Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Travel writing – History – Europe'
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Chang, Na. "The East and the West in the travel writings of the late medieval East and West." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708975.
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Rege, Adeline. "Les voyages en Europe de l’architecte Simon-Louis Du Ry : Suède, France, Hollande, Italie (1746-1777)." Thesis, Paris 4, 2011. http://www.theses.fr/2011PA040173.
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De 1746 à 1756, l’architecte allemand d’origine huguenote Simon-Louis Du Ry voyagea en Suède, en Hollande, en France et en Italie pour apprendre son métier. Il retourna en Italie de 1776 à 1777. Lors de ses périples, Simon-Louis Du Ry a entretenu une intense correspondance avec sa famille. Il a tenu un journal de son second tour d’Italie. Ces manuscrits sont une source très précieuse pour l’histoire de la mobilité des artistes à l’époque Moderne. L’objet de cette thèse est d’analyser et d’éditer les récits de voyage de Simon-Louis Du Ry. Nous considérons le voyage comme une pratique individuelle obéissant à des contraintes sociales et matérielles, et comme un mode de perception du monde, des autres, du savoir et de soi-même. L’enjeu est de prendre en compte le voyageur en tant qu’individu, mais aussi l’environnement dans lequel il organise ses déplacements. Après avoir décrit ces périples (itinéraires, modes de transport et d’hébergement, activités du voyageur…), nous les comparons aux modèles de voyage en vogue à l’époque qu’étaient le Grand Tour, le voyage savant, et le voyage artistique. Nous nous attachons aussi à étudier la manière dont Simon-Louis Du Ry a relaté ses pérégrinations, ainsi que l’influence que ces voyages eurent non seulement sur la carrière de cet architecte, mais aussi sur son milieu d’origine, c’est-à-dire le landgraviat de Hesse-Cassel au siècle des Lumières. L’édition critique des récits de voyage de Du Ry que nous proposons est accompagnée d’un apparat critique constitué de notes et de trois index : toponymique, biographique et thématiqueFrom 1746 to 1756, Simon-Louis du Ry, the German architect with Huguenot roots, traveled to Sweden, Holland, France, and Italy to learn a trade. He returned to Italy from 1776 to 1777. During his travels, Simon-Louis du Ry maintained an intense correspondence with his family. He kept a diary of his second trip to Italy and these manuscripts are a very valuable source for the history of the mobility of artists in the Modern era. The purpose of this thesis is to analyse and edit Simon-Louis Du Ry’s travel writings. We consider travel an individual experience which is limited by material and social issues, and a way of understanding the world, others, knowledge and oneself. Our challenge is to take account of the traveler as a person, but also of the environment in which he organizes his travels. After describing these journeys (including routes, transport and accommodation, and traveler’s activities), we compare them with the travel patterns in vogue at that time: the Grand Tour, the scholar’s travel, and the artist’s travel. We aim to explore how Simon-Louis Du Ry has described his travels and the influence that his journeys have had, not only on his architectural career, but also on his cultural background, i.e. the landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel during the Enlightenment. The critical examination of Du Ry’s travel books that we offer is accompanied by a critical apparatus consisting of notes and of three indexes: geographical names, biographical names, and subjects
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Shaw, Cassandra. "South African travel writing and bias." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/9011.
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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-96).This thesis spotlights the travel and leisure magazine industry within South Africa. It contends that the travel writing genre is susceptible to a number of biases, both past and present, which ultimately affect the way its overall content is produced and presented to the public. This work was substantiated through a set of qualitative interviews with key professionals within the South African travel and leisure magazine industry, as well as through a theme- based content analysis of a number of local travel writing publications. This study adds to a rather extensive line of research written on the topic of travel writing regarding a number of older criticisms of bias including 'othering', escapism, and gendering. However, it also focuses on a number of more modem biases such as direct advertising, advertorial usage, as well as the acceptance of 'freebies' and barter agreements, none of which has been given much attention in previous research. The sheer existence of these and other biases within the modem South African travel and leisure magazine industry exhibits an absolute necessity of examination into such a topic, especially given the importance and overall influence that the travel writing industry has on a country's economic standing and overall image.
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Labon, Joanna. "English literary response to 1930s Europe in Rebecca West's 'Black lamb and grey falcon: a journey through Yugoslavia in 1937' (1941) and Storm Jameson's 'Europe to let: the memoirs of an obscure man' (1940)." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.325548.
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Majchrowicz, Daniel Joseph. "Travel, Travel Writing and the "Means to Victory" in Modern South Asia." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17467221.
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This dissertation is a history of the idea of travel in South Asia as it found expression in Urdu travel writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though travel has always been integral to social life in South Asia, it was only during this period that it became an end in itself. The imagined virtues of travel hinged on two emergent beliefs: that travel was a requisite for inner growth, and that travel experience was transferable. Consequently, Urdu travel writers endorsed travel not to reach a particular destination but to engender personal development, social advancement and communal well-being. Authors conveyed the transformative power of travel to their readers through accounts that traced out their inner journeys through narratives of physical travel, an ideal echoed in an old proverb that re-emerged at this time: “travel is the means to victory.”
