their intimate knowledge of the authors' respective literary spouses. The analysis presented in this article shows that while Frieda and Caitlin sought to escape the gendered and classed strictures that so oppressed them in England, they applied them nevertheless to the individuals they encountered on their travels. Turning to the issue of viewpoints and watching, the article explores the frequency with which both narrators chose to position themselves behind windows as they set their scenes, indicating a more complex interrelation between watcher and watched than might first be assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1816 Joseph Blanco White visited the Trossachs, having travelled to Edinburgh as a member of the household of Lord and Lady Holland. Soon afterwards he wrote A Journey to the Trosacks in 1816, a short but fascinating account of his trip which has remained unpublished until now. Lucidly penned, this autograph text shows admiration for the Scottish wilderness and interest in technological feats such as the steamboat that he takes on the Firth of Forth, an absolute novelty at the time. Observations on Highlands customs and language, and literary allusions to Sterne, Scott, Johnson and Boswell add to the interest of this forgotten piece, as do remarks about John Murray the publisher and Dugald Stewart the philosopher. The aim of this article is to present for the first time this work as a document of literary and cultural importance, given the renewed interest of Romantic era scholarship in travel writing and in Blanco White, the most important Spanish cultural mediator in Britain during the first decades of the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Robert Southey's literary responses to his walking experiences in Spain as he recounted them in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797). Published after a four-month visit to the Iberian Peninsula, Letters departs from previous travelogues in offering, apart from factual details, subjective impressions of the places visited both in prose and verse. Nonetheless, I argue, Southey adopts a more intimate and self-reflective mood when he relates his pedestrian excursions in verse, not only showing a deeper aesthetic engagement with the natural surroundings but also acquiring an inward look. Moved by the bodily exertion of walking and hill climbing in Spain, Southey produced a series of poems in which the fragility of memory, the feelings of isolation and distress and the related poetic incapacity are explored. Encompassing examples from Coleridge's and Wordsworth's poems, in this essay I read Southey's poems in Letters as aligned with and contributing to the then emerging Romantic pedestrian poetics, though at the same time showing their ideosyncracy derived from Southey's complex approach to the Other in 'a land of strangers'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a few ways in which contemporary travel writing can engage with the digital world. It investigates different travelling narratives that allow for a dialogue between the digital and the print format: the blog 'Dreamlands, virtual travelogue' and its adaptation in print format (Éclats d'Amérique, Inculte, 2014) by Olivier Hodasava, as well as the novel Boussole (Actes Sud, 2015) by Mathias Énard. From Hodasava's Street View-inspired blog and travelogue to Énard's hyper-stratified prose mimicking the encyclopaedic ambition of the Internet, travel writing questions the porosity of the world, the text and the digital, by bringing the virtual and the real, immobility and movement, into play. In so doing, these works invite us to renew the critical tools we use to approach travel writing in the digital world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to shed light on the relationship between Britain and Portugal in the 1820s filtered through Marianne Baillie's eyes in her travel writing Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822, and 1823 (1824). Looked at through the lens of transculturation as used in Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes, this relationship – ambivalent though it may be – is perceived along the lines of centre and periphery, domination, and subordination. Portugal is identified as a European contact zone where disparate cultures meet with asymmetrical relations of power. The first part is dedicated to Portugal's entangled post-Napoleonic political situation and to the role of Baillie's letters as eye-witness accounts of historical importance. The second part focusses on Baillie's perception of the Portuguese and their culture, drawing on Jacques Derrida's Of Hospitality to explore the relationship between host and foreigner. It also highlights instances of Baillie's all-pervasive patriotism, which leads to a rather taste-based condemnation of local and living conditions. Her letters combine historical facts and personal impressions while at the same time showing characteristics of travel accounts and women's life writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to give an overview of the study of Ireland and its culture in continental Europe from the late eighteenth century up to the present day. It discusses the early interest in Ossianic poetry, Celtic philology, and travel writing, together with the internationalist standing of modernist writers such as Joyce and Beckett as the roots of how and under which rubric Irish culture has been received by the general public and studied at universities, and then proceeds to examine the current state of Irish Studies and its prospects on the European continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the use of historical GIS with timestamped itineraries to better understand a large multilingual corpus of nineteenth-century travelogues about Spain and their diverse 'chronotopes' (meaningful intersections of space and time in a narrative, as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin), which remain unnoticeable when one reads travelogues as traditional literary texts. The authors offer a rationale for using historical maps and GIS with timestamps, discuss the challenges posed by a multilingual historical dataset with partially imprecise or inferred information, and share their approach to overcoming these challenges in data collection, the creation of gazetteer, and timecoding. Despite focusing on travelogues, these tools and approaches are transferable to the visualisation and analysis of other texts in which chronotopes matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18), Byron was on the edge of fame. He broke this barrier through his European Tour (1809–11) which provided inspiration for the famous poem. Whilst extending social boundaries, through his meeting with Ali Pasha, Byron expanded the itinerary of the traditional ‘Grand Tour’ to include land, like Albania, previously unmarked by British boots. Byron mirrors his pioneering travel practices in his fiction. On the edges of Childe Harold are footnotes that cover anthropological, topographical, and autobiographical ground, advancing cultural understanding of areas either neglected or misrepresented by previous writers. I argue that, through revisions of these footnotes, Byron sought to dispel and correct myths relating to obscure European nations, perpetuated by ‘irresponsible’ accounts of previous travellers and in doing so strove to educate his readership on the benefits of informed, reasoned debates, built on empirical knowledge. This article establishes a link between