Paradise Blues is an unconventional history of the United States of America, an unusual travel guide that follows and renders visible the country’s paths of nature, history and civilisation. Christof ...Mauch is a leading German historian who has spent many years in the US and in this book he attempts, from a European perspective, to grasp the diversity of American culture and the transformation of its environments, combining travel reporting with nature writing, personal observation and philosophical reflection. Mauch seeks the familiar in unfamiliar places and the curious in places that seem common and well-known. The journey begins in tiny Wiseman, Alaska and the final portrait is of Portland, Oregon, famously America’s most sustainable city. In between, Mauch’s wanderings in space and time, his serendipitous and planned encounters with places and people, bring to light the tension and ambivalence in most Americans’ attitudes towards their often-perilous environment, the intertwining throughout history of valuation, conservation and destruction. Interactions between human beings and the environment have settled like sediment down the centuries and may be read in the present – in the form of landscapes and collective memory, in bodies of water and the earth’s strata, tree rings and human cells. One of Mauch’s dominant themes is that the grand hopes and bitter disappointments of the American paradise are not equally distributed – the blues is the voice of the dispossessed and disadvantaged; and here environmental injustice toward Black, Indigenous and other marginalised people is a recurring and haunting motif. This is a book of melancholia and hope – Mauch exposes the beauty, the imperilment, at times the wreckage, of the American environment. And he shows us that, more powerfully than abstract ideas, governmental edicts or technological forces, stories reveal the infinite discoveries to be made in humans’ relationship to nature – in beautiful landscapes where danger lurks as well as in visions and behaviours that change the world and ecosystems. Above all, stories demonstrate that where we come from and where we are going are intimately connected and therefore nothing has to remain as it is. The stories told in Paradise Blues demonstrate that vulnerabilities and pressures are almost always political constructions and, for that reason, it must be possible to deconstruct them.
The goal of this study is to analyse the travelogues of Protestant evangelists in Wonogiri, a topic so far barely touched upon. Despite being a predominantly Muslim community, Wonogiri was one of the ...areas in the principalities of Surakarta targeted by the zending. Therefore, this study explores various aspects, including the purpose behind the visits of Protestant missionaries, the discourses presented in the travelogues, and the perspectives of these evangelists on the belief system prevalent in the community in the early twentieth century. Based on several travel accounts, this research utilizes a critical discourse analysis approach. The evangelists built a discourse which intertwined Christianity and identity discourse. The narratives reveal stark differences between the abangan communities and the stricter Muslims identified as putihan. The indigenous people who embraced Protestantism were perceived as the chosen ones, while those who remained unconverted were considered as the others. This reality highlights the inherent European-Christian perspective adopted by the travelogue writers.
Guidebooks are by now an integral feature within travel writing studies. This article presents a detailed contextual reading of George Carey's The Balnea (1799-1801): the first general guidebook to ...English leisure resorts. Although the work is occasionally cited by scholars, little attention has been paid to The Balnea's status as a text, to the changes that were made across its three editions, or to its nineteenth-century afterlife. My discussion elaborates both the pioneering aspects of Carey's text and the clash it stages between two distinct forms of travel writing: the systematic guidebook and the first-person travelogue. A digressive and uneven work, The Balnea struggles to match Carey's ambitions for either comprehensiveness or impartiality. At the same time, I argue, Carey's incorporation of a series of sentimental anecdotes and ballads engenders misgivings about his reliability as an author and the factual grounding of the text-as-travelogue.
This volume deals with the De Bry collection of voyages, one of the most monumental publications of Early Modern Europe. It analyzes the textual and iconographic changes the De Bry publishing family ...made to travel accounts describing Asia, Africa and America.
Following the success of prominent feature films shot on location, including Tolkien's wildly popular The Lord of the Rings, New Zealand boasts an impressive film tourism industry. This book examines ...the relationship between New Zealand's cinematic representation - as both a vast expanse of natural beauty and a magical world of fantasy on screen - and its tourism imagery, including the ways in which savvy local tourism boards have in recent decades used the country's film representations to sell New Zealand as a premiere travel destination. Focusing on the films that have had a strong impact on marketing strategies by local tourist boards, Touring the Screen will be of interest to all those working and studying in the fields of cinema, postcolonial history and tourism studies.
The article considers the range of subjects related to Mykola Rigelman’s travels to European countries in the 40-60s of the 19th century. The travelogues of this public figure and historian became ...the basis of our scientific research. They are characterized by subjective nature of the descriptions, the lack of clear structure, and inconsistency in the presentation of the material (for example, detailed representation of the German lands and only brief mentions of his stay in France). However, travelogues contain depictions of everyday life that are difficult or impossible to recreate with the help of other sources. The study found that the traveler was attracted not only to material culture, but also to customs, traditions, and worldview beliefs of people of different countries. It has been revealed that Mykola Rigelman focused on several aspects related to urban space, in particular, general descriptions of landscapes, features of buildings, architectural monuments, mainly of religious significance. Certain problems that were common to both European and Ukrainian cities, such as dirty streets and, at times, the decrepit housing, also attract our attention. Under the influence of imperial ideology and myths, the traveller constantly, often skeptically, compared life in European countries to everyday life in St. Petersburg, and pinpointing negative attitudes, especially those of Germans towards the Russian Empire. Describing his stay abroad, Mykola Rigelman did not limit himself to documenting what he saw and heard. He used historical and ethnographic information about the regions he visited, borrowed from European literature or stories of his compatriots and fellow travelers.
The article investigates the records of English travellers about their visits to Transdniprian Ukraine in the end of the 18th - in the first half of the 19th centuries. The travelogues are ...characterised by the subjectivity of descriptions, absence of clear structure, and irregular presentation of data. However, they also contain unique information that cannot be found in other resources. In the course of the investigation it was established that the majority of the travellers preferred to visit Kyiv and Odesa, as opposed to provincial towns. The authors paid special attention to different aspects of city life, such as landscape description, building peculiarities, and architectural monuments of predominantly religious nature. Furthermore, the travellers observed such typical issues of the Ukrainian cities as desolate streets and houses, low service level and so on. The authors also analysed the attribution of sacred orthodox properties to some Ukrainian cities and to Kyiv in particular. This phenomenon attracted attention of the protestants who perceived certain features of the Orthodox Church, for instance pilgrimage, as local superstitions. In addition, they viewed the Church as a tool of mental manipulation and enrichment. A part of the travelogues is dedicated to the polyethnicity of the Ukrainian cities, although it interested the travelers only in the context of cultural interaction. In their description of the Ukrainian territories and cities the authors not only wrote down what they had seen or heard, but also referred to geographical, historical, ethnographical, and statistical data about the regions they had visited. This data was collected from researches made by their predecessors or from statistical and administrative accounts provided by the Russian officials.
To examine the narratives of plagues in Arab societies, the paper, along with the postcolonial perspectives, uses the concepts like ‘empathy’ or ‘detached concern’ to bring fresh and new ...understanding of the travel texts. It selected John Antes’ Observations on the Manners and Customs of the Egyptians, the Overflowing of the Nile and its Effects (1800) and Richard F. Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah (1857) for the study. The paper analyses their narratives to understand their approaches in describing the ‘native’ Arab societies. The key findings show that while Burton tends to construct the people and their culture as ‘the Other’ although his mode of presentation tends to follow a mode of ‘detached concern’, Antes is, on the other hand, more objective but stood by the plague-infected people in empathy. The findings show that these Western travellers considered the concept of predestination, lack of quarantine, lack of sanitation, mass gatherings during the plague, and the unscientific local treatments as the root causes of the spread of the plagues among the ‘natives’.
