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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'British Travel Literature'
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1
Ḥajarī, Hilāl. "Oman through British eyes : British travel writing on Oman from 1800 to 1970." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2003. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2662/.
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This thesis focuses on the images of Oman in British travel writing from 1800 to 1970. In texts that vary from travel accounts to sailors’ memoirs, complete travelogues, autobiographies, and letters, it looks at British representations of Oman as a place, people, and culture. It argues that these writings are heterogeneous and discontinuous throughout the periods under consideration. Offering diverse voices from British travellers, this thesis challenges Edward Said’s project in Orientalism (1978) which looks to Western discourse on the Middle East homogenisingly as Eurocentric and hostile. Chapter one explores and discusses the current Orientalist debate suggesting alternatives to the dilemma of Orientalism and providing a framework for the arguments in the ensuing chapters. Chapter two outlines the historical Omani-British relations, and examines the travel accounts and memoirs written by several British merchants and sailors who stopped in Muscat and other Omani coastal cities during their route from Britain to India and vice versa in the nineteenth century. Chapter three is concerned with the works of travellers who penetrated the Interior of Oman. James Wellsted’s Travels in Arabia (1838), Samuel Miles’ The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf (1919) and other uncollected travel accounts, and Bertram Thomas’s Alarms and Excursions (1932) are investigated in this chapter. Chapter four considers the travellers who explored Dhofar in the southern Oman and the Ruba Al-Khali or the Empty Quarter. Precisely, it is devoted to Bertram Thomas’s Arabia Felix (1932) and Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands (1959). Chapter five looks at the last generation of British travellers who were in Oman from 1950 to 1970 employed either by oil companies or the Sultan Said bin Taimur. It explores Edward Henderson’s Arabian Destiny (1988), David Gwynne-James’s Letters from Oman (2001), and Ian Skeet’s Muscat and Oman (1974). This thesis concludes with final remarks on British travel writing on Oman and recommendations for future studies related to the subject. The gap of knowledge that this thesis undertakes to fill is that most of the texts under discussion have not been studied in any context.
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Hållen, Nicklas. "Travelling objects : modernity and materiality in British Colonial travel literature about Africa." Doctoral thesis, Umeå universitet, Institutionen för språkstudier, 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-46365.
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This study examines the functions of objects in a selection of British colonial travel accounts about Africa. The works discussed were published between 1863 and 1908 and include travelogues by John Hanning Speke, Verney Lovett Cameron, Henry Morton Stanley, Mary Henrietta Kingsley, Ewart Scott Grogan, Mary Hall and Constance Larymore. The author argues that objects are deeply involved in the construction of pre-modern and modern spheres that the travelling subject moves between. The objects in the travel accounts are studied in relation to a contextual background of Victorian commodity and object culture, epitomised by the 1851 Great Exhibition and the birth of the modern anthropological museum. The four analysis chapters investigate the roles of objects in ethnographical and geographical writing, in ideological discussions about the transformative powers of colonial trade, and in narratives about the arrival of the book in the colonial periphery. As the analysis shows, however, objects tend not to behave as they are expected to do. Instead of marking temporal differences, descriptions of objects are typically unstable and riddled with contradictions and foreground the ambivalence that characterises colonial literature.
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Gualtieri, Claudia. "The discourse of the exotic in British colonial travel writing in West Africa." Thesis, University of Leeds, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.274829.
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Wang, Tsai-Yeh. "British women’s travel writings in the era of the French Revolution." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2010. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/1029/.
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This thesis intends to investigate how educated British women travellers challenged conventional female roles and how they participated in the political culture in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. Part One will discuss those who tried hard to challenge or to correct traditionally-defined femininity and to prove themselves useful in their society. Many of them negotiated with and broadened the traditionally defined femininity in this age. Part Two will take Burke and Wollstonecraft’s debate as the central theme in order to discuss chronologically the British women travellers’ political responses to the Revolution controversy. When the Revolution degenerated into Terror and wars, the Burkean view became the main strand of British women travellers’ political thinking. Under the threat of Revolutionary France and during the Napoleonic Wars, a popular conservatism and patriotism developed in Britain. Part Three will use the travel journals of the women who went to France during the Amiens Truce and after the fall of Napoleon in 1814 to analyse the formation of British national identity and nationalism in this period. In the end, these educated British women both stimulated and contributed to the formation of British political and cultural identity at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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Mahn, Churnjeet Kaur. "Journeys in the Palimpsest : British women's travel to Greece,1840-1914." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2007. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1317/.
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Discussions of British travel to Greece in the nineteenth century have been dominated by the work of Lord Byron. Byron’s contemporary Greeks were Orientalised, while antique Greece was personified as a captive Greek woman on the brink of compromise by the Ottomans, or a cadaver. Throughout the nineteenth century this antique vista was employed by the tourist industry. This thesis offers a consideration of the visions and vistas of Greece encountered by British women who travelled to Greece in the subsequent years, especially in the light of how commercial tourism limited or constructed their access to Greece. Commercial tourist structures were in place in Athens and other major sites of antiquity, but the majority of the women considered here travelled through a terrain that went beyond a narrow and museum staged experience of Greece. Three paradigms have been established for women travelling in Greece: the professional archaeologist, the ethnographer, and the tourist. The women archaeologist combated the patriarchal domination of the classics, not only to posit a female intellectual who could master Greece, but also reveal how antique Greece was used to underwrite patriarchal British ideologies. The ethnographers in Greece are a mixed collection of semi-professional and professional ethnographers, considered alongside more conventional travel narratives, all of which offer discussions of the modern Greek psyche trapped at a series of liminal fissures (East/West, antique/modern). Concentrating on women and geography, they subtly conflate the two to read nation in gender. However, without the sexualised aspect of their male counterparts, they read Greek women through a series of diverse practices that they identify through a close contact that could only be established between women. The modern tourist in Greece offers the most enduring and lasting type of traveller in Greece. Travelling with and against guidebooks, the discussion considers the visual technologies that helped to codify the way Greece is still seen as a tourist destination. In conjunction with this, the popular discourses denigrating women’s travel are also discussed, which offers a key reason for the dismissal of their literary output.
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Piatt, Patricia Angela. "The relevance of the ideology of separate spheres in nineteenth-century British travel literature." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.490909.
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The purpose of this thesis is to assess whether the ideology of separate spheres should continue to be used in the analysis of nineteenth-century travel literature, and to detennine whether there is any justification in assuming male travellers were primarily concerned with 'public' issues and female travellers were primarily concerned with 'private' issues. To answer these questions this thesis examines a number of areas traditionally associated with each gender, and analyzes how both sexes coped with a variety of discursive pressures. It incorporates travel literature produced by both genders covering the whole of the nineteenth century, and includes travel texts from a wide range of countries. The thesis is divided into two parts, each with two chapters. The first part focuses on areas traditionally associated with male expertise and 'public' issues. Chapter One investigates the inclusion of 'technical' subjects and finds, contrary to popular belief, that both sexes addressed these subjects in similar ways, and that there is a considerable weight of material to prove that women writers were interested in a much wider range of subjects than has been appreciated. Chapter Two explores the use of the 'Action Hero Narrator' and similarly finds that, rather than being modest and reserved, many women writers were also able to employ the use of a strong narrative voice in their travel texts. \Vhat is particularly striking regarding these 'masculine' issues is not that women were able to discuss a wide range of topics, and often do so in an authoritative manner, but that the work of many male writers was not dominated by 'technical' detail, and that they did not feel the need to portray themselves as dynamic and in control at all times. The second part of this investigation focuses on areas traditionally associated with female expertise and 'private' issues. Chapter Three examines how sexual relationships were dealt with in travel literature and finds, unlike female writers who were generally rather circumspect when they addressed matters of a sexual nature, male writers were able to be much more open and direct. Chapter Four investigates how other areas of relationships, such as children, family life and the position of women, were discussed by travel writers, and finds that male travel literature often demonstrated a greater interest in these issues than travel accounts produced by female writers. This thesis offers considerable evidence to prove that, in regard to male and female travel writing, there was much more commonality in subject matter than has been assumed. It demonstrates that there was a significant degree of movement between 'public' and 'private', and that assessing material primarily from the perspective of gender can be very misleading. It emphasises the importance of examining texts produced by both sexes before any assumptions are made about gender. Based on the evidence it concludes that it is difficult to justify the application of the ideology of separate spheres in the analysis of nineteenth-century travel literature. Supplied by The British Library - 'The world's knowledge'
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Harrow, Sharon Rebecca. ""Homely adventures": Domesticity, travel, andthe gender economy of colonial difference in eighteenth-century British literature." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/284078.
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"Homely Adventures": Travel and the Gender Economy of Colonial Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Literature examines the shift from adventure tales, in which characters dress up in the signs of colonial otherness, to domestic stories, in which characters are valued for their assimilation into an idealized, bourgeois identity. In so doing, I demonstrate that England's literary imagination and national identity were increasingly built upon an economy of colonial difference. In demonstrating the relationship between domesticity and difference, I analyze canonical fiction in a colonial context and read women's travel writing in the context of abolitionist poetry, natural history, and political pamphlets. Chapter one argues that Daniel Defoe's novel, Captain Singleton, moved questions of domesticity and sexuality, usually constellated around the notion of the home, into the public realm of colonial enterprise. Singleton transports his adventures to a home in England and threatens the countryside with piratical illegitimacy. Chapter two argues that Richard Cumberland's sentimental play, The West Indian, resolved colonialism's anxieties by incorporating worry about Afro-Caribbean commerce and sexuality into its domestic plot. Reworking the trope of the passionate Creole into the manageable figure of domestic husband, the sentimental script diffuses sexual danger and endorses patriarchy. Chapter three analyzes one of the scant travelogues written by a woman in the eighteenth century. Anna Maria Falconbridge's Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone challenges stereotypes of women that had become fundamental to empire by opening the domestic to exploration. In examining images of disease and representations of women in colonial contexts, I demonstrate that the connections between colonialism and domesticity in women's travel writing reorganized colonial discourse written by men. Chapter four argues that Austen's Mansfield Park represents class and race-mixing as dangerous excesses that threaten the ordered English countryside. Like many contemporary texts, Austen's novel views the relationship between female sexuality and labor as a way to define cultural (and moral) difference. Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram's marriage is an endorsement of patriarchal and imperial values based upon an ideology that fears the contaminating vices of cultural others whose difference is determined by the kinds of labor women perform.
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Gephardt, Katarina. "Imagined boundaries: the nation and the continent in nineteenth-century British narratives of European travel." The Ohio State University, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1070292654.
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Rupp, William H. "A new perspective on British identity : the travel journals of John Byng, 1781-1794." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2011. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/48885/.
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The Honourable John Byng (1743-1813; later fifth Viscount Torrington) was a British soldier, civil servant, and diarist who wrote fifteen accounts of his series of pleasure tours between 1781 and 1794. Unpublished in his lifetime, these accounts were re-discovered in the twentieth century and have been in print ever since. Despite their scope (Byng visited two thirds of all English and Welsh counties) and detail (he filled twenty seven manuscript volumes totalling over 2,500 hand-written pages) his writings have been used only sporadically and anecdotally by historians. This dissertation, therefore, seeks to re-position Byng as an historical actor and his writings as a complex historical source that requires detailed re-examination and reevaluation. Doing so reveals that Byng’s journals can inform the historigraphical discussion that surrounds the creation of a ‘British’ national identity and consciousness in the late eighteenth century. Prevailing models stress top down dynamics and external forces that caused the English, Welsh, and Scottish to band together as a Protestant elect in order to survive the onslaught of the large, Catholic, Continental powers of the time. Whilst Byng’s observations do not refute this interpretation, they present a strong argument for the inclusion of ‘sub-national’ (hamlet, village, town, county) identities and loyalties in any attempt to chart British identity formation. To demonstrate this, elements of post-colonial theory, particularly contact theory, are used to show that in Britain Byng moved through a series of encounters akin to those experienced by Europeans in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Through his reactions, it is possible to see how these various identities complemented and competed with each other, particularly important social tropes such as politeness. Family composition and relationships with friends are also discussed to illustrate how focusing on individual historical subjects can yield useful insights into broader historical issues. Finally, the experiences of Arthur Young (1741-1820) and William Cobbett (1763-1835), two other well known travellers and commentators, are used to suggest the wider ramifications of the analysis whilst making links to wider study of domestic travel.
