scholarly journals Konferencja: Early Modern Travel Literature, Toruń, 28–29 maja 2012

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Samsel
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Early Modern Travel Literature

‘I wish to be no other but as he’: Persia, masculinity, and conversion in early-seventeenth-century travel writing and drama

Conversions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloë Houston
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Early Modern Travel Literature

In classical descriptions, Persians and their rulers are seen as being given to both tyranny and femininity; early modern Europe thus inherited a view of Persia in which the performance of religious identity, political power and gender were inter-connected. Given the complex relationships between Islam, tyranny and gender, early modern European interest in the possible religious conversion of Persia and its people marks a moment at which contemporary anxieties about religious and gender identities converge. This chapter argues that European writers’ interest in the prospect of Persian conversion became tied up with their ideas about the links between Persian effeminacy and tyranny. The prospect of the conversion of Persian Shahs in early modern travel literature and drama gives rise to particular anxieties about masculinity, both in Persian figures and in the Christian European travellers and dramatists who portrayed them. Despite the tradition of viewing Persia as feminised and luxurious, the sources betray an underlying concern that Muslims’ gender and religious identities might in fact be more ‘fixed’ than those of Christian travellers, who experienced their own conversions to Islam and to Persian identities in ways that were troubling to them both as Christians and as men.  

scholarly journals Fantasies of Immediacy, or, the Boundaries of the Book in Eighteenth Century Travel Narratives

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Buschmeier
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
The Other ◽  
Structural Shift ◽  
The One ◽  
Early Modern Travel Literature

This article explores a structural shift in techniques of representation in eighteenth-century travel literature as a reaction to the changing needs of cameralist governance, one in which space is no longer grasped as enyclopedic and all-encompassing. Instead of being understood as static territory, space is increasingly represented as a dynamic and continually updatable dataset. As a consequence, travel literature itself goes in search of new representational modes appropriate to this new understanding of space. And as I show, the medium of the book becomes increasingly problematic in this regard. As early modern travel literature (ars Apodemica) largely splits in the eighteenth century into statistics and geography on the one hand and literary travel experiences on the other, each of these categories requires new forms of mediation for their successful presentation. Common to both, however, remains a desire to communicate an immediacy of perception through representation. Taking Friedrich Nicolai’s Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781 as my primary example, I show how the medium of the book arrives at its own media boundary, one whose transgression necessarily results in failure because it can no longer account for an epistemological divide that has already transpired. This difference has far-reaching implications for the place of the book within the humanistic sciences today.

Travel and Travel Writing

2009 ◽  
pp. 351-363
Author(s):  
Maria Pretzler
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Modern Geography ◽  
The City ◽  
Act One ◽  
Greek World

Greek travellers tried to take their city with them: travel is typically conducted as a civic act, one justified and defined by one's tie to the city: trade, for example, or martial aggression, or colonization. This article discusses the range of travel experiences reflected in surviving literature. The study of ancient travel focuses on the process of travelling, on individual travellers' movements and their reactions to particular journeys and places. The evidence is therefore mainly literary, with valuable additions from epigraphic sources. The remains of sites that were particularly attractive to ancient travellers, depictions of their means of transport, shipwrecks, and traces of ancient roads can add further information. Greek travel literature had a strong influence on early modern geography and ethnography, and it still has an impact on how people understand the Greek world.

scholarly journals Al-Ṭahṭāwī in Paris: Western Influence on Format and Style in Early Modern Arabic Travel Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Ibrahem Almarhaby
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Influence ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Modern Arabic

This study investigates format and style in the first modern Arab travel source, Takhliṣ al-Ibriz fī Talkhiṣ Paris, written by Sheikh al-Ṭahṭāwī in the 19th century. During this century, the connection between the Eastern Self and the Western Other became closer and more immediate culturally and politically, which undeniably impacted literature on both thematic and artistic levels. This paper addresses the extent to which the format and style of al-Ṭahṭāwī was influenced by the Other and to determine how these artistic aspects had changed and were distinct from those aspects in medieval travel literature.