This study, which draws on extensive archival research from four countries, represents the most comprehensive examination of travel writing in any South Asian language. Through a diachronic analysis of a wealth of new primary sources, it indexes shifting valuations of travel as they relate to conceptualizations of the self, the political and the social. It demonstrates that though the idea of beneficial travel found its first expression in accounts commissioned by a colonial government interested in inculcating modern cosmopolitan aesthetics, it quickly developed a life of its own in the public sphere of print. This dynamic literary space was forged by writers from across the social spectrum who produced a profusion of accounts that drew inspiration from Indic, Islamic and European traditions. In the twentieth century, too, travel writing continued to evolve and expand as it adapted to the shifting dimensions of local nationalisms and successive international conflicts. In independent India and Pakistan, it broke new ground both aesthetically and thematically as it came to terms with the post-colonial geography of South Asia. Yet, throughout this history,Urdu travel writing continued to cultivate the idea that the journey was valuable for its own sake.Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
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Ansell, Richard. "Irish protestant travel to Europe, 1660-1727." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:55b4a741-f840-4d79-b1e8-60a3a78e567b.
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This thesis examines travel to continental Europe as undertaken by several generations of Irish Protestants between 1660 and 1727. Historians draw parallels between the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland and other polities in ancien régime Europe, but these demand an exploration of contemporary encounters. Research on the Irish in Europe concentrates on Catholics without much regard to Protestant experiences, while work on English or British travel overlooks ways in which Irish Protestant voyages differed. This thesis analyses the experiences of Church-of-Ireland families from the gentry, nobility and aristocracy, especially the Southwells, Percevals, Molesworths, Molyneuxs, Boyles and Butlers. Correspondence, notebooks and financial accounts reconstruct their voyages, mainly to France, Italy, the Low Countries and Germany, and their attitudes towards the practice of travel. Journeys to other destinations are incorporated, as are the voyages of neighbours, acquaintances and employees. Purposes varied, but travel was consistently considered an opportunity for 'improvement'. The thesis follows the successive preoccupations of travellers, beginning with demonstrations of 'fitness to travel'. Wealthy young men were judged according to criteria that privileged anglicisation and Protestantism, though linguistic skill was a more socially-comprehensive standard. Advisors emphasised civil conversation and written observation, but warnings to avoid 'countrymen' were ignored. The company of English-speaking travellers and Irish Catholic expatriates created distinctive European experiences. Foreign hosts often saw uncomplicated Englishmen, though some recognised Irish difference. Anglican travellers held qualified membership of a 'Protestant international', drawing on a cross-confessional 'stock of friends'. Travellers received tuition that complicates perceptions of travel as 'informal' education and they memorialised experiences through souvenirs and gifts. Voyages encouraged some into English residence and identifications, though others brought improvements home to Ireland. 'Improvement', as it related to wealthy Church-of-Ireland families, functioned not as a binary between approved England and disdained Ireland but a triangular exchange in which continental Europe featured prominently.
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Burns, James Robert. "William Lithgow's Totall Discourse (1632) and his 'Science of the World' : a seventeenth-century Protestant traveller's view of Europe and the near East." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.339776.
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Wood, Jennifer Linhart. "Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Theater and Travel Writing." Thesis, The George Washington University, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3587221.
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My dissertation explores how sound informs the representation of cross-cultural interactions within early modern drama and travel writing. "Sounding" implies the process of producing music or noise, but it also suggests the attempt to make meaning of what one hears. "Otherness" in this study refers to a foreign presence outside of the listening body, as well as to an otherness that is already inherent within. Sounding otherness enacts a bi-directional exchange between a culturally different other and an embodied self; this exchange generates what I term the sonic uncanny, whereby the otherness interior to the self vibrates with sounds of otherness exterior to the body. The sonic uncanny describes how sounds that are perceived as foreign become familiar through the vibratory touch of the soundwave that attunes a body to its sonic environment or soundscape. Sounds of foreign Eastern and New World Indian otherness become part of English and European travelers; at the same time, these travelers sound their own otherness in Indian spaces. Sounding otherness occurs in the travel narratives of Jean de Lèry, Thomas Dallam, Thomas Coryate, and John Smith. Cultural otherness is also sounded by the English through their theatrical representations of New World and Oriental otherness in masques including The Masque of Flowers, and plays like Robert Greene's Alphonsus, respectively; Shakespeare's The Tempest combines elements of East and West into a new sound—"something rich and strange." These dramatic entertainments suggest that the theater, as much as a foreign land, can function as a sonic contact zone.
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Munoz-Martin, Maria Gloria. "In search of the promised land : the travels of Emilia Pardo Bazan." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.344092.
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Orians, Emily Anne. "A Picture Tells a Thousand Years." Kent State University Honors College / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ksuhonors1304697179.
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Englard, Michael Anselm. "'Grounds for argument' : English literary travel 1911-1941." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610092.
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Boynton, Eric Grayson. "The Burdens of History: Problems Invoked by Occidental Travel Writing on the Balkans." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/42634.
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Works on the Balkans currently face a crisis of representation--from Ivo Andric's fictionalized memory to Joe Sacco's humanitarian witnessing, the occidental reader must examine the Balkans within a historical context of colonialism to avoid misrepresentation. The goal of this study is threefold: to provide a firm historical grounding while observing the instruments of colonialism, to give an overview of Occidental travel writing on the Balkans with a particular focus on the formation and dissolution of Yugoslavia, and to suggest examples of travel texts that strive to read colonized worlds without losing sight of their own Occidental positioning or pretending that it does not exist.
When approaching a contested space that involves a multitude of competing discourses, a hefty responsibility is thrust on both the reader and writer of Balkan representations to retain an awareness of counter and hidden discourses while resisting the urge to define, or even pursue, the definitive "true story" