Perspectives on Travel Writing

Glenn Hooper, Tim Youngs, Tim Youngs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351911658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Ranging from the early modern to the postcolonial, and dealing mainly with encounters in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, Perspectives on Travel Writing is a collection of new essays by international scholars that examines some of the various contexts of travel writing, as well as its generic characteristics. Contributions examine the similarities between autobiography and memoir, fiction, and travel writing, and attempt to define travel writing as a genre. Utilising a variety of approaches, the essays display a shared concern with what travel writing does and how it does it. The effects of encounter and border-crossing on gender, 'race', and national identity are considered throughout. The collection begins with a review of some of the problems and issues facing the scholar of travel writing and moves on to a detailed discussion of the qualities of travel writing and its related forms. It then presents in chronological order a number of case studies, before closing with a critical discussion of approaches to the subject. An essay collection with broad historical and geographical coverage, this volume should appeal to students and researchers of travel and travel-related literatures from across the Humanities.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs

Europe, transition, and travel

One of the major aims of the series in which this volume appears is to add to the current of cross-disciplinary research on Europe, and to further an understanding of how Europe was constructed, as well as how it managed to construct its Others. We hope that Perspectives on Travel Writing will contribute to these discussions of differing European strands; of how ideas, people and customs operate within certain known, geo-political parameters, but also how they have come to influence – and be influenced by – other locales, jurisdictions, and cultures.¹ Indeed, given the emphasis within much of this research on mobility of one form or another, it seems appropriate that our contributors are scholars working within the broad area of travel writing, a form – as the following essays will demonstrate – that embraces many interests and themes, but which seems especially suited to the notion of transition, in all its guises. This sense of change is something we wish to underline.

A consequence of work in the past twenty or thirty years on how Europe has viewed and used other parts of the world has been to reinforce an impression of the continent as homogeneous. Yet there are differences within Europe – there are different Europes – and the ways in which those differences are enforced parallel the processes of Othering enacted elsewhere. To address these issues we have commissioned essays that between them (and in some cases on their own) cover diverse territories and periods. This is not to suggest that complete coverage has been attempted of the various geo-political identities historically linked with Europe, or which share even the vaguest connection with its development. Nevertheless, we do suggest that in their scope, and in the approaches they take, the essays presented here indicate some of the advantages to be gained from interrogating the generalizations made about Europe and its various Others. A more 'domestic' framework – represented by Scotland, Ireland and Brittany – is also opened up. while discussion of those regions distant from Europe, such as the Caribbean and Brazil, indicates how they have come under Europe's various influences. Our historical coverage ranges from the late fifteenth to the late twentieth century. Our methodologies reflect theoretical as well as more empirical interests and concerns.²

The travelling genre(s)

Editors of essay collections usually have the advantage of knowing what it is that they assemble and introduce. Travel writing, however, remains a loosely defined body of literature. Whether this is despite or a consequence of the growing amount of critical energy expended on its study over the past couple of decades is debatable. One's ready assumption would probably be that travel writing is a factual, first-person account of a journey undertaken by the author. However, this is far from clear, and it is common to complicate such an argument by turning to the mediaeval example of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1356): uncertainty about the author and what he claims to have visited remains strong.³ Similar doubts have been raised about the truth of Marco Polo's account.⁴ and even when we move into what we assume is more historically verifiable terrain – the eighteenth century – problems regarding veracity continue to exist. For example, Percy Adams has noted the high incidence of plagiarism among many travel writers of this period, and argues that much of what has been routinely accepted as 'truth' is in fact an amalgam of the historical, antiquarian and aesthetic jottings of many others.⁵ An altogether different question is posed by a text such as Herman Melville's Typee (1846). which when first published was taken for what it purported to be: the self-told adventures of its sailor protagonist, but which was later, when Melville's writings became better known, reappraised as a novel. Nor is generic instability resolved simply by historical change or biographical information: to complicate the matter further. Melville's South Seas works have spawned their own travel texts.⁶

One of the most persistent observations regarding travel writing, then, is its absorption of differing narrative styles and genres, the manner in which it effortlessly shape-shifts and blends any number of imaginative encounters, and its potential for interaction with abroad range of historical periods, disciplines and perspectives. In much the same way that travel itself can be seen as a somewhat fluid experience, so too can travel writing be regarded as a relatively open-ended and versatile form, notwithstanding the closure that occurs in some of its more rigidly conventional examples7Mark Cocker agrees that the 'enormous extension of style, content and intention in travel books has tended to confuse', but in a world where uncertainty is increasingly expected, if not courted, this has proved to be a bonus.⁸ True, there is always the occasional sour note. At the beginning of The Old Patagonian Express, Paul Theroux, in an extension of the much quoted phrase that there is nowhere new for the traveller to visit, argues that travel writing itself has become an exhausted medium:

