Journal articles on the topic 'Critical travelogue'

Regarding travel writing as the textual manifestation of the Self and the Other confrontation, travelogues provide interesting material for analyzing otherness discourse and various strategies of othering. Accordingly, this paper aims to study how metaphor functions as an othering device in travel writing. The travelogue which is the subject of this research is Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia written by Lady Sheil in the mid-nineteenth century. The framework employed for analyzing metaphor in this text is Critical Metaphor Analysis which is amongst various approaches of cognitive poetics. The critical-cognitive analysis of metaphors in this travelogue implies that Sheil metaphorized Persia mainly as an Oriental Other which has a denigrated inferior position relative to the Occidental Self. In so doing, she has vastly used different stereotypical images of the East abundantly present in the Orientalist discourse. It can be argued that Orientalism as a discourse has exerted great influence on Sheil’s metaphorization of Persia as an Eastern Other via a number of conceptual metaphors which characterize the East as a unified object which has no diversity and should be studied by European scholars.

Nikos Kazantzakis is one of the most famous Greek authors of the 20th century known primarily for his novels. A significant part of Nikos Kazantzakis’s work is his travel writings. Whereas the novels of Kazantzakis are recognized as canonical Greek literature, it is difficult to pinpoint his travelogues, or Ταξιδεύοντας (Traveling) due to the ambiguity of their critical reception: assessments range from neutral or mildly negative to enthusiastic. Both critical and enthusiastic assessments usually lack in-depth analysis of poetic, thematic, compositional, and stylistic features of the Traveling cycle. This essay is an attempt at a more cogent and motivated assessment of Kazantzakis’s cycle of travel notes and his role in the development of this genre. In contrast to the general view in Greek criticism, I argue that the genre of travelogue had developed for an extended period before Traveling was published and that Kazantzakis’s predecessors and contemporaries had contributed to its development. Among them is Kazantzakis’s contemporary Kostas Ouranis whose work has aspects and features to be found in the later work of Kazantzakis as the comparative analysis of the travel notes by both authors demonstrates.

This article is based on the premise that African authored travel writing about European socio-cultural spaces during the colonial period has the potential to interrogate notions about contemporary African identity while contributing to the collective ideological construction of the wider African society. Recent studies in African thought and ideology have provoked research into African-authored travel writing and the extent to which such travelogues have influenced discussions about the opinions and ideas, as well as a collective self-examination of African identities. These African-authored travelogues do not only represent a critical mass of source materials that highlight the racial discriminatory practices which many Africans encountered and still grapple with as sojourners and travellers to the British (Western) metropolises, but they also serve as a means of reimagining the diverse ways which Africans negotiate the identity quandaries they find themselves in within the context of a hegemonic milieu. The article focuses on the broader issues of identity and thematic ideological categories, using close reading strategies within a multidisciplinary context in analysing an African authored travelogue, “An African in an English School,” which was published in the December, 1937 edition of The West African Review magazine, and written by S.A.T. Taylor. Taylor writes about his impressions of the British educational system and difference, while simultaneously highlighting stereotypical perceptions about Africans by Europeans or the people of England.

This article is based on the premise that African authored travel writing about European socio-cultural spaces during the colonial period has the potential to interrogate notions about contemporary African identity while contributing to the collective ideological construction of the wider African society. Recent studies in African thought and ideology have provoked research into African-authored travel writing and the extent to which such travelogues have influenced discussions about the opinions and ideas, as well as a collective self-examination of African identities. These African-authored travelogues do not only represent a critical mass of source materials that highlight the racial discriminatory practices which many Africans encountered and still grapple with as sojourners and travellers to the British (Western) metropolises, but they also serve as a means of reimagining the diverse ways which Africans negotiate the identity quandaries they find themselves in within the context of a hegemonic milieu. The article focuses on the broader issues of identity and thematic ideological categories, using close reading strategies within a multidisciplinary context in analysing an African authored travelogue, “An African in an English School,” which was published in the December, 1937 edition of The West African Review magazine, and written by S.A.T. Taylor. Taylor writes about his impressions of the British educational system and difference, while simultaneously highlighting stereotypical perceptions about Africans by Europeans or the people of England.

AbstractPart One of this essay traced a biography for Benjamin Brodsky and revealed surprising facets of the production of his 1916 feature-length travelogue A Trip Thru China. Part Two addresses the film's genre inscription and cinematic qualities and relates its embedded values to its enthusiastic reception across America 1916-18. Although the ethnographic documentary pays admiring tribute to laboring men and women throughout China, it also valorizes the moribund Chinese empire, as embodied in Brodsky's ultimate patron in China, President Yuan Shikai. While fully eschewing the "Yellow Menace" U.S. discourse of its period, Trip humorously delineates the East and West as essentially different. The rare work's exceptional critical and popular success from California to New York City points to Brodsky's skilled showmanship and ability to engage the support of independent movie distributors and investors. Why, then, the essay considers in conclusion, did Brodsky's subsequent experiences after his shift in 1917 to making films in Japan, including the feature-length travelogue Beautiful Japan (1918), so diverge in its outcome from his early filmmaking career in China?

In the context of the Great Game and in throes of Geok-Tepe War in Akhal region located in Turkomania, The Daily Mail sends off Edmond O’Donovan to make the reportage of the Russians’ colonial advancement and their clash with Turkmens, but the Russians’ ban on foreign reporters disrupts his initial plan. As a result, he redirects his way to Merv where the Turkmens capture him. His captors ironically receive him both as prisoner and a ruling member for five months. Meanwhile, he registers his observations and experiences there which later appears in his bestseller travelogue entitled, The Merv Oasis. Despite his involvement with British Imperialism, O’Donovan’s travel book has not received any critical attention from scholars of travel studies. In this regard, this article seeks to address their critical negligence by studying it in the spirit of postcolonial approach. This method is invaluable in two ways. Firstly, it discloses the travel writer’s hidden imperial assumptions through focusing on his surveillance and his description of his travelees’ diseases and their medical treatment. Secondly through clarifying the role of travel writer on Othering his travelees when he deals with their food culture and their supposedly exotic bazaar. On the whole, this reading challenges the innocent façade of O’Donovan’s travelogue and points to his imperial assumptions and cultural baggage which tarnish its impartiality and authenticity.

lore from Kosovo, regarding systematic destruction of Serbian medieval churches and monasteries, committed by the local and semi-independent Jashar pasha in the early 19th century, was introduced in Serbian historiography by way of Serbian travelogue literature during the second half of 19th and early 20th century. According to lore, Pasha destroyed monasteries Vojsilovica and Burinci, Samodreza church and several other village churches for the purpose of using building materials for his water mills. Allegedly, construction materials of destroyed church in Lipljan and several surrounding village churches were used for construction of the bridge on river Sitnica, while, also allegedly, he took the floor from Gracanica monastery for his hamam. Lead from the monastery roof was used to cover the mosque in Pristina. After a critical analysis of such lore, it can be stated that Pasha did not demolish a singe church or monastery, but in fact, for his projects, he used materials from the already destroyed temples. These writings of lore, combined with the local population?s perception of him as a cruel master, left a historic view of him as being the main destroyer of Serbian medieval churches and monasteries. Release of lore version of Serbian history, made by folklore writers, contributed to the rapid dissemination of inaccurate information. This had an encouraging affect which, as time went on, associated Pasha?s name with the large number of destroyed churches. In Serbian historiography such usage of travelogue literature from the 19th century and further developed oral tradition recorded by ethnologists as relevant historical sources, have led to the adoption of unverified data as historical fact.

This article explores the local histories and ecological knowledge embedded within a Spanish print of enslaved, Afro-descendant boatmen charting a wooden vessel up the Chagres River across the Isthmus of Panamá. Produced for a 1748 travelogue by the Spanish scientists Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan, the image reflects a preoccupation with tropical ecologies, where enslaved persons are incidental. Drawing from recent scholarship by Marixa Lasso, Tiffany Lethabo King, Katherine McKittrick, and Kevin Dawson, I argue that the image makes visible how enslaved and free Afro-descendants developed a distinct cosmopolitan culture connected to intimate ecological knowledge of the river. By focusing critical attention away from the print’s Spanish manufacture to the racial ecologies of the Chagres, I aim to restore art historical visibility to eighteenth-century Panamá and Central America, a region routinely excised from studies of colonial Latin American art.

Austerlitz was the German expatriate author W. G. Sebald’s last book before his untimely death in 2001. Greeted with great critical acclaim, the novel is a profound meditation on history, memory, and loss. Sebald’s larger attempt to represent and memorialise the lasting trauma of the Holocaust, in an oblique and understated rather than a literal way, led him to a new kind of literary expression described by Eric Homberger as ‘part hybrid novel, part memoir and part travelogue’. What is most interesting about Austerlitz, for the purposes of this article, is that it makes so much use of architecture. In this, it joins a tradition of literary works that treat architecture as a metaphor for human endeavour and artifice, social structures, and attempts to order and construct the world. But, there is more to the buildings in Austerlitz. The book offers insights into the larger meaning – often, but not always, melancholy – of architecture in culture and society, past and present. This is elucidated at a personal level, in the way that surroundings and spatial atmospheres can affect the emotional life of an individual, and also at a collective level, in the way that buildings bear witness to, and last beyond, the trials and duration of a single human life.

