A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature offers a comprehensive, comparative and generic analysis of developments of travel writing in Anglophone and Polish literature from the Late Medieval Period to the twenty-first century. These developments are depicted in a wider context of travel narratives written in other European languages.

Bringing together original contributions from scholars across the world, this volume traces the history of travel writing from antiquity to the Internet age. It examines travel texts of several national or linguistic traditions, introducing readers to the global contexts of the genre. From wilderness to the urban, from Nigeria to the polar regions, from mountains to rivers and the desert, this book explores some of the key places and physical features represented in travel writing. Chapters also consider the employment in travel writing of the diary, the letter, visual images, maps and poetry, as well as the relationship of travel writing to fiction, science, translation and tourism. Gender-based and ecocritical approaches are among those surveyed. Together, the thirty-seven chapters here underline the richness and complexity of this genre.

Escaping Kakania is about fascinating characters—soldiers, doctors, scientists, writers, painters—who traveled from their eastern European homelands to colonial Southeast Asia. Their stories are told by experts on different countries in the two regions, who bring diverse approaches into a conversation that crosses disciplinary and national borders. The 14 chapters deal with the diverse encounters of eastern Europeans with the many faces of colonial southeast Asia. Some essays directly engage with post-colonial studies, contributing to an ongoing critical re-evaluation of eastern European “semi-peripheral” (non-)involvement in colonialism. Other chapters disclose a range of perspectives and narratives that illuminate the plurality of the travelers’ positions while reflecting on the specificity of the eastern European experience. The travellers moved—as do the chapter authors—between two regions that are off-centre, in-between, shiftingly “Eastern,” and disorientingly heterogeneous, thus complicating colonial and postcolonial notions of “Europe,” “East,” and East-West distinctions. Both at home and overseas, they navigated among a multiplicity of peoples, “races,” and empires, Occidents and Orients, fantasies of the Self and the Other, adopting/adapting/mimicking/rejecting colonialist identities and ideologies. They saw both eastern Europe and southeast Asia in a distinctive light, as if through each other—and so will the readers of Escaping Kakania.

This book reflects, comments on and adds to a fast growing field of travel writing studies. The twenty-five papers in this volume rely on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches and explore a diverse body of travel writing texts created over the last three hundred years in English, Polish, Hungarian and French. The book is divided into three parts. The first one includes papers which apply the findings of post-structuralism, generic and cultural criticism as well as narratology to explore theories, canons and genres in travel writing drawing material not only from non-fictional and fictional prose narratives but also from poetry and tragedy. The second and third parts contain papers on a wide selection of travel writing texts, both fictional and non-fictional, written in Anglophone, as well as other literary traditions. They are arranged chronologically: the second part is devoted to texts written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the third part focuses on those written in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

Memory and Identity in the Learned World offers a detailed and varied account of community formation in the early modern world of learning and science. The book traces how collective identity, institutional memory and modes of remembrance helped to shape learned and scientific communities. The case studies in this book analyse how learned communities and individuals presented and represented themselves, for example in letters, biographies, histories, journals, opera omnia, monuments, academic travels and memorials. By bringing together the perspectives of historians of literature, scholarship, universities, science, and art, this volume studies knowledge communities by looking at the centrality of collective identity and memory in their formations and reformations. Contributors: Lieke van Deinsen, Karl Enenkel, Constance Hardesty, Paul Hulsenboom, Dirk van Miert, Alan Moss, Richard Kirwan, Koen Scholten, Floris Solleveld, and Esther M. Villegas de la Torre.

Long popular with a general readership, travel writing has, in the past three decades or so, become firmly established as an object of serious and multi-disciplinary academic inquiry. Few of the scholarly and popular publications that have focused on the nineteenth century have regarded the century as a whole. This broad volume examines the cultural and social aspects of travel writing on Africa, Asia, America, the Balkans and Australasia.

Imperial Eyes is a highly acclaimed and interdisciplinary book which quickly established itself as a seminal work in the study of travel literature and the field of postcolonial criticism. It investigates the way in which travel writing has constructed an image of the world beyond Europe for European readerships. Focusing on writing about South America and Africa in relation to the political and economic expansion of Europe, Mary Louise Pratt uses readings of particular genres of travel writing to show how they connect with the forms of knowledge and expression which surround them.This long-awaited second edition:• is updated throughout, including a new preface and a fully revised introduction;• contains a new chapter, which reads well-known Latin American texts through the concept of neocoloniality, then takes up the expressive coordinates of late twentieth-century experiences of migration and displacement;• upgrades original illustrations and incorporates new visual materials.This new edition of Imperial Eyes continues to advance the study of imperialism, colonialism and travel writing in fresh directions, whilst retaining the clarity necessary to engage readers new to the topic.