Byron's poetry and politics to assess how far his demand for objectivity in literature bled into his political ambitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the layered and multivocal nature of Romantic-period travel writing in Wales through the theme of geology. Beginning with an analysis of the spectral sense of place that emerges from William Smith's 1815 geological map of England and Wales, it considers a range of travel texts, from the stones and fossils of Thomas Pennant's A Tour in Wales (1778–83), to Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday's early nineteenth-century Welsh travels, to little-known manuscript accounts. Wales is still the least-researched of the home nations in terms of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, despite recent and ongoing work that has done much to increase its visibility. Travel writing, meanwhile, is a form whose popularity in the period is now little recognised. These points doubly position Welsh travel writing on the fringes of our field, in an outlying location compounded by the genre's status as a category that defies easy definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes as its starting point the conceptual metaphor 'life is a journey' as defined by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) in order to advance a new reading of William Michael Rossetti's Democratic Sonnets (1907). These political verses may be defined as cognitive-semantic poems, which attest to the centrality of travel in the creation of literary and artistic meaning. Rossetti's Democratic Sonnets is not only a political manifesto against tyranny and oppression, promoting the struggle for liberalism and democracy as embodied by historical figures such as Napoleon, Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi; but it also reproduces Rossetti's real and imagined journeys throughout Europe in the late nineteenth century. This essay examines these references in light of the issues they raise, especially the poet as a traveller and the journey metaphor in poetry. But its central purpose is to re-read Democratic Sonnets as a cognitive map of Rossetti's mental picture of France and Italy. A cognitive map, first theorised by Edward Tolman in the 1940s, is a very personal representation of the environment that we all experience, serving to navigate unfamiliar territory, give direction, and recall information. In terms of cognitive linguistics, Rossetti is a figure whose path is determined by French and Italian landmarks (Paris, the island of St. Helena, the Alps, the Venice Lagoon, Mount Vesuvius, and so forth), which function as reference points for orientation and are tied to the historical events of the Italian Risorgimento. Through his sonnets, Rossetti attempts to build into his work the kind of poetic revolution and sense of history which may only be achieved through encounters with other cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sarah Harriet Burney's little-known 1839 novel The Romance of Private Life is a novel that, in many ways, seems to belong to the 1790s, rather than to the early years of Victoria's reign. Burney constantly draws attention to both her own work's deviance from the Gothic plot, and her reliance on this plot to structure the two stories that comprise the volume. While 'The Hermitage' is arguably the world's first murder mystery, 'The Renunciation' represents a process of thinking through the afterlife of the Gothic plot in a rapidly changing world, anticipating the works of the Brontës and Dickens. 'The Renunciation' represents a conscious reworking of what Italy had come to mean in the early Victorian period, reframing Italy as an artistic wonderland where women were given the means and opportunity to pursue artistic and other independent professional existences. I argue that Burney's story represents an ambitious, critically overlooked attempt to reframe the literature of the eighteenth century for a new age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the idea of the journey in Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) and the manner in which it has been referred to and elaborated upon by three twentieth-century writers: Italo Svevo in Corto viaggio sentimentale ( Short Sentimental Journey, 1925), Gregor von Rezzori in Kurze Reise übern langen Weg: eine Farce ( The Orient-Express, 1986) and Claudio Magris in Danubio ( Danube, 1986). The authors engage in a dialogue with Sterne and the literary model he proposed in his works. Despite the differences between their texts, in all of them the journey appears not only as a narrative device, but also a symbol of the never-ending quest for individual freedom, self-knowledge and erotic fulfilment. It is both a physical and psychological experience and a literary practice which allows the authors/narrators to distance themselves from cultural clichés and dogmas of their time and venture beyond social routines. This essay attempts to elucidate the unconventional character of 'sentimental' travel narratives and bring to the fore thematic continuities between Sterne and his twentieth-century successors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyses J.M. Synge's construction of domestic and institutional space in his debut play The Shadow of the Glen. The Richmond Asylum and Rathdrum Union Workhouse, the two institutions of confinement which are mentioned in the play, are seen as playing important roles in constructing a threatening offstage space beyond the cottage walls. The essay reads Nora's departure from the home at the end of the play as an eviction into this hostile environment, thereby challenging the dominant interpretation of The Shadow as a woman's choice between her home and the road. By drawing on historical research and Synge's travel writing to delineate contemporary attitudes towards the asylum and the workhouse, the essay aims to provide a deeper understanding of the play's dynamics of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Postcardlogbook' is the "travel diary" of a rereading of Derrida's 'Envois' more than thirty years after its publication. It was penned during and after a period of research into the 1974-75 'La vie la mort' seminar, undertaken at the University of California, Irvine, and mimics Derrida's own transatlantic voyages that provided the context for his text. My article borrows a series of formal devices that attempt to maintain it as a peripheral reading of the 'Envois'. Notably, it refrains from quoting directly from the text or from entering into its substance. It nevertheless addresses, however indirectly, the intellectual climate in Paris at the time the 'Envois' were written, and draws comparisons with the current scene, with the current status of Derrida's work, and with problems of a more or less post-literary age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on how texts are transformed when migrating across space and time, focusing on how the migration can transform thought, subjectivity and society. It discusses the essay "Travelling Theory," by Edward Said which proposes that theories, ideas and texts also migrate across geographical and cultural frontiers. Also discussed are theorists Jean Rouaud, Michel Le Bris, and the novel "Samarcande," by Amin Maalouf.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports published within the issue on topics including the fracturing of the translation of Japanese works to English, traveling narratives, and the difficulties of cultural translation.