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Clayton, Jeffrey Scott Keirstead Christopher M. "Discourses of race and disease in British and American travel writing about the South Seas 1870-1915." Auburn, Ala., 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10415/1996.
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Hallett, Adam Neil. "America seen : British and American nineteenth century travels in the United States." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/3164.
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The thesis discusses the development of nineteenth century responses to the United States. It hinges upon the premise that travel writing is narrative and that the travelling itself must therefore be constructed (or reconstructed) as narrative in order to make it available for writing. By applying narratology to the work of literary travel writers from Frances Trollope to Henry James I show the influence of travelling point of view and writing point of view on the narrative. Where these two points of view are in conflict I suggest reasons for this and identify signs in the narrative which display the disparity. There are several influences on point of view which are discussed in the thesis. The first is mode of travel: the development of steamboats and later locomotives increasingly divested travellers from the landscape through which they were travelling. I concentrate on Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain travelling by boat, and Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James travelling by rail to examine how mode of travel alters travelling point of view and influences the form of travel writing. The second is the frontier: writing from a liminal space creates a certain point of view and makes travel not only a passage but a rite of passage. I examine travel texts which discuss the Western frontier as well as the transatlantic frontier. As the opportunity for these frontier experiences diminished through the spread of American culture and developments in travel technology, so the point of view of the traveller changes. A third point of view is provided by European ideas of nature and beauty in nature. The failure of these when put against American landscapes such as the Mississippi, prairies, and Niagara forms a significant part of the thesis, the fourth chapter of which examines writing on Niagara Falls in guidebooks and the travel texts of Frances Trollope, Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anthony Trollope, Twain and James. Other points of view include seeing the United States through earlier travel texts and adopting a more autobiographical interest in travelogues. In the final chapter the thesis contains a discussion of the nature of truth in travel writing and the tendency towards fictionalisation. The thesis concludes by considering the implications for truth of having various travelling and writing points of view impact upon constructing narrative out of travel.
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Abunasser, Rima Jamil. "Corporate Christians and Terrible Turks: Economics, Aesthetics, and the Representation of Empire in the Early British Travel Narrative, 1630 - 1780." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2003. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4444/.
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This dissertation examines the evolution of the early English travel narrative as it relates to the development and application of mercantilist economic practices, theories of aesthetic representation, and discourses of gender and narrative authority. I attempt to redress an imbalance in critical work on pre-colonialism and colonialism, which has tended to focus either on the Renaissance, as exemplified by the works of critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and John Gillies, or on the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as in the work of scholars such as Srinivas Aravamudan and Edward Said. This critical gap has left early travel narratives by Sir Francis Moore, Jonathan Harris, Penelope Aubin, and others largely neglected. These early writers, I argue, adapted the conventions of the travel narrative while relying on the authority of contemporary commercial practices. The early English travelers modified contemporary conventions of aesthetic representation by formulating their descriptions of non-European cultures in terms of the economic and political conventions and rivalries of the early eighteenth century. Early English travel literature, I demonstrate, functioned as a politically motivated medium that served both as a marker of authenticity, justifying the colonial and imperial ventures that would flourish in the nineteenth century, and as a forum for experimentation with English notions of gender and narrative authority.
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Holmes, Rachel Amanda. "Red, white and blue highways : British travel writing and the American road trip in the late twentieth century." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2001. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2833/.
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This study locates late-twentieth-century roadlogues (nonfiction, prose accounts of American road trips) by British writers within the tradition of the postwar American highway narrative in travel writing, novels, and film. It exposes the discursive structures and textual constraints underlying seven case studies published in the 1990s by comparing them to texts from various genres in diachronic and synchronic contexts. It contributes to scholarship on the American highway narrative, which largely overlooks British texts. It complements research on British travel writing, which tends to be biased towards pre-twentieth-century texts by travellers whose culture is in a dominant relation to that of travellees. It adds to postcolonial studies through analysis of representations of the other where otherness is reduced and complicated by a history of cultural exchange. The methodology combines several approaches including discourse theory, discourse analysis, narrative theory, feminist criticism, and theories of tourism. Three main areas are considered: identity, in relation to nationality and gender; the road writer's gaze, with regard to vehicles and roads; and intertextuality, on the margins (in maps) and inside roadlogues (in direct and indirect allusions). The study concludes that contemporary British roadlogues are in what is almost a subordinate relation to American highway narratives, evidenced by extensive influence of American texts. However, this subordination is qualified by joint ownership of western and New World myths, vestiges of imperial superiority, and selective deference by British writers. The latter is demonstrated through a consumer approach to American culture afforded by the episodic structure of the road trip and encouraged by the niche-oriented nature of the current market for travel writing. While American writers regard roadscapes with imperial eyes and experience the road trip as a rite of passage, contemporary Britons generally engage in superficial role play and remain untransformed by American highways.
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Sikstrom, Hannah J. "Performing the self : identity-formation in the travel accounts of nineteenth-century British women in Italy." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:fdd4d82a-8bfe-4d3d-b668-4e88da45db7e.
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From the adventures of Odysseus to those of the male Grand Tourist, travel has often been regarded as an important rite of masculine self-fashioning. However, as this thesis argues, travel and travel writing also provided a valuable opportunity for women's self-fashioning: journeys offered women a means of altering themselves, enabling them to assume a novel identity abroad and in text, whether it be a subversive or idealised version of themselves. Drawing upon Judith Butler's and Sidonie Smith's theories of performativity, this thesis investigates Victorian women travel writers' impulse to self-fashioning, and argues for travel writing as a performative act of identity-formation. Drawing on Butler's notion of subversive repetition, this thesis also demonstrates the ways in which the instability of women authors' narrative identities gives them a potential for agency, enabling authors to unsettle prescribed gender boundaries and challenge cultural constructions of femininity. In particular, I examine the constructed textual travel identities of the following nineteenth-century British women: Anna Jameson, Susan Horner, Emily Lowe, and Frances Minto Elliot. I highlight the discursive strategies that these four authors use in order to create certain images of themselves for their readers in their travelogues about Italy, all published (or, in the case of Horner, written) between the years 1826 and 1881. Jameson, Horner, Lowe, and Elliot also reconfigure traditional notions of travel and gender in their travelogues to articulate and perform definitions of selves that are not necessarily exemplary – at least not at first glance. I examine the ways in which these nineteenth-century authors adopt apparently undesirable selfhoods ('ill', 'intellectual', 'unprotected', and 'idle') and turn supposed weaknesses into strengths. This thesis also analyses the significance of Italy for the travel narrators and their self-representation in relation to the peninsula. Italy signalled a meaningful difference from Britain, and these authors represent it as a positive space for healing, intellectual growth, pleasure, fulfilment, and self-determination. The constructed identities of these four authors result in 'travel performances' that aim to persuade readers of the narrators' aptitude for travel and of their especially meaningful attachment to, experience of, and understanding of Italy. This thesis does not only provide a space for voices which have until now been little recognised in contemporary scholarship. It also sheds light on an important form of Victorian women’s writing that was a valuable route towards cultural and intellectual authority and self-empowerment, as well as a means of personal and professional self-fashioning.