Abstract This essay demonstrates the oft-dismissed centrality of critical race thought to posthumanist studies by excavating the neglected writings of the New Yorker magazine’s earliest black staff writers. Within this early post–Civil Rights archive of “The Talk of the Town” columns and a Russian travelogue, this essay uncovers conditions of possibility for the emergence of racially anomalous strains of contemporary black narrative that have long discomfited canon-makers. Analyzing how the implicitly white persona of “The Talk of the Town” functioned as an avatar of the liberal humanist subject, I show how Andrea Lee, Charlayne Hunter, and Jamaica Kincaid undermined or appropriated this figure of Man. Their experiments with racial legibility in their unsigned columns would give rise to what I term black anaesthetics: narrative practices that disable the reader’s capacity to make meaning of race even as they disclose traces of racialized blackness. Working thus both in and out of touch with racial reality, black anaesthetic texts such as Lee’s Russian Journal (1981), Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” (1983), and Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” (1984) suspend processes of racialization vital to the production of Man’s human Others. In doing so, they invite us to rethink the descent of what has come to be called posthumanism.

Advancing modernity fatally weakened direct ways of intervening in the social, whether by the Divine Will or barricades. Nietzsche’s technique of inscription has been gradually adapted to reach the present as hazardous sub-brands of “digitally enhanced” inscriptive connectivity born out of an unlikely alliance of emergent tools of networked communication and technophobia of much of the humanities. Even some specialist topics enter the public space as “narratives”, no longer grounded in open allegiances to a system of thought or worldview. Instead authors prefer a travelogue format which hides intended connections. What then is the genealogy of this way of structuring narratives? In particular, what might serve as a tutorial door opening not only to the hidden content of such narratives but also to turning them into useful tools of learning and competence building free of top-down impositions and rota learning familiar from the curriculum delivery demanded by much of the educational Establishment? It will be shown how to guide the reader in an interactive, bottom up manner so that he or she can, gradually, and at the level of ability and resources peculiar to the case in hand, proceed through ascending stages of reading and engaging with the text, and systematically dispel the baggage of layers of loss and uncertainty preventing confident, critical approaches to communication, work, and citizenship.

This paper deals with three different perspectives appeared in foreign visitors’ records on Korea in 1900s. Jack London was a writer who wrote novels highly critical of American society based on progressivism. However, when his progressive perspective was adopted to report the political situation of Korea in 1904, he revealed a typical perspective of orientalism. He regarded Korea and ways of living in Korea as disgusting and ‘uncivilized.’Compared with Jack London’s perspective, French poet Georges Ducrocq’s book was rather favorable. He visited Korea in 1901 and he showed affectionate attitude toward Korea and its people. However, his travel report, Pauvre et Douce Coree, can be defined as representing aesthetic orientalism. He tried to make all the ‘Korean things’ seem beautiful and nice, but it is true that this kind of view can also conceal something concrete and specific. This perspective at once beautifies Korea and also conceals the reality about Korea.E. Burton Holmes was a traveler and he often used his ‘motion-picture’ machine to record things he witnessed while travelling around worldwide countries. So, his report (travelogue) and motion picture film on Korea written and made in 1901 was based on close observation and rather objective point of view. Nonetheless, he couldn’t avoid the perspective of the colonizer’s model of the world, in other words, geographical diffusionism of western culture.

Abstract In this paper I discuss the ways in which Bruce Baillie’s Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964) and Quixote (1965) evoke Native American Indian heritage and western-hero road poems by challenging the concept of the American landscape and incorporating conventions traditionally associated with cinéma pur, cinéma vérité, and the city symphony. Both pictures, seen as largely ambiguous and ironic travelogue forms, expose their audiences to “the sheer beauty of the phenomenal world” (Sitney 2002: 182) and nurture nostalgic feelings for the lost indigenous civilizations, while simultaneously reinforcing the image of an American conquistador, hence creating a strong sense of dialectical tension. Moreover, albeit differing in a specific use of imagery and editing, the films rely on dense, collage-like and often superimposed images, which clearly contribute to the complexity of mood conveyed on screen and emphasize the striking conceptual contrast between white American and Indian culture. Taking such an assumption, I argue that although frequently referred to as epic road poems obliquely critical of the U.S. westward expansion and manifest destiny, the analyzed works’ use of plot reduction, observational and documentary style as well as kinaesthetic visual modes and rhythmic editing derive primarily from the cinéma pur’s camerawork, the cinéma vérité’s superstructure, and the city symphony’s spatial arrangement of urban environments. Such multifaceted inspirations do not only diversify Mass’ and Quixote’s non-narrative aesthetics, but also help document an intriguing psychogeography of the 1960s American landscapes, thus making a valuable contribution to the history of experimental filmmaking dealing with Native American Indian heritage.

This article explores the ways in which nineteenth-century Argentine author, Eduarda Mansilla de García, engaged with the issues of women and modernity in her 1882 travelogue, Recuerdos de viaje. It argues that the practice of travel writing served a dual purpose for Mansilla. Publishing a travelogue about the United States enabled Mansilla to trouble Argentine period gender restrictions while at the same critically evaluate North American females. Drawing from theorizations regarding travel writing as a place of power negotiations, I unveil how Mansilla employed her travelogue as a means of validating the cultural capital of Latin American geocultural space in comparison with that of the United States. Consequently, this nineteenth-century Latin American travel narrative did more than the task of light entertainment; it engaged with significant, ongoing period transnational debates regarding modernity, gender, and nation.

