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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.

Without any doubt, one of the European regions that has never ceased to trouble the Westerner traveller is the Balkan Peninsula, which functioned as a terra incognita within the British travel canon, and served as the transit point to the Ottoman Empire or the Old Grecian world. At a time when Anglo-Saxonism occupied a prevalent position in British political discourse, the Balkan Peninsula came to epitomise all the negative qualities of the Orient that British travellers were anxious to apply to alien countries that were far removed from the nation-building agenda of the Empire. As such, classified as the fringe of the Orient, Serbia was persistently depicted as a politically unstable region, inhabited by primitive ethnic groups that could possibly threaten the viability of the British imperialist interests in European Turkey. In the light of the Serbian national struggle to promote the idea of a South-Slavic Union or forge an identity against the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, some British travellers undertook a journey to all the Balkan states where Serbians formed the majority of the population to demonise the War of Liberation of the Balkan states against the Ottoman yoke, treating it as visible evidence of Russian Expansionism.This book concentrates on dystopian British imagology of Serbia as a travel destination, including travel accounts produced from 1717 until 1911, a year prior to the outbreak of the First World War. The travel texts incorporated into this volume shed light on all the conceptualisations of the Balkans, addressing the sociopolitical conditions that sparked the national awakening of Serbia.

Beginning with the medieval period, this book collates and reviews first-hand scholarship on Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia, as noted down by eminent British travellers, sleuths and observers of lived Islam.The book foregrounds the pre-colonial and pre-Orientalist phase and locates the multi-disciplinarity of Britain's relationship with Muslims over the last millennium to demonstrate a multi-layered interface. Fully sensitive to a gender balance, the book focuses on specially selected individuals and their transformative experiences while living and working among Muslims. Examining the writings of male and female authors including Adelard, Thomas Coryate, Mary Montagu and Fanny Parkes, the book analyses their understanding of Islam. Moreover, the author explores the works of a salient number of representative colonial British women to move away from the imperious wives stereotype and shed light on gender and Islam in Near East and South Asia by illustrating the status of women, tribal hierarchies, historic and architectural sites and regional politics. Going beyond familiar views about colonialism, travel writings and memsahibs without losing sight of the complex relations between Britain and Asian Muslims, this book will be of interest to academics working on British history, Imperial history, the study of religions, Shi'i Islam, Islamic studies, Gender and the Empire and South Asian Studies.

Ireland's Great Famine generated Western Europe's most devastating social crisis of the nineteenth century, a crisis that created enormous and transformational upheaval. In Travel Narratives of the Irish Famine: Politics, Tourism, and Scandal, 1845-1853, author Catherine Nealy Judd proposes that a new literary genre emerged from the crucible of the Great Famine, that is, the Irish Famine travelogue. In her keenly argued and thoroughly researched book, Judd contends that previous scrutiny of Famine travel narratives has been overly broad, peripheral, or has tended to group Famine travelogues into an undi erentiated whole. Judd invites us to consider Famine-era travel narratives as comprising a unique subgenre within the larger discursive - eld of travel literature. Here Judd argues that the immensity of the Famine exerted great pressure on the form, topics, themes, and goals of Famine-era travelogues, and for this reason, Famine travel narratives deserve detailed and organized consideration, as well as critical recognition of their status as an unprecedented subgenre. Drawing on an extensive array of underutilized sources, Travel Narratives of the Irish Famine adumbrates the Irish Famine travelogue canon.

The early modern period is often seen as a pivotal stage in the emergence of a recognizably modern form of the state. Agents beyond the State returns to this context in order to examine the literary and social practices through which the early modern state was constituted. The state was defined not through the elaboration of theoretical models of sovereignty but rather as an effect of the literary and professional lives of its extraterritorial representatives. Netzloff focuses on the textual networks and literary production of three groups of extraterritorial agents: travelers and intelligence agents, mercenaries, and diplomats. These figures reveal the extent to which the administration of the English state as well as definitions of national culture were shaped by England's military, commercial, and diplomatic relations in Europe and other regions across the globe. Netzloff emphasizes the transnational contexts of early modern state formation, from the Dutch Revolt and relations with Venice to the role of Catholic exiles and nonstate agents in diplomacy and international law. These global histories of travel, service, and labor additionally transformed definitions of domestic culture, from the social relations of classes and regions to the private sphere of households and families. Literary writing and state service were interconnected in the careers of Fynes Moryson, George Gascoigne, and Sir Henry Wotton, among others. As they entered the realm of print and addressed a reading public, they introduced the practices of governance to an emerging public sphere.

Interpretations of Canada's emerging identity have been largely based on a relatively small corpus of literary writing and landscape paintings, overlooking the influence of the British and American travel writers who published hundreds of books and articles that did much to fix the image of Canada in the popular imagination. In Fashioning the Canadian Landscape, J.I. Little examines how Canada, much like the United States, came to be identified with its natural landscape. Little argues that in contrast to the American identification with the wilderness sublime, however, Canada's image was strongly influenced by the picturesque convention favoured by British travel writers. This amply illustrated volume includes chapters ranging from Labrador to British Columbia, some of which focus on such notable British authors as Rupert Brooke and Rudyard Kipling, and others on talented American writers such as Charles Dudley Warner. Based not only on the views of the landscape but on the racist descriptions of the Indigenous peoples and the romanticization of the Canadian ‘folk', Little argues that the national image that emerged was colonialist as well as colonial in nature.