The article reviews the book "al-Tibr (Gold Dust)" by Ibrahim al-Kūnī.

This article examines attempts by contemporary female travellers to distance themselves from travel's leisure and pleasure connotations by reasserting the ethical value of travel literature. In Bienvenue en Palestine (2004), Anne Brunswic bears witness to everyday life in Israeli-occupied Ramallah; and Soifs d'Orient and Méandres d'Asie (2008) describe the twenty-two-month journey by Caroline Riegel following 'les pérégrinations d'une goutte d'eau en Asie'. These travel narratives by voyageuses engagées underline the potential of this undervalued literary genre to serve as a means of social critique and vehicle for raising awareness about key humanitarian and environmental issues. The article explores how the narrator-travellers inscribe the experience of travel with a sense of travail, not only through the global concerns they highlight and the war-torn conflict zones they visit, but also by deliberately depriving themselves of the comfort and ease of modern means of transport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which examines allegations by writer Francis Bond Head that writer Anna Jameson stole a skull from an Anishinaabe Indian gravesite while visiting Canada during the early 19th century. Particular focus is given to the relationship between British Romanticism, colonialism, and contemporary ideas surrounding indigenous culture. The authors suggest that it is possible that Jameson took the skull both for literary purposes and for her study of phrenology.

The article presents a research paper which aims to establish accurate links between xenographic representation and literary-mediated travel writing. It seeks to define the said links using how the fascination with Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote" describes the notion that writer Miranda France offered in her travelogue "Don Quixote's Delusions: Travels in Castilian Spain." It also explores how Don Quixote initiates the observation of the modern Spanish society in the travelogue.

An introduction is presented in which the guest editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics related to xenography the definitions of foreigner and foreignness, and travel writing.

An essay is presented on the depiction of the foreigner in the writings of women travelers in the second part of the 19th century to Norway. Among the texts discussed were "Unprotected Females in Norway,"by Emily Lowe, "Voyage d'une femme au Spitzberg,"by Léonie D'Aunet, and "Norway and the Vöring—Fos," by Maria Dickson. The author also explores how the reflexivity of the narrators indicates the relationship complexity between the concept of other and the woman traveler.