In the current period of the globalization processes of the XXI century it is important to be aware of the exter- nal orientations and national priorities of Ukraine in the world scene. That presents a significant challenge, which depends on the state’s ability to implement its national, cultural, ethnic interests and needs, which are its motive power, and to pre- serve a set of values, symbols and customs to guarantee peace and safety and contribute to development and improvement as well as to be prepared for holding out against threats of external in internal confrontation, separation, identity crisis, political and religious instability. Therefore it is topical to study the works which help gain an understanding of historical truth and get to know the national ethnogenepool of Ukrainians better, which is the basis of their socio-political experience. Applying that approach to the little-known travelogue “Ukrainians in Egypt” by a Ukrainian political emigrant Hryts Bozhok the author of the article has developed a literary critical, historical and cultural understanding of the work concern- ing travels to the Near Eat which have not been thoroughly studied yet in Ukrainian humanistic sciences. The means of psy- chologism (the author’s characterization, diary notes, self-esteem, duality, portrait, detail, language, memories, scenery) are considered in the article. They show the psychophysiology of the character of a military internee who had to stay in a closed foreign place and who was worried about those times’ issues of a nation creation as well as general spiritual ones. In the essay the controversial topic of a political emigration in the history of Ukrainian society at the beginning of the XX century is raised. The subject of artistic generalization of belles non-fiction is the historical time of that period which was perceived by the character during forced travels when Ukraine was a fighting platform of different political forces: Denikins, Petliuras, Makhnos, Red Army men. Unordinary events were reflected in the character’s existence, in his memory. The mem- ory is a basis of the national identity and national consciousness, therefore such works by emigrants are a part of Ukrainian ethnic literary tradition and help understand its historical course through the prism of modern times. This information also contributes to better understanding of the process of the recent historical experience in Ukrainian state creation.

Abstract While there is plenty of scholarship on the spread and study of English in China, scarce attention has been paid to representations of English in tourism discourses about China. This article aims to explore language ideologies undergirding representations of English language use in 253 travelogues from China Daily published since 2000. Findings show that most prominently in China Daily “standard” English was represented as a lingua franca for travel in China, a language of prestige, and a means of Othering. Some places are demarcated from others due to the lack of English-language services. Chinese people’s way of using English was reduced to Chinglish, a pejorative term indicating inappropriate or incorrect usage of English. Chinese use of English was thus ridiculed as an inferior Other. This critical discourse analysis of tourism discourses about China emanating from within the country demonstrates one facet of Orientalism – self-orientalism. CD’s self-orientalist strategies were embedded in oppositional East-West ideologies that set an inferior China against a superior West.

This essay, is a presentation of a succession of brief, tentative, and often incongruous readings of the human geography of contemporary Los Angeles, an urban region of both telling uniqueness and compelling generalizability. Viewed as a comprehensive whole, Los Angeles brings to mind Jorge Luis Borges's perplexing encounter with The Aleph, “the only place on earth where all places are”, a limitless space of simultaneity and contradiction, impossible to describe in ordinary language. Extraordinary language is accordingly experimented with in describing Los Angeles as a place where everything seems to ‘come together’ in evocative fragments, Abstractions and concreteness are combined in verbal tours of the peripheral and central landscapes of Los Angeles, critical travelogs aimed at restructuring how we look at, interpret, and theorize the spatiality and historicity of contemporary urban society, how we read the urban con-text.

Abstract The travelogues from the late-19th century voyages of Iranians offer important knowledge on the political, social and cultural history of the modern state. Attention has been directed mainly towards the diaries of travels in Europe, less to the works recording the impressions of those who, for various reasons, travelled within the country during the Qâjâr era. Among these, the Khâterât-e Hâjj Sayyâh, by Mirzâ Mohammad ‘Ali Mahallâti, better known as Hâjj Sayyâh, is of remarkable interest. The article examines several aspects of this ‘travel diary’; in particular their revelation of the author’s critical and pessimistic vision of his homeland and those who are currently governing it. We observe the processes of defining a national ‘self’ in contrast to the ‘other’, influenced by comparisons between Europe and the needs for modernisation, but also from memories of greatness.

This article is devoted to new books written by Alexey Kara-Murza, a Russian philosopher and political scientist. Kara-Murza is the author of numerous works on the philosophy of Russian history and culture and Russian social thought, successfully working in the original genres of philosophical travelogy and philosophical local history. Russian-European and Russian-Italian cultural interactions have been the subject of Alexey Kara-Murza’s scientific interest for many years. The new monographs explore the political circumstances as well as the key biographical voyage plots to Italy of the outstanding Russian thinkers Pyotr Chaadaev (1824–1825), and Vladimir Solovyov (1876). According to Alexey Kara-Murza, these trips determined the intellectual identity of the two Russian authors as well as the spiritual and philosophical horizon of their work. Kara-Murza consistently develops a central thesis about the intellectual relationships between Europe and Russia. He interprets the dialogue of cultures as a story of creativity, and comprehends the journey as a special way of the philosophical reception of culture and creative self-identification. Kara-Murza’s cultural and political studies in his philosophical travelogy genre, as well as the method he developed which helped the philosopher reconstruct the intellectual experience of Russian thinkers in the context of the history of Russian and European culture, are critically analyzed in this article.

This paper deals with the fact that Matoš spent nearly half of his creative life in exile, in numerous, often anxious encounters with the new life conditions in foreign countries and cultures, encounters with nuances of “different” in literatures and cultures from which Matoš derived his knowledge and experience. Regarding the fact that Matoš often wrote observing and percieving the other with the eyes of an “eternal stranger”, emigrant and newcomer, flâneur and traveler, we decided to apply the imagological approach to the aspects of Matoš’s interaction with French, Italian and Serbian cultures, respectively. We were determined to conduct this research from the perspective of comparative imagology, dealing with the delicate “consequences” of the Matoš’s life abroad, primarily in the context of aforementioned cultures that determined him artistically and intellectually. Accordingly, in order to investigate these important aspects of Matoš’s character and work thoroughly (primarily his travelogues and feuilletons), we applied adequate theoretical and critical apparatus in an effort to point out the basic features of his travelogue poetics, or in a broader sense poetics of traveling.

AbstractThe article discusses the neo-romantic vision of Iceland in Judith Hermann’s travel story „Kaltblau“ (2003) and the essayistic portrait of postcolonial Greenland in Anna Kim’s travelogue „Invasionen des Privaten“ (2011). It compares the postmodern version of the Icelandic sublime with the sublime experience of Greenland’s ice sheet and juxtaposes the therapeutic aspects of contemporary nature tourism in Hermann’s story with the critical focus on questions of cultural identity in Kim’s essay.

In feminist studies, the relation between gender and travel has been addressed in many important critical discourses. Feminist critics have pointed out that travel writing had for long remained oblivious about women’s travel, one reason being that travel was, forever, a masculinist exercise. Underlining the gendered aesthetics of travel writing, feminist criticism has read women’s travelogues as interesting sites of struggle between repeating the normative patterns of male travelling and casting an ‘alternative’ gaze. However, reading women’s travel writing simply as feminist narratives against their masculinist counterparts can be an oversimplification, as it may mean ignoring the deeper complexities underlying the texts. Being an autobiographical form, travel writing creates textual spaces where the formation of selfhood happens through a constant negotiation of the ‘self’ with the ‘world’, not only in terms of gender, but also other subject identities like race, class, and culture. In this context, my paper proposes to read Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers. A Walk in the Himalaya (2005), as a female travel writing, where the question of gender intertwines with her non-white, ex-colonial, diasporic identity during her travel in Himalayan Nepal. My focus would be on examining the writer’s narratorial self as a female agency, influencing, and negotiating her postcolonial identity. The paper will try to address how the travelogue functions as a register of female experiences, while Kincaid, as a post-colonial black traveller, negotiates her position within the existing imperialist paradigm of white travelling.

This piece was prompted by the requirement that I write a “Critical Travelogue” for one of my MA classes. The assignment required every member of the class to physically make a journey before critically re-imagining it in a short essay. Beyond this, there were very few restrictions on the direction and form the piece could take. Combining my interests in art, activism, memory and Nigerian history as only a project like this would allow, I travelled to an exhibition commemorating Ken Saro-Wiwa entitled Doing Nothing is Not an Option. In order to provide structure as well as interest and humour to the project, I considered details such as mode of travel, embarkation point, and route in order to structure theme and narrative. As a result, the finished piece represents not only a spontaneous consideration of city space, diaspora, and gentrification but also an interaction (or a ‘brief encounter’) between the careful planning and inevitable spontaneity that are essential to both academia and travel, thus creating a dialogue between the disciplines.

This article focuses on the representation of faith as conveyed by Naipaul in the course of four travelogues. Drawing on historical scholarship pertaining to Islamic societies in transition, and comparing this to a selection of the literary critical reception that Naipaul’s writing about Islam has evoked, I argue for a revision of literary readings of Naipaul’s travelogues. My premise is that the author’s subject positioning influences both a self-critical as well as more compassionate perspective on the relationship between faith and political transition in developing societies.

AbstractThis article examines how the travel sections of China Daily (CD) appropriate dominant tourism discourses in representing Chinese languages. Incorporating language ideology into critical discourse analysis, an examination of 223 CD travelogues reveals three discourse strands: naming Chinese cuisine, referring to Chinese languages, and metapragmatic comments on Chinese languages. It is argued that CD’s touristic representations of Chinese languages constitute part of the repertoire of dominant tourism discourses rather than a challenge or resistance against them, and CD travel writing does constitute a voice in the “contact zone,” which, however, speaks in a language that is essentially complicit in Othering China for tourist consumption.