The literature of travel has become measly, the standard opening, that farcical nose-against-the-porthole view from the plane's tilted fuselage. The joke-opening, that straining for effect, is now so familiar it is nearly impossible to parody. How does it go?⁹

Whether this is another exercise in bad faith on Theroux's part, a genuinely expressed difficulty, or a cover-up. is hard to say, for in a critical climate where the richness of repetition, irony and self-reflexivity are awarded high marks, none of what Theroux describes seems especially limiting. But not all writers are so jaded. W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (1998) employs memoir and historical and geographical digression within the narrative structure of a walk through the countryside of the author-narrator's East Anglia. Categorizing Sebald's work is impossible, and yet it is in its indefinability, as well as its textured prose, that much of its appeal lies.

Given these different styles of writing, as well as the fact that we are looking upon an unstable set of classifications generally, it hardly needs saying that the number of interpretive approaches required will be as varied as the primary sources themselves. As travel itself has changed – physically, as well as in terms of its perception¹⁰ – so too has travel writing altered, reflecting the shifting aesthetic and cultural fashions of the day, as well as the power inequalities that lie between East and West, the history of empire, and the gendered spaces of home and abroad.¹¹ These factors, especially in the influence they directly have on the writer's thoughts and representations, make for an even greater sense of the random and fleeting than is usual with literary documents. And when we add to these the changes that have come about within the various disciplines and methodologies upon which we would routinely expect to draw – anthropology, historiography and English studies, for example – then we begin to have some sense of the complexities facing us in our task.¹²

The essays

The question of loose borders is explored in the essays by Jan Borm and Tim Youngs that frame our volume. In the opening essay, Borm lists some of the many terms used to describe travel literature and asks what we mean by them; whether they even refer to the same object. Arguing against strict boundaries, he proposes that travel writing is not a genre, but comprises texts, both predominantly fictional and non-fictional, that have travel as their main theme. Travel writing might not be as strictly factual as some like to claim, he suggests, especially as it employs some of the most characteristic of fictional techniques. Indeed, even the presence of a non-fiction dominant is a complicated matter since ideas about non-fiction change over time. It is not only with the novel that travel writing crosses over, of course, but with autobiography also (and to complicate the matter further, developments over the past few years in the criticism of autobiography have tended to treat that genre as akin to fiction in its construction of character, its selection and relation of episodes, and its arrangement of plot – a point taken up by Loredana Polezzi in a later essay).¹³ Besides the mixing of genres within travel writing that Borm describes. his essay crosses another boundary in that it draws on the work of European critics, notably Gérard Genette, Philippe Lejeune, Jean-Didier Urbain, and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, a reminder that despite the influence of continental European thinkers upon cultural theory in general, travel writing criticism still tends (in the US and Britain, at least) to be dominated by Anglophone critics. In considering what he describes as the hybrid nature of the travel book and travel writing Borm emphasizes the literary aspects. Youngs, too, while detailing some important cultural contexts and features of narratives that literary criticism ignores, concludes that specialist attention to literary characteristics is nonetheless essential to a fuller appreciation of travel writing. Where Borm reveals how travel writing crosses over with or accommodates other forms, Youngs demonstrates that a similar travelling occurs within its very study.

'Identity is largely constituted through the process of othering', writes Trinh T. Minh-ha. It is a process that can evolve within societies, but which is especially evident transculturally, at the point of contact, when our sense of Self is most under threat frequently in need of reassurance, and likeliest to resort to binary modes of discourse as a form of defence.¹⁴ In Helga Quadflieg's essay this process of Othering is seen as an almost necessary component of many early modern travel accounts, as the subject constructs himself – frequently as an English, Protestant, Colonizing Male – in contrast to the natives of Eastern Europe, Persia, North America, and the East Indies. Quadflieg's survey touches on several texts, including Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations and Purchas's Hakluytus Posthumus, and she notes that as with many modern travel accounts, for Tudor and early Stuart writers there is often a sense of unease about what they are producing, a form of discourse that manages to appear both intensely nuanced and naive. At once colonial discourse, autobiography and anthropological treatise, many texts, she argues, articulate a political perspective, while at the same time appearing conscious of the wider implications of their narratives. Moreover, because many of their evaluations fall within the period of the immediate pre- and post-reformation era, Quadflieg is able to show the extent to which religious difference was also deployed and seen as a convenient ethnic marker but also as an inevitable site of contention as the European powers fought to consolidate territorial gains, especially in the Americas and the East Indies. Facing the 'exotic', then became a test for these early modern writers, but also a wonderful opportunity for self- (and national) (re)invention, a way of encountering, and then countering, difference.