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Unterborn, Kelly R. "Negative Representation and the Germination of English Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Travel Narratives." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1607713565270697.
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Visser, Liezel. "The contextual compass : a literary-historical study of three British women’s travel writing on Africa, 1797 – 1934." Thesis, Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/2673.
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Thesis (MA (English Studies))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Texts by women travellers describing their journeys date back almost as far as those produced by their male counterparts, yet women’s travel writing has only become an area of academic interest during the past ten to fifteen years. Previously, women’s travel writing was mostly read for its entertainment value rather than its academic merit and – as Sara Mills notes in her Discourses of Difference – appeared almost exclusively in the form of coffee table books or biographies offering romanticized accounts of heroic, eccentric women who undertook epic journeys to Africa (4). The growing interest in women’s travel writing as part of colonial discourse coincides with the emergence of gender studies and related subjects. The emergence of these areas of academic enquiry can be attributed to the systematic dismantling of the patriarchal structures, which previously dominated social and academic domains. The aim of this study is to examine European women’s travel writing as a subversive discourse which, while sharing some characteristics with traditional male-produced travel texts from the colonial era, was informed by the discursive constraints of femininity. These texts thus differ from male-produced texts in the sense that, because of the different discursive constraints informing women’s travel writing, they offer commentary on aspects of Africa and its peoples which men had omitted in their travel accounts. Three specific texts by British women who recorded their travels in Africa form the basis of the discussion in this dissertation: the travel writing of Lady Anne Barnard (South African Cape Colony, 1797 – 1801), Mary Kingsley (West Africa: Gabon and the Congo, 1896 – 1900) and Barbara Greene (Liberia, 1935). Since, as Mills argues, “feminist textual theory has restricted itself to the analysis of literary texts and has been concerned with analysis of the text itself” (12), which limits the extent to which one can provide interesting, discerning, and relevant comment on women’s writing, the readings of these texts are not limited to feminist theory of women’s travel writing. Social expectations until as recently as the early twentieth century located women firmly in the domestic sphere. It was almost unthinkable for women to undertake travels other than the traditional Grand Tour. To attempt to venture into the predominantly male territory of travel writing was to expose oneself to harsh criticism and to risk being labelled as eccentric and unfeminine. Thus women had to find a way of making both their travels and writing seem acceptable by social standards, while still presenting as true as possible a picture of Africa in their writing. These constraints of the discourse of femininity on their texts necessarily make women’s writing seem concerned almost exclusively with matters of feminine interest. Mills attributes this to women travel writers’ “problematic status, caught between the conflicting demands of the discourse of femininity and that of imperialism.” (Mills, Discourses of Difference 22)
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Reisbeskrywings deur vroue dateer byna so ver terug as dié wat deur mans geskryf is. Tog het vroue se reisbeskrywings eers in die afgelope tien tot vyftien jaar akademiese belangstelling begin ontlok. Voorheen is vroue se reisbeskrywings meestal vir vermaak eerder as akademiese meriete gelees, en – soos Sara Mills in haar Discourses of Difference opmerk – het dit byna uitsluitlik verskyn as koffietafelboeke of verromantiseerde biografieë van heldhaftige, sonderlinge vroue wat epiese reise na Afrika onderneem het (4). Die toenemende belangstelling in vroue se reisbeskrywings as deel van koloniale diskoers val saam met die verskyning van gender-studies en verwante vakgebiede. Die ontstaan van hierdie akademiese vakgebiede kan toegeskryf word aan die stelselmatige aftakeling van die paternalistiese strukture wat sosiale en akademiese arenas voorheen oorheers het. Die doel van hierdie studie is om Europese vroue se reisbeskrywings te ondersoek as ‘n ondermynende diskoers wat, hoewel dit sekere eienskappe van tradisionele reisbeskrywings deur manlike skrywers uit die koloniale tydperk toon, gegrond is in die beperkende diskoers van vroulikheid. Hierdie tekste verskil dus van tekste deur manlike skrywers in die opsig dat dit, as gevolg van die verskillende diskoersbeperkinge waarin dit gegrond is, kommentaar lewer op aspekte van Afrika en sy bevolking wat mans in hul reisbeskrywings uitgelaat het. Drie spesifieke tekste deur Britse vroue wat hul reise beskryf het vorm die grondslag van hierdie verhandeling; dit is die reisbeskrywings van Lady Anne Barnard (Suid-Afrikaanse Kaapkolonie, 1797 – 1801), Mary Kingsley (Wes- Afrika: Gaboen en die Kongo, 1896 – 1900) en Barbara Greene (Liberië, 1935). Mills voer aan: “Feminist textual theory has restricted itself to the analysis of literary texts and has been concerned with analysis of the text itself” (12). Dít beperk die mate waartoe interessante, skerpsinnige en toepaslike kommentaar oor vroue se reisbeskrywings gelewer kan word; dus is die interpretasie van hierdie tekste nie beperk tot feministiese teorie met betrekking tot vrouereisbeskrywings nie. Tot so onlangs as die vroeë twintigste eeu het die samelewing se verwagtinge vroue streng tot die huishoudelike sfeer beperk. Afgesien van die tradisionele Grand Tour was dit bykans ondenkbaar vir vroue om te reis. As ‘n vrou inbreuk sou probeer maak op die tradisioneel manlike gebied van die skryfkuns sou sy haarself blootstel aan skerp kritiek en onwenslike etikettering as eksentriek en onvroulik. Dus moes vroue ‘n manier vind om sowel hul reise as hul skryfwerk sosiaal aanvaarbaar te maak en terselfdertyd so ‘n egte beeld as moontlik van Afrika te skets in hul skryfwerk. Die beperkinge wat die diskoers van vroulikheid op hul tekste plaas, lei noodwendig daartoe dat vroue se skryfwerk as byna geheel en al beperk tot sake van vroulike belang voorkom. Mills skryf dít toe aan vroue-reisbeskrywers se “problematic status, caught between the conflicting demands of the discourse of femininity and that of imperialism.” (Mills, Discourses of Difference 22)
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Misich, Courtney Misich. "Social and Spatial Mobility in the British Empire: Reading and Mapping Lower Class Travel Accounts of the 1790's." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1505864270348148.