This article attempts to define and to illustrate in some detail the kind of critical relationship it is possible (and desirable) to develop with early modern travelogues. It then suggests that such a relationship leads to nothing less than a new conception of literature, which could be characterized as constructivist, gradualist and based on a principle of “availability”.

In Victorian times, when female travel narratives were read as excursions rather than expeditions, it was common for women authors to preface their travels with an apology. “What this book wants,” begins Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa, “is not a simple preface but an apology, and a very brilliant and convincing one at that” (4). This tendency of the woman writer to depreciate her travel with an acknowledgment of its presumptuousness crafted her apology essentially as an admission of guilt. “Where I have offered my opinions,” Isabella Bird writes in The Englishwoman in America, “I have done so with extreme diffidence, giving impressions rather than conclusions” (2). While Elizabeth Howells has since argued the apologetic preface was in fact an opposing strategy that allowed women writers to assert their authority by averting it, it is certainly telling of the time and genre that a female writer could only defend her work by first excusing it. The personal apology may have emerged as the natural response to social restrictions but it has not been without consequence for female travel. The female position, often constructed as communal, is still problematised in contemporary travel texts. While there has been a traceable shift from apology to affirmation since the first women travellers abandoned their embroidery, it seems some sense of lingering culpability still remains. In many ways, the modern female traveller, like the early lady traveller, is still a displaced woman. She still sets out cautiously, guide book in hand. Often she writes, like the female confessant, in an attempt to recover what Virginia Woolf calls “the lives of the obscure”: those found locked in old diaries, stuffed away in old drawers or simply unrecorded (44). Often she speaks insistently of the abstract things which Kingsley, ironically, wrote so easily and extensively about. She is, however, even when writing from within the confines of her own home, still writing from abroad. Women’s solitary or “unescorted” travel, even in contemporary times, is considered less common in the Western world, with recurrent travel warnings constantly targeted at female travellers. Travelling women are always made aware of the limits of their body and its vulnerabilities. Mary Morris comments on “the fear of rape, for example, whether crossing the Sahara or just crossing a city street at night” (xvii). While a certain degree of danger always exists in travel for men and women alike and while it is inevitable that some of those risks are gender-specific, travel is frequently viewed as far more hazardous for women. Guide books, travel magazines and online advice columns targeted especially at female readers are cramped with words of concern and caution for women travellers. Often, the implicit message that women are too weak and vulnerable to travel is packaged neatly into “a cache of valuable advice” with shocking anecdotes and officious chapters such as “Dealing with Officials”, “Choosing Companions” or “If You Become a Victim” (Swan and Laufer vii). As these warnings are usually levelled at white, middle to upper class women who have the freedom and financing to travel, the question arises as to what is really at risk when women take to the road. It seems the usual dialogue between issues of mobility and issues of safety can be read more complexly as confusions between questions of mobility and morality. As Kristi Siegel explains, “among the various subtexts embedded in these travel warnings is the long-held fear of ‘women on the loose’” (4). According to Karen Lawrence, travel has always entailed a “risky and rewardingly excessive” terrain for women because of the historical link between wandering and promiscuity (240). Paul Hyland has even suggested that the nature of travel itself is “gloriously” promiscuous: “the shifting destination, arrival again and again, the unknown possessed, the quest for an illusory home” (211). This construction of female travel as a desire to wander connotes straying behaviours that are often cast in sexual terms. The identification of these traits in early criminological research, such as 19th century studies of cacogenic families, is often linked to travel in a broad sense. According to Nicolas Hahn’s study, Too Dumb to Know Better, contributors to the image of the “bad” woman frequently cite three traits as characteristic. “First, they have pictured her as irresolute and all too easily lead. Second, they have usually shown her to be promiscuous and a good deal more lascivious than her virtuous sister. Third, they have often emphasised the bad woman’s responsibility for not only her own sins, but those of her mate and descendents as well” (3). Like Eve, who wanders around the edge of the garden, the promiscuous woman has long been said to have a wandering disposition. Interestingly, however, both male and female travel writers have at different times and for dissimilar reasons assumed hermaphroditic identities while travelling. The female traveller, for example, may assume the figure of “the observer” or “the reporter with historical and political awareness”, while the male traveller may feminise his behaviours to confront inevitabilities of confinement and mortality (Fortunati, Monticelli and Ascari 11). Female travellers such as Alexandra David-Neel and Isabelle Eberhardt who ventured out of the home and cross-dressed for safety or success, deliberately and fully appropriated traditional roles of the male sex. Often, this attempt by female wanderers to fulfil their own intentions in cognito evaded their dismissal as wild and unruly women and asserted their power over those duped by their disguise. Those women who did travel openly into the world were often accused of flaunting the gendered norms of female decorum with their “so-called unnatural and inappropriate behaviour” (Siegel 3). The continued harnessing of this cultural taboo by popular media continues to shape contemporary patterns of female travel. In fact, as a result of perceived connections between wandering and danger, the narrative of the woman traveller often emerges as a self-conscious fiction where “the persona who emerges on the page is as much a character as a woman in a novel” (Bassnett 234). This process of self-fictionalising converts the travel writing into a graph of subliminal fears and desires. In Tracks, for example, which is Robyn Davidson’s account of her solitary journey by camel across the Australian desert, Davidson shares with her readers the single, unvarying warning she received from the locals while preparing for her expedition. That was, if she ventured into the desert alone without a guide or male accompaniment, she would be attacked and raped by an Aboriginal man. In her opening pages, Davidson recounts a conversation in the local pub when one of the “kinder regulars” warns her: “You ought to be more careful, girl, you know you’ve been nominated by some of these blokes as the next town rape case” (19). “I felt really frightened for the first time,” Davidson confesses (20). Perhaps no tale better depicts this gendered troubling than the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood. In the earliest versions of the story, Little Red outwits the Wolf with her own cunning and escapes without harm. By the time the first printed version emerges, however, the story has dramatically changed. Little Red now falls for the guise of the Wolf, and tricked by her captor, is eaten without rescue or escape. Charles Perrault, who is credited with the original publication, explains the moral at the end of the tale, leaving no doubt to its intended meaning. “From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers, and it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner” (77). Interestingly, in the Grimm Brothers’ version which emerges two centuries later an explicit warning now appears in the tale, in the shape of the mother’s instruction to “walk nicely and quietly, and not run off the path” (144). This new inclusion sanitises the tale and highlights the slippages between issues of mobility and morality. Where Little Red once set out with no instruction not to wander, she is now told plainly to stay on the path; not for her own safety but for implied matters of virtue. If Little Red strays while travelling alone she risks losing her virginity and, of course, her virtue (Siegel 55). Essentially, this is what is at stake when Little Red wanders; not that she will get lost in the woods and be unable to find her way, but that in straying from the path and purposefully disobeying her mother, she will no longer be “a dear little girl” (Grimm 144). In the Grimms’ version, Red Riding Hood herself critically reflects on her trespassing from the safe space of the village to the dangerous world of the forest and makes a concluding statement that demonstrates she has learnt her lesson. “As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so” (149). Red’s message to her female readers is representative of the social world’s message to its women travellers. “We are easily distracted and disobedient, we are not safe alone in the woods (travelling off the beaten path); we are fairly stupid; we get ourselves into trouble; and we need to be rescued by a man” (Siegel 56). As Siegel explains, even Angela Carter’s Red Riding Hood, who bursts out laughing when the Wolf says “all the better to eat you with” for “she knew she was nobody’s meat” (219), still shocks readers when she uses her virginity to take power over the voracious Wolf. In Carter’s world “children do not stay young for long,” and Little Red, who has her knife and is “afraid of nothing”, is certainly no exception (215). Yet in the end, when Red seduces the Wolf and falls asleep between his paws, there is still a sense this is a twist ending. As Siegel explains, “even given the background Carter provides in the story’s beginning, the scene startles. We knew the girl was strong, independent, and armed. However, the pattern of woman-alone-travelling-alone-helpless-alone-victim is so embedded in our consciousness we are caught off guard” (57). In Roald Dahl’s revolting rhyme, Little Red is also awarded agency, not through sexual prerogative, but through the enactment of traits often considered synonymous with male bravado: quick thinking, wit and cunning. After the wolf devours Grandmamma, Red pulls a pistol from her underpants and shoots him dead. “The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers. She whips a pistol from her knickers. She aims it at the creature’s head and bang bang bang, she shoots him dead” (lines 48—51). In the weeks that follow Red’s triumph she even takes a trophy, substituting her red cloak for a “furry wolfskin coat” (line 57). While Dahl subverts female stereotypes through Red’s decisive action and immediacy, there is still a sense, perhaps heightened by the rhyming couplets, that we are not to take the shooting seriously. Instead, Red’s girrrl-power is an imagined celebration; it is something comical to be mused over, but its shock value lies in its impossibility; it is not at all believable. While the sexual overtones of the tale have become more explicit in contemporary film adaptations such as David Slade’s Hard Candy and Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, the question that arises is what is really at threat, or more specifically who is threatened, when women travel off the well-ordered path of duty. As this problematic continues to surface in discussions of the genre, other more nuanced readings have also distorted the purpose and practice of women’s travel. Some psychoanalytical theorists, for example, have adopted Freud’s notion of travel as an escape from the family, particularly the father figure. In his essay A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, Freud explains how his own longing to travel was “a wish to escape from that pressure, like the force which drives so many adolescent children to run away from home” (237). “When one first catches sight of the sea,” Freud writes, “one feels oneself like a hero who has performed deeds of improbable greatness” (237). The inherent gender trouble with such a reading is the suggestion women only move in search of a quixotic male figure, “fleeing from their real or imaginary powerful fathers and searching for an idealised and imaginary ‘loving father’ instead” (Berger 55). This kind of thinking reduces the identities of modern women to fragile, unfinished selves, whose investment in travel is always linked to recovering or resisting a male self. Such readings neglect the unique history of women’s travel writing as they dismiss differences in the male and female practice and forget that “travel itself is a thoroughly gendered category” (Holland and Huggan 111). Freud’s experience of travel, for example, his description of feeling like a “hero” who has achieved “improbable greatness” is problematised by the female context, since the possibility arises that women may travel with different e/motions and, indeed, motives to their male counterparts. For example, often when a female character does leave home it is to escape an unhappy marriage, recover from a broken heart or search for new love. Elizabeth Gilbert’s best selling travelogue, Eat, Pray, Love (which spent 57 weeks at the number one spot of the New York Times), found its success on the premise of a once happily married woman who, reeling from a contentious divorce, takes off around the world “in search of everything” (1). Since its debut, the novel has been accused of being self-absorbed and sexist, and even branded by the New York Post as “narcissistic New Age reading, curated by Winfrey” (Callahan par 13). Perhaps most interesting for discussions of travel morality, however, is Bitch magazine’s recent article Eat, Pray, Spend, which suggests that the positioning of the memoir as “an Everywoman’s guide to whole, empowered living” typifies a new literature of privilege that excludes “all but the most fortunate among us from participating” (Sanders and Barnes-Brown par 7). Without seeking to limit the novel with separatist generalisations, the freedoms of Elizabeth Gilbert (a wealthy, white American novelist) to leave home and to write about her travels afterwards have not always been the freedoms of all women. As a result of this problematic, many contemporary women mark out alternative patterns of movement when travelling, often moving deliberately in a variety of directions and at varying paces, in an attempt to resist their placelessness in the travel genre and in the mappable world. As Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, speaking of Housekeeping’s Ruthie and Sylvie, explains, “they do not travel ever westward in search of some frontier space, nor do they travel across great spaces. Rather, they circle, they drift, they wander” (199). As a result of this double displacement, women have to work twice as hard to be considered credible travellers, particularly since travel is traditionally a male discursive practice. In this tradition, the male is often constructed as the heroic explorer while the female is mapped as a place on his itinerary. She is a point of conquest, a land to be penetrated, a site to be mapped and plotted, but rarely a travelling equal. Annette Kolodny considers this metaphor of “land-as-woman” (67) in her seminal work, The Lay of the Land, in which she discusses “men’s impulse to alter, penetrate and conquer” unfamiliar space (87). Finally, it often emerges that even when female travel focuses specifically on an individual or collective female experience, it is still read in opposition to the long tradition of travelling men. In their introduction to Amazonian, Dea Birkett and Sara Wheeler maintain the primary difference between male and female travel writers is that “the male species” has not become extinct (vii). The pair, who have theorised widely on New Travel Writing, identify some of the myths and misconceptions of the female genre, often citing their own encounters with androcentrism in the industry. “We have found that even when people are confronted by a real, live woman travel writer, they still get us wrong. In the time allowed for questions after a lecture, we are regularly asked, ‘Was that before you sailed around the world or after?’ even though neither of us has ever done any such thing” (xvii). The obvious bias in such a comment is an archaic view of what qualifies as “good” travel and a preservation of the stereotypes surrounding women’s intentions in leaving home. As Birkett and Wheeler explain, “the inference here is that to qualify as travel writers women must achieve astonishing and record-breaking feats. Either that, or we’re trying to get our hands down some man’s trousers. One of us was once asked by the president of a distinguished geographical institution, ‘What made you go to Chile? Was it a guy?’” (xviii). In light of such comments, there remain traceable difficulties for contemporary female travel. As travel itself is inherently gendered, its practice has often been “defined by men according to the dictates of their experience” (Holland and Huggan 11). As a result, its discourse has traditionally reinforced male prerogatives to wander and female obligations to wait. Even the travel trade itself, an industry that often makes its profits out of preying on fear, continues to shape the way women move through the world. While the female traveller then may no longer preface her work with an explicit apology, there are still signs she is carrying some historical baggage. It is from this site of trouble that new patterns of female travel will continue to emerge, distinguishably and defiantly, towards a much more colourful vista of general misrule. References Bassnett, Susan. “Travel Writing and Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 225-40. Berger, Arthur Asa. Deconstructing Travel: Cultural Perspectives on Tourism. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004. Bird, Isabella. The Englishwoman in America. London: John Murray, 1856. Birkett, Dea, and Sara Wheeler, eds. 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