Chapter 5. Italian travel narratives on twentieth century China

Author(s):  
Linetto Basilone
2021 ◽  
pp. 179-189
Author(s):  
Carla Marisa da Silva Valente

Abel Salazar presents the considerations of a traveler-storyteller about some Italian cities in his book of travel narratives, Uma Primavera em Itália (2003), the central corpus of our research. Starting from an introduction about the author, the text, the perspectives of travel literature in the first half of the twentieth century, its categorization and reflecting on the tourist and traveler profile, we intend, with this research, to present a critical analysis of the interpretation of the figure of the traveler and its facets by the eclectic Portuguese author Abel Salazar, praised and criticized in his travel narratives.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-68
Author(s):  
Michał Czorycki

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.


Author(s):  
Charles M. Tung

Modernism and Time Machines places the fascination with time in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and art side-by-side with the rise of time-travel narratives and alternate histories in popular culture. Both modernism and this cardinal trope of science fiction produce a range of effects and insights that go beyond the exhilarations of simply sliding back and forth in history. Together the modernist time-obsession and the fantasy of moving in time help us to rethink the scales and shapes of time, the consistency of timespace, and the nature of history.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-279
Author(s):  
Rajashree Mazumder

Travel plays a critical role in twentieth-century Bengali adventure literature for adolescent males. Armchair journeys through the Empire and beyond let that audience discover the world: a panoply of high- to low-ranking cultures, utterly strange geographical spaces and, often, their ‘barbarous’, ‘uncivilized’ inhabitants. Exemplified by Hemendrakumar Roy’s works, the genre encourages boys to draw correlations between race, ethnicity and territory in a way that elevates Hindu elites within a civilizational hierarchy that borrows, but will not follow wholesale, the Western schema. The literary trope of travel imaginatively transports the colonized protagonists and audience across their country’s borders. Yet the destinations, distanced from their experience by perilous voyages, are clearly chosen to spark reflection on their own domestic spaces. The adventures, in turn, fuel their individual and, ideally, national self-transformation. For Roy’s travel narratives promote such changes by featuring Bengali heroes defeating horrific hazards with courage, strength, intelligence, self-sacrifice and perseverance—‘masculine’ qualities the author hopes a new generation will imbibe and use to serve the nation. Doing so, he also hopes, will disprove in reality what he demolished in writing: colonizers’ stereotype of Bengalis as effeminate cowards, and their dismissal of Indian culture as beneath their own.


2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wills

In the second half of the twentieth century Greece became a subject for travel writers in search of a European ‘Paradise’. But ‘Hell was also to be found in Greece, often in the form of frustrations over allegedly ‘non-European’ standards of living, facilities, and attitudes. A sample of travel narratives published between 2006 and 2014 suggests the extent to which, in the light of the ‘Greek Crisis’, twenty-first-century writers are abandoning these formerly conventional themes. There is now the potential for the realignment of narratives, with Greece becoming the Hell, rather than the Heaven, of Europe.


Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-33
Author(s):  
Victoria Kuttainen ◽  
Susann Liebich

This special section considers the interconnections of print culture and mobility across the Pacific in the early twentieth century. The contributors explore how print culture was part of the practices, experiences, mediations, and representations of travel and mobility, and understand mobility in a number of ways: from the movement of people and texts across space and the mobility of ideas to the opportunities of social mobility through travel. The special section moves beyond studies of travel writing and the literary analysis of travel narratives by discussing a range of genres, by paying attention to readers and reception, and by focusing on actual mobility and its representation as well as the mediation between the two.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Katherine Collins

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.


Transfers ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-98
Author(s):  
Michael Bies

This article deals with representations of equator crossings in travel literature. Focusing on the accounts of European travelers to Brazil, it considers descriptions of crossing-the-line ceremonies that were performed on board ships since the sixteenth century and shows that, since the late eighteenth century, writers have increasingly staged crossings of the equator as an individual and private experience. Furthermore, it addresses the relation of travel and knowledge that descriptions of equator crossings establish by referring to distinctive epistemological approaches to the New World and by producing a “liminal knowledge” characteristic of travel narratives. The article draws on travel literature from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, paying special attention to the postromantic description of an equator crossing in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous memoir Tristes Tropiques.


Author(s):  
Francis Müller

AbstractThis chapter lays out the history of ethnography, which began with travel narratives in antiquity and came to be used as a method in anthropology and urban sociology in the early twentieth century. Discussed, among other things, are the researcher’s role in the field and ethical considerations, as well as methods such as observation, interviews, digital, visual, and participatory ethnography, and the question of the documentation of design ethnography research. These are dealt with here within the specific context of design ethnography, which is usually significantly shorter in duration than the typical ethnographies in anthropology and cultural sociology and may seek not only to investigate a situation but also potentially to alter it.


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