Dealing with the exotic could, of course, prompt a variety of responses. James Duncan has examined the way in which sameness within difference can affect the self-perceptions of travellers, a troubling recognition within a site clearly unknown to them. Duncan discusses several Victorian travellers visiting the Kandyan Highlands of what was then Ceylon. Although fundamentally different, and recognized as such, Kandy startled many travellers because of its 'mountainous topography ... and the relatively cool climate', both of which acted on the imaginations of its visitors who saw it, sometimes needily, 'as a mirror of home'.¹⁵ Something of this shared, or bifurcated, vision is evident in Betty Hagglund's essay, as she investigates the complex interleaving of self with place that is articulated by one particular traveller, Anne Grant. Born in Glasgow in 1755, Grant was an inspired and talented individual of modest means, but also a figure well-versed in the ethnographic change brought about as a result of travel. More interestingly, although a Lowland-born Scot, Grant was taken to live in the British colonies in Albany, New York, an experience that was to help shape her understanding not just of Native American culture, but also her own Highland society on her return to Scotland. On the outside of Native American life, yet part of a settler colony, on her return to a part of Scotland unfamiliar to her Grant found herself, as in America, at something of a remove. A hybrid figure who favoured a hybrid narrative voice. Grant appears as a complex character who gained an 'inside' perspective on Mohawk culture, who came to value the 'wilderness' of the frontier settlement of Albany, but who, in the Scottish Highlands, developed a romantic enthusiasm for the poems of Ossian, a convenient tool with which to deal with the challenges of her new surroundings.

The Scottish Highlands received increasing numbers of tourists from the middle of the eighteenth century, as did the south-west of Ireland, and North Wales. But closer to home, select parts of Derbyshire and Yorkshire also offered domestic competition to the Grand Tour.¹⁶ Such a development might seem difficult to believe, but at just the point when enthusiasm for continental travel was at its peak (with the exception of the period of the Nine Years War), the more rugged and elemental parts of Britain and Ireland were witness to a noticeable increase in the number of travellers, and travel writers.

If Hagglund's essay investigates some of the motivation behind the fascination for the Home Tour – the advantages of scenic over grand tourism, a new-found confidence in the Celtic fringe – then one place in which this development would be played out more fitfully was in Ireland. Like Hagglund's, Glenn Hooper's essay picks up on this theme of migrancy, although he takes as his starting point the Irish Famine of 1845-52, and shows how those disastrous years contributed to a re-evaluation of the country in the early 1850s. Hooper shows that an increasingly positive impression of post-Famine Ireland was endorsed by several British travellers and travel writers, well up until the late 1860s. More specifically, he argues that although the country was seen by many travellers to be in a deplorable state, several insisted that it was also time to see in its shattered economy an opportunity for investment, and in the place itself the most unlikely of opportunities: a resettlement option to rank with the Antipodes and the Americas.¹⁷ Taking John Hervey Ashworth as an example of one of the most trenchant post-Famine settlers to Ireland, Hooper reveals how the travel narrative Ashworth composed became the perfect medium for the over-layering of a strident promotional rhetoric and he shows how adept Ashworth was at marketing Ireland to a wary British readership. The Saxon in Ireland, structured around a series of visits to Ireland made by Ashworth, deploys some of the most notorious of colonizing tropes while at the same time portraying the country as a somewhat disfigured extension of England, a feat that the travel narrative was able to discharge with arguably greater confidence than other forms. More attractive than places such as Australia, New Zealand and Port Philip, Ireland becomes, at least in the travel-settler mind of John Hervey Ashworth, a place from which an unpleasant and recent history might be excised, but also a region in which a new beginning may be allowed to emerge.

Jean-Yves Le Disez reminds us that there are margins within continental Europe as well as outside it. Brittany had at times been as peripheral to France as to Britain. Le Disez contends that the study of Victorian narratives of travel in Brittany...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Illustrations
• General Editors' Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology
• 3 'As mannerly and civill as any of Europe': Early Modern Travel Writing and the Exploration of the English Self
• 4 'Not absolutely a native, nor entirely a stranger': The Journeys of Anne Grant
• 5 The Saxon in Ireland: John Hervey Ashworth on the Emigrant Trail
• 6 Animals as Figures of Otherness in Travel Narratives of Brittany, 1840-1895
• 7 'The Silent Language of the Face': The Perception of Indigenous Difference in Travel Writing about the Caribbean
• 8 Night Train to Belo Horizonte: South American Travels
• 9 Between Gender and Genre: The Travels of Estella Canziani
• 10 Varieties of Nostalgia in Contemporary Travel Writing
• 11 Mediaeval Travel in Postcolonial Times: Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land
• 12 Where Are We Going? Cross-border Approaches to Travel Writing
• Select Bibliography
• Index