Different Peoples, Different Inebriations: The Recognition of Different Cultures of Intoxication in Early Modern English Medicine

2021 ◽  
pp. e488112020
Author(s):  
Edoardo Pierini
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Alcohol Intoxication ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
Medical Community ◽  
Western World ◽  
Medical Travel ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Culturally Embedded

In early modern Europe, the global dimensions of the drug trade and the introduction of new substances contributed to the development of new cultures of intoxication. This process was particularly evident in England, where a new intoxication culture emerged from the recognition of how different substances produced similar reactions. Medical travel literature provides a critical source for examining alternative methods of drug consumption in the non-Western world in this period: culturally embedded practices like Turkish opium eating or Native American tobacco smoking became significant benchmarks for comparing with Western habits of alcohol consumption. This article argues that the early modern Western medical community relied on comparisons of intoxication in other contexts in an effort to describe its own culturally embedded practices of alcohol intoxication.

Intertextuality in Folklore: Pagan Themes in Jewish Folktales from the Early Modern Era

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-80
Author(s):  
Eli Yassif
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Folk Narrative ◽  
Powerful Effect ◽  
Religious Meaning ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

AbstractThis article deals with the concept of intertextuality in folk narrative—a theme that has been dealt with only rarely. By analyzing the Hasidic, nineteenth-century folktale of The Sacrificers of Children, we attempt to demonstrate the importance of this theme for folkloristic scholarship and its centrality in the interpretation of folktales.The true importance of intertextuality lies in its contribution to the complexity of the text. The presence of secondary textual elements that are incorporated into the primary text but do not interfere with its ideological and aesthetic independence creates the powerful effect of multiple layers and meanings.We have here a story whose intent and purpose are distinctly and unquestionably didactic and conservative. The storyteller uses the earlier sources—biblical, midrashic, travel literature, medieval exempla—not only as narrative materials, but as references which can bring religious meaning and authority to his text. And yet it can also be read from an entirely different perspective thanks to textual elements from another world, and one which is diametrically opposed to Jewish morality. The intertextuality here is not, therefore, simply an interweaving of texts, but an existential dialogue that is conducted and deciphered by means of textual elements.

Pirates, Captives, and Conversions: Rereading British Stories of White Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean

2017 ◽  
Vol 135 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-439
Author(s):  
Marcus Hartner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Captivity Narratives ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Important Field ◽  
Early Novel

AbstractWhile captivity narratives have long been recognized as an important field of research in American Studies, the substantial body of autobiographical tales portraying captivity in the Muslim world published in England between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth century has only recently begun to attract the attention of literary scholars. Despite a number of important pioneering works, however, British captivity narratives have not only remained at the margins of early modern studies, but even where they have received attention they have mainly been treated as historical source material. In other words, there has hardly been any interest in the genre of captivity narratives as a textual and literary phenomenon in its own right. As a consequence, most of the published stories in question lack thorough narrative analysis, although the genre is situated at the intriguing intersection of travel literature, religious writing (e. g. tales of martyrdom), and prose fiction, and arguably constitutes one of the forerunners of the early novel. This paper proposes that we need to go beyond the limits of current research by rereading British tales of captivity with a stronger interest in their narrative composition, their discursive and generic contexts, and the pragmatics of publishing. Only in this way it will be possible to both do justice and draw more sustained attention to this highly fascinating and yet still understudied genre of literary texts.

scholarly journals Sanctifying Domestic Space and Domesticating Sacred Space: Reading Ziyāra and Taṣliya in Light of the Domestic in the Early Modern Ottoman World

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Parkes Allen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
Physical Evidence

Shrine-visitation (ziyāra) and devotion to Muḥammad (such as expressed in taṣliya, the uttering of invocations upon the Prophet), both expressed through a range of ritualized practices and material objects, were at the heart of everyday Islam for the vast majority of early modern Ottoman Muslims across the empire. While both bodies of practice had communal and domestic aspects, this article focuses on the important intersections of the domestic with both shrine-visitation and Muḥammad-centered devotion as visible in the early modern Ottoman lands, with a primary emphasis on the eighteenth century. While saints’ shrines were communal and ‘public’ in nature, a range of attitudes and practices associated with them, recoverable through surviving physical evidence, travel literature, and hagiography, reveal their construction as domestic spaces of a different sort, appearing to pious visitors as the ‘home’ of the entombed saint through such routes as wall-writing, gender-mixing, and dream encounters. Devotion to Muḥammad, on the other hand, while having many communal manifestations, was also deeply rooted in the domestic space of the household, in both prescription and practice. Through an examination of commentary literature, hagiography, and imagery and objects of devotion, particularly in the context of the famed manual of devotion Dalā’il al-khayrāt, I demonstrate the transformative effect of such devotion upon domestic space and the ways in which domestic contexts were linked to the wider early modern world, Ottoman, and beyond.

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