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Anderson, Carol. "On the contrary : counter-narratives of British women travellers, 1832-1885." University of Western Australia. English and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2009. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2009.0058.
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This study examines five counter-narratives written by British women between 1832 and 1885 who wrote in a non-conformist or negative manner about their travel experiences in foreign countries. In considering a small number of women travellers who took an alternative approach to narrating their experiences, a key objective of this study is to consider the reasons for the way in which the women writing counter-narratives positioned their writing. After considering how the quasi-scientific concept of domestic womanhood attempted to restrict Victorian women in general, and in particular influenced how women travellers were viewed, an exploration of counter-narratives questions whether the sustained interest in more positive travel accounts reflects a simplified contemporary, if not feminist, reading of Victorian women. An examination follows of the influence of discourse criticism, alternative interpretations of geographical space, and the presence of intertextuality in travel writing. The chapters are then arranged chronologically, with each counter-narrative being analysed as emanating from the range of discourses that were in conflict during the period. The writers form a varied group, travelling and living in five different countries, with a range of contradictory voices. Susannah Moodie and Emily Innes are outspoken in their criticism of British government policy for Canada and the Malay States respectively; Isabella Fane in India and Emmeline Lott in Egypt are disdainful of foreign practices which were otherwise considered fascinating on account of their exoticism; Frances Elliot differentiates her writing by opposing the ubiquitous influence of guidebooks for European travel. Thus each account records an aspect of political or cultural opposition to established discourses circulating at the time, as the women challenge the 'grand narratives' of foreign travel in different ways. Because such accounts may be challenged by literature of the period, the study positions the women in the context of their contemporaries, and thus each chapter examines the counter-narrative alongside another account by a female writer who travelled or lived in a similar area during the same era. Moreover, before examining the range of discursive complexities and tensions that emerge in each case study, the writers are positioned in their geographical locations and historical moments so that the texts are read against the cultural background to which the women were originally responding. The marginalisation of such counter-narratives has led to gaps in our understanding of travel writing from the period: where accounts once coexisted they are separated, and positive accounts are privileged over negative ones. It is this discontinuity of knowledge that the study will address in order to create a truer picture of the diversity of travel writing at the time.
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Marsh, Kimberly. "Paintings & palanquins : the language of visual aesthetics and the picturesque in accounts of British women's travels in India from 1822 to 1846." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c87b9841-a322-4dad-95a8-44831e8ab2cd.
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This thesis explores the Picturesque as a visual aesthetic that is often self-consciously employed in the travel accounts of British women in India in the first half of the nineteenth century. It addresses how three women - Fanny Parks, Marianne Postans, and Emily Eden - made use of the language of aesthetics, in particular that of the Picturesque (a style deemed especially appropriate for women travellers) in a variety of ways: first, to help them understand and relate to their experiences in this foreign land; second, to convey these experiences to their audiences back home; and, third to carve out what frequently becomes a feminised space within the established (and predominantly masculine) field of travel writing. The approach is largely historicist in order to situate the authors (and artists) within their contemporary cultural, social, and political context. My work builds upon that of literary scholars Elizabeth Bohls, Nigel Leask, and Sara Suleri in its interweaving of historical research and visual aesthetics with a literary analysis of travel writing and colonialism, bringing to bear their insights on authors previously little or not at all addressed in critical literature. Expanding on the notion of the 'Indian picturesque', which Leask begins to shape in his work, I bring Parks, Postans, and Eden into dialogue with the suggestions of Bohls and Suleri that women travel writers adapt the traditionally masculine ideal of the Picturesque aesthetic. After an introduction and two chapters which explore the broader themes concerning the development of the Picturesque and its influence on British artistic representations of India, I briefly summarise how this visual aesthetic came to be applied to written texts about travels in the region, beginning with the texts produced by male travellers, and with a specific focus on the travel narrative of Captain Godfrey Charles Mundy, whose accounts are referenced in Fanny Parks' work. My thesis then offers three case studies considering each writer in order of their arrival in India - starting with Fanny Parks' autobiography of her travels (published in 1850), followed by the published works of Marianne Postans in the 1830s, and through to those of Emily Eden, relating to her travels in the same decade and published in 1866. Aside from drawing on the aesthetics of visual art, the discussion of each author also addresses the importance of other sources to which they allude that enable aesthetic responses to India's landscape and peoples.
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Jones, Mary C. "Fashioning Mobility: Navigating Space in Victorian Fiction." UKnowledge, 2015. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/24.
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My dissertation examines how heroines in nineteenth-century British Literature manipulate conventional objects of feminine culture in ways which depart from uses associated with Victorian marriage plots. Rather than use fashionable objects to gain male attention or secure positions as wives or mothers, female characters deploy self-fashioning tactics to travel under the guise of unthreatening femininity, while skirting past thresholds of domestic space. Whereas recent Victorian literary and cultural criticism identifies female pleasure in the form of consumption and homosocial/erotic desire, my readings of Victorian fiction, from doll stories to the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Marie Corelli, consider that heroines find pleasure in deploying fashionable objects – such as dolls, clothes, cosmetics, and jewelry – which garner access to public space typically off limits for Victorian women. In the first chapter, girls use dolls to play in wilderness spaces, fostering female friendships. Muted dress provides a cloak of invisibility, allowing the heroine to participate in the pleasure of ocular economies in the second chapter. The third chapter features a female detective who uses cosmetics to disguise her infiltration of men’s private spaces in order to access private secrets. Finally, the project culminates with jewelry’s re-signification as female success in the publishing world.
Tracing how female characters in Victorian fiction use self-fashioning as a pathway, this study maps the safe travel heroines discover through wild landscapes, urban streets, and professional arenas. These spaces were often coded with sets of conditions for gendered interactions. Female characters’ proficient self-styling provides mobility through locations guarded by the voices of neighbors, friends, and family who attempt to keep them in line with Victorian gender conventions. Female characters derive an often unexplored pleasure: the secret joy of being where they should not and going against what they are told. In the novels I examine, female protagonists navigate prolific rules and advice about how to arrange and manage their appearances, not to aspire to paragons of Victorian beauty and womanhood but in order to achieve physical and geographic mobility outside domestic interiors.
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Andersson, Burnett Linda Carin Cecilia. "Northern noble savages? : Edward Daniel Clarke and British primitivist narratives on Scotland and Scandinavia, c.1760-1822." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6410.
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This thesis analyses a growing metropolitan British fascination with northern Scandinavia and Scotland towards the end of the eighteenth century. These two northern regions underwent a dramatic transformation, from being places people avoided to being realms writers considered worthy of visiting, observing and narrating. This thesis examines the importance of the primitivist discourse of northern noble savagery in that transformation. While encounters with the ‘noble savage’ were largely associated with the extra-European world, the fascination with the north was in observing Europe’s very own native examples of the breed. The Highlanders and Islanders of Scotland and the northern Scandinavians, the Sami people in particular, were often romanticised in this context. Despite the Sami being celebrated in British fiction and natural-history works at the time, there has been, in contrast with Scandinavia’s ‘Vikings’, little scholarly attention given to them in a British context. The origin and function of the northern-noble-savage discourse is anchorerd in naturalhistory texts. This study emphasises the importance of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), who travelled in Lapland in 1732, in constructing idealised depictions of the Sami. Linnaeus also provided a model of domestic exploration in which naturalists produced inventories of regions and their inhabitants previously relatively unmapped by the state. Although the image of the northern savage often bore little resemblance to reality, it had real application and effect. Such imagery allowed allegedly backward regions to be incorporated into the national narrative, and through this the national community sought to benefit from these peripheries and their communities. The thesis also studies the consequences of actual encounters between metropolitan observers and the local populations of these northern regions. The travelogues of the celebrated natural historian and traveller Edward Daniel Clarke (1769-1822), who sojourned in Scotland and Scandinavia in 1797-1799, is the focus of the investigation. In a comparative analysis of his Scottish and Scandinavian accounts, this study presents Clarke as an ambivalent primitivist who both praised and condemned the Highlanders and Sami. Clarke was, for example, critical of what he regarded as the superstitious beliefs of both peoples. His narrative on the Highlanders was, however, far more positive than that on the Sami because of Clarke's adherence to racial classifications, which paradoxically Linnaeus had instigated, which demoted the Sami to mere savages. After Clarke’s death in 1822, attitudes towards the Highlanders and Sami continued to diverge against a backdrop of increased racialisation in British thought. While the Highlander became firmly integrated into a British narrative, the Sami was displaced by growing interest in a Scandinavian invader of Britain, the Viking, whose image went on to provide a robust challenge to the romanticisation of the Celtic Highlander in the century that followed. Meanwhile, the optimism over the Highlands’ economic prospects that had permeated the Linnaean project of exploration in Scotland was now gone. Whereas the idealised gaze of the eighteenth-century explorer had surveyed Highland history in order to chart a course to the future, the focus of the nineteenth-century tourist tended to be firmly on the past.
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Laverick, Jane A. "A world for the subject and a world of witnesses for the evidence : developments in geographical literature and the travel narrative in seventeenth-century England." Thesis, University of Stirling, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/2250.
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In the latter half of the seventeenth century, the first-person overseas voyage narrative enjoyed an unprecedented degree of popularity in England. This thesis is concerned with texts written by travellers and the increasing perception that such information might be useful to those engaged in newly-developing scientific specialisms. It draws upon a wide range of texts including geographiae, physico-theological texts, first-person voyage narratives and imaginary voyage prose fictions. The main focus of the thesis is on the movement away from traditional encyclopaedic geographical textbooks whose treatment of non-European countries comprised an amalgam of unattributed information and a mass of traditional and erudite beliefs, towards a priontising of eyewitness accounts by named observers. Following an introductory survey of the production of an indigenous body of geographical literature in England, the first chapter traces the decline in popularity of traditional geographiae and the separation of regional description from general theories of the earth. The second chapter shows how in the Restoration period the concerted efforts of Fellows of the newly-established Royal Society resulted in a significant increase in the number of overseas travel narratives being published. The third chapter looks at the way in which the Royal Society's campaign developed from its initiation in 1666 to the close of the century, focusing on the response of travellers to the Society's requests for information. The fourth chapter considers the way in which earlier accounts were advertised as fulfilling contemporary expectations of this type of discourse. The fifth and sixth chapters concern fictitious voyage narratives. Imitative of a genre the value of which was increasingly seen as residing in its veracity, these fictions adapted in accordance with the changes being introduced to real voyage accounts whilst continuing to perpetuate the archaic myths and traditional beliefs which had been ehminated from factual geographical description. Appended to the thesis is a list of accounts of voyages and travels outside Europe, printed in the Philosophical Transactions (1665-1700). Also listed are reviews and abstracts of geographical texts, inquiries concerning specific locations and directions and instructions aimed at seamen, with brief biographical information about the authors to indicate the range of contributors to that journal.
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Avgeris, Zafeirios. "From Text to Space and Vice Versa : The Travel Accounts of Sir William Gell and Edward Dodwell in Phocis and Boeotia." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för ABM, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-447010.
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This thesis examines and compares two travel accounts in the regions of Phocis and Boeotia in Greece, as they appear in the book of Sir William Gell “The Itinerary of Greece: With a Commentary on Pausanias and Strabo and an Account of the Monuments of Antiquity at Present Existing in that Country (1819) and on the two volumed book of Edward Dodwell A Classical and Topographical Tour Through Greece: During the Years 1801, 1805, and 1806, Volume 1 & 11 (1819). More specifically, the thesis explores the extent of the area that these travelers managed to cover during their routes, the places with historical and archaeological interest that they mentioned at least, their moves among the various chronotopes, and the use of their predecessors’ texts for on their routes. With the use of digital platforms such as Recogito, their travel accounts have been annotated, tagged, aligned with ToposText gazetteer and Wikidata, exported as .csv files, and further processed using OpenRefine. By having as a ground theory approach the social construction of space, as Lefebvre has defined it, the thesis, with the assistance of ArcGIS and Python and the necessary manual steps, explored the topics as mentioned above. The analysis of these topics provided interesting results to the thesis. It showed the differences in the area coverage of the two travelers in Phocis and Boeotia. It also highlighted their accuracy in the discovering of ancient places and buildings. Moreover, it delineated their moves through the different chronotopes and the vital role of the physical environment as a bridge for these moves. Ultimately, this thesis revealed the crucial role of their predecessors’ travel accounts for their navigation on the respecting. Mainly, it made clear the vitality of the travel accounts of Strabo and Pausanias. These results were clearly connected with the social construction of space and time from the two British travelers based on their cultural background.
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McIntyre, Ruth Anne. "Memory, Place, and Desire in Late Medieval British Pilgrimage Narratives." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2008. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/31.
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In this study, I read late medieval vernacular texts of Mandeville’s Travels, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, and Margery Kempe’s Book in terms of memory, place and authorial identity. I show how each author constructs ethos and alters narrative form by using memory and place. I argue that the discourses of memory and place are essential to authorial identity and anchor their eccentric texts to traditional modes of composition and orthodoxy. In Chapter one, I argue that memory and place are essential tools in creating authorial ethos for the Wife of Bath, Margery Kempe, and John Mandeville. These writers use memory and place to anchor their eccentric texts in traditional modes of composition and orthodoxy. Chapter two reads Mandeville’s treatment of holy places as he constructs authority by using rhetorical appeals to authority via salvation history and memory. His narrative draws on multiple media, multiple texts, memoria, and collective memory. Chapter three examines the rhetorical strategy of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale as directly linked to practices of memoria, especially in her cataloguing of ancient and medieval authorities and scripture. Chaucer’s Wife legitimates her travel and experience through citing and quoting from medieval common-place texts and ultimately makes a common-place text of her own personal experience. Chapter four argues that memory is the central structuring strategy and the foundation for Margery’s arguments for spiritual authority and legitimacy in The Book of Margery Kempe. I read the Book’s structure as a strategic dramatization of Margery’s authority framed by institutional spaces of the Church and by civic spaces of the medieval town. Chapter five considers the implications of reading the intersections of memory and place in late-medieval construction of authority for vernacular writers as contributing to a better understanding of medieval authorial identity and a clearer appreciation of structure, form, and the transformation of the pilgrimage motif into the travel narrative genre. This project helps strengthen ties between the fields of medieval literature, women’s writing and rhetoric(s), and Genre Studies as it charts the interface between discourse, narrative form, and medieval conceptions of memory and authorial identity.
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Sand, Anne. "Rain from the Dublin Bus." Ohio University Honors Tutorial College / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1398273904.
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Stephenson, Lois Bea. "Ethos in "Gulliver's Travels"." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 1994. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/863.
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Weiss, Katherine. "Traces from a Forgotten Past: Beckett’s Last Plays." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2015. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/2255.
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Hodson, Katrin C. "The Plight of the Englishman: The Hazards of Colonization Addressed in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels." Wittenberg University Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wuhonors1617896210333106.
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Weiss, Katherine. "Traces Re-Lived in Krapp’s Last Tape, Come and Go and Quad." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2012. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/2264.
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Akhimie, Patricia. "Cultivating Difference in Early Modern Drama and the Literature of Travel." Thesis, 2011. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8QR4WH4.
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This dissertation argues that the early modern discourse of conduct, which produced social difference within English households and communities, took on greater importance in a newly global world. In the conduct-obsessed culture of early modern England, two competing and contradictory beliefs about the nature of social difference emerged. The first of these was an ideology of cultivation, a widespread belief that social identity was malleable, that socio-economic status could be determined by measuring an individual's adherence to accepted codes of conduct. The second belief depended upon the idea that social difference was fixed and naturally determined, and thus that somatic differences such as sex and race were deeply significant. For those bearing stigmatized somatic marks, particularly women and non-Europeans, access to cultivating strategies was systematically circumscribed, and this process of socio-economic differentiation was understood as the natural consequence of bodily difference. This dissertation examines the discourse of conduct at work in both domestic and global contexts through early modern English conduct literature, guides to self-improvement through specific cultivating activities or strategies; through plays that stage cultivation as beneficial to self, community, and nation; and through travel writing, where authors attempt to make sense of unfamiliar customs and behaviors. In these works the social and material benefits of cultivation achieved through practices such as good husbandry, educational travel, and hunting for sport are affirmed, even as the limited access of some groups to these same cultivating strategies is reiterated.
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Palmer, Philip S. "The world inscribed: Literary form, travel, and the book in England, 1580–1660." 2013. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3589124.
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Between 1580 and 1660 the English travel book emerged as a site of rich literary innovation. To supplement practical features long associated with the genre, writers called upon an array of poetic devices, satirical modes, and mixed prose and verse forms to represent the early modern traveled world. The World Inscribed: Literary Form, Travel, and the Book in England, 1580-1660 historicizes such literary experimentation by examining how travel narratives moved through the transmission circuits of early modern book culture, and how, in turn, modes of textual production shaped the genre's formal characteristics. Reading canonical poets and dramatists (Spenser, Donne, Marvell, Jonson, Herbert) together with a number of contemporary printed and manuscript travel books, this project argues that the aesthetics and literary aims of prose travel writing developed rapidly alongside developments in the travel book as a circulating text technology. The project's five case studies articulate not only how the form and style of early modern English travel writing could be altered or suppressed across different versions of a given narrative (within print or manuscript networks), but also how the travel book itself could serve as a vehicle for literary texts, especially verse, related to the writer's travel experience but not necessarily offering direct descriptions of travel. By engaging with the understudied intersection of literary form, textual transmission, and early modern English travel writing, this project traces how new ways of representing the traveled world through material texts reveal the formal mechanics of a genre in the making.
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Van, Zyl Estelle. "Siberia revealed through the travel narrative : a Russian, American and British perspective." Diss., 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/18322.
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This study examines how travelogues by the Russian author Anton Chekhov, an American, George Kennan and a British citizen, Harry de Windt, contributed towards establishing the image of Siberia towards the end of the 19th century, juxtaposing their individual views against the commonly perceived view of the region at the time.
In examining the texts, a literary analysis is merged with elements of other approaches, through a strong thematic focus, centring on the cultural and ideological assumptions implied in the texts.
The findings reveal that both native inhabitants and foreigners are capable of expressing a justifiable opinion on a locality, resulting in different versions of what is observed, from divergent points of view. Although the three writers in this study appear to support a negative view of Siberia, closer investigation show evidence of optimism about the eventual destiny of a region in a stage of transition.Linguistics and Modern Languages
M.A. (Russian)
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Bondhus, Charles Michael. "Gothic Journeys: Imperialist Discourse, the Gothic Novel, and the European Other." 2010. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/203.
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In 1790s England, an expanding empire, a growing diaspora of English settlers in foreign territories, and spreading political unrest in Ireland and on the European continent all helped to contribute to a destabilization of British national identity. With the definition of “Englishperson” in flux, Ireland, France, and Italy—nations which are prominently featured in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—could be understood, similar to England’s colonies, as representing threats to the nation’s cultural integrity. Because the people of these European countries were stereotypically perceived as being economically impoverished victims of political and “popish” tyranny, it would have been easy to construct them in popular and literary discourse as being both socially similar to the “primitive” indigenous populations of colonized territories and as uneasy reminders of England’s own “premodern” past. Therefore, the overarching goal of this project is twofold. First, it attempts to account for the Gothic’s frequent—albeit subtle—use of imperialist rhetoric, which is largely encoded within the novels’ representations of sublimity, sensibility, and domesticity. Second, it claims that the novels under consideration are preoccupied with testing and reaffirming the salience of bourgeois English identity by placing English or Anglo-inflected characters in conflict with “monstrous” continental Others. In so doing, these novels use the fictions of empire to contain and claim agency over a revolutionary France, an uncertainlypositioned Ireland, and a classically-appealing but socially-problematic Italy.
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Khattak, Nasir Jamal. "“Gulliver's Travels”: A journey through the unconscious." 2001. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3012148.
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Gulliver's Travels has been admired and criticized alike since its appearance in print for its scathing satire. It has mostly been read as an allegory whose prototypes were contemporary events and figures. Critics have found counterparts and analogies for its characters and events in the political and historical scenes of eighteenth-century England. Studying Gulliver's Travels from an allegorical point of view, however, conceals its universality from us. Allegorical readings usually focus on the first and third voyages, and are based on the assumption that Gulliver is a mouthpiece, not a character. The question of the nature of Gulliver's character is still very popular and controversial. Critics are divided into the “Hard” and “Soft” schools of interpretation in their readings of Gulliver and his travels. The former consider Gulliver as an artistic device; the latter as a fully developed character with some psychological flaws. Though “Soft” school critics make a convincing case, they do not fully explain Gulliver's psychological abnormalities. Both the schools focus on the issue of the Swift-Gulliver debate with reference to Gulliver's final voyage alone, and usually overlook the other three parts. Thus both allegorical readings and the “Hard” and “Soft” schools of interpretation create and strengthen the erroneous impression that Gulliver's Travels lacks artistic unity. This study focuses on the universality of Gulliver Travels and argues that Gulliver's four voyages are a journey through the human unconscious. It is the story of Gulliver's encounter with the unexplored and unacknowledged aspects of his personality. The four remote nations and their denizens represent the contents of the unconscious, and symbolize different archetypal qualities, which are common to all members of human race. The worlds that Gulliver visits are all within him but he is unconscious of them due to his lack of self-knowledge. Lemuel Gulliver is a fully developed character who gradually but consistently regresses due to his extreme extraverted-sensation-type personality. Gulliver's excessive dependence on sense perception has widely been documented but rarely explored. This study accentuates the psychological dynamics and social implications of Gulliver's excessive extraversion and lack of self-knowledge, and uses Jungian analytical psychology as a tool to study Gulliver's abnormalities. My strategy involves a close reading of the text to show that a central thread runs through Gulliver's Travels, and that every episode in the four parts of the book contributes to Gulliver's alienation from himself and from humanity.
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Gertken, Matthew Charles. "Jonathan Swift, Sir William Temple and the international balance of power." 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/23023.
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This dissertation investigates the balance of power theory of international relations in the works of Jonathan Swift and his mentor Sir William Temple. Both Temple and Swift are known to have championed balance-of-power foreign policy, yet no sustained study of the subject exists. To begin, I argue that Temple used balance as a metaphor for division or separation. His policy of preserving the “Balance of Christendom” translates to sowing division among European states, and for the same reason he rejects balance of power at home. Proceeding to Swift, while commentators have long known that he advocated the classical theory of constitutional balance, they have neglected his engagement with international balance. Swift assimilates Temple’s positions into a universal theory based on classical authors; he sees balance of power as an element in the broader quarrel of ancients and moderns. The ancient view posits an independent agent who operates within the constraints of a system; the modern, by contrast, either exaggerates agency to the point of divine-right absolutism or minimizes it to the extent that only an impersonal, clockwork-like system remains. In both cases, the moderns pursue material power at each other’s expense, neglecting the intangible benefits of due separation. This theory has important ramifications for Swift’s international writings. For years scholars have emphasized Swift’s conspiracy theorizing in the Conduct of the Allies, but I argue that he discredits the Whig war cry of “Balance of Europe,” which sought military power (the balance of forces) as an end in itself, and reasserts balance as a policy of slicing Europe into as many separate kingdoms as possible. Ultimately, however, Swift’s most lasting contribution appears in Gulliver’s Travels. Here he depicts maritime power as the quintessential means by which moderns pursue absolute power, and intimates a political “Balance of Earth” as a satirical correction. This study, the first to focus on the international dimension of Swift’s political theory, offers a corrective to literary studies that favor domestic politics and yields insights into the evolution of balance-of-power theory and the intersection of culture and foreign policy at the dawn of the British empire.text