Encounters with a'multicultural'Britain in the Tudor and Stuart periods written with an eye to debates about immigration and ethnicity in today's Britain.This book recovers the encounter with a'multicultural'Britain by British travellers in the Tudor and Stuart periods. When William Camden, writing in the sixteenth century, set out to write the history of Britannia, he deliberately took to the roads to discover it first-hand, and those diverse cultures guided and informed his journeys. Here, John Cramsie offers original perspectives on Camden's multicultural Britain through the study of British travellersand their narratives. We meet characters such as the Tudor traveller John Leland, who intended to tell the peoples of England and Wales about themselves; chronicle how they came to settle the towns, villages, valleys, and mountaintops they called home; record the marks they left in the landscape; and celebrate the noble histories and cultures they created. Dozens - eventually hundreds - of Britons shared the same passion to meet their island neighbours and relate their experiences. The individuals studied in this book include actual as well as armchair travellers and those who blurred the boundaries between them. Their letters, diaries, journals, and histories range from the epic,poignant, and matter of fact to the exotic, preposterous, and hateful; the sources include actual and imaginative narratives and those which combined both elements. Travellers painted Britain with, in Leland's words, native colours that were rich, vibrant, and, above all, complex. Their remarkable journeys are the story of how Britons over two centuries met, interacted, and attempted (or not) to understand one another. Written with an eye to debates aboutimmigration and ethnicity in today's Britain, the book emphasizes the long history of making and remaking the island's cultural mosaic. The encounter with Britain's native colours has been a burden of history and opportunity formillennia, not simply for our own times. JOHN CRAMSIE is Associate Professor, Department of History, Union College, NY.

With cheaper publishing costs and the explosion of periodical publishing, the influence of New World travel narratives was greater during the nineteenth century than ever before, as they offered an understanding not only of America through British eyes, but also a lens though which nineteenth-century Britain could view itself. Despite the differences in purpose and method, the writers and artists discussed in Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World-from Fanny Wright arriving in America in 1818 to the return of Henry James in 1904, and including Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Isabella Bird, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Martineau, and Robert Louis Stevenson among others, as well as artists such as Eyre Crowe-all contributed to the continued building of America as a construct for audiences at home. These travelers'stories and images thus presented an idea of America over which Britons could crow about their own supposed sophistication, and a democratic model through which to posit their own future, all of which suggests the importance of transatlantic travel writing and the'idea of America'to nineteenth-century Britain.

Neuhaus explores the roots of the long-standing European fascination with Tibet, from the Dalai Lama to the Abominable Snowman. Surveying a wide range of travel accounts, official documents, correspondence and fiction, he examines how different people thought about both Tibet and their home cultures.

Until the 1880s, British travellers to Arabia were for the most part wealthy dilettantes who could fund their travels from private means. With the advent of an Imperial presence in the region, as the British seized power in Egypt, the very nature of travel to the Middle East changed. Suddenly, ordinary men and women found themselves visiting the region as British influence increased. Missionaries, soldiers and spies as well as tourists and explorers started to visit the area, creating an ever bigger supply of writers, and market for their books. In a similar fashion, as the Empire receded in the wake of World War II, so did the whole tradition of Middle East travel writing. In this elegantly crafted book, James Canton examines over one hundred primary sources, from forgotten gems to the classics of T E Lawrence, Thesiger and Philby. He analyses the relationship between Empire and author, showing how the one influenced the other, leading to a vast array of texts that might never have been produced had it not been for the ambitions of Imperial Britain. This work makes for essential reading for all of those interested in the literature of Empire, travel writing and the Middle East.

Picturesque but poor, abject yet sublime in its Gothic melancholy, the Ireland perceived by British visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not fit their ideas of progress, propriety, and Protestantism. The rituals of Irish Catholicism, the lamentations of funeral wakes, the Irish language they could not comprehend, even the landscapes were all strange to tourists from England, Wales, and Scotland. Overlooking the acute despair in England's own industrial cities, these travelers opined in their writings that the poverty, bog lands, and ill-thatched houses of rural Ireland indicated moral failures of the Irish character.

The British Empire drew on the talents of many remarkable figures, whose lives reveal a wonderfully rich involvement with the crucial issues of the period. In many cases they left a legacy of travel writing, novels, biography and ethnography which made important contributions to our knowledge of other cultures.'Writing, Travel and Empire'explores the lives and writings of eight such figures, including Sir George Grey, Gertrude Bell, Sir Hugh Clifford, and Roger Casement. All travelled the Empire - from Grey, the renowned colonial governor who undertook dangerous journeys to the interior of Australia, to Tom Harrisson, the emaciated polymath, war hero and Arctic explorer, whose time in the New Hebrides embraced both cannibalistic rituals and a meeting with film legend Douglas Fairbanks Sr, who sought Harrisson out for a Hollywood feature about savage life.All saw themselves as writers, despite their very different approaches and interests, and each was writing against a backdrop of the impending disappearance of indigenous cultures around the world.Writing from the margins of what was shortly to become the more formalised discipline of anthropology, their work yields interesting insights into both the issues of empire and the ways in which academic disciplines define the boundaries of their subject. Embracing themes such as gender and travel, racial science, the globalisation of'native management'and the internal colonies, and with a geographical coverage that extends from South America to Russia via Africa and the South Seas,'Writing Travel and Empire'will engage all those with an interest in cultural geography, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, biography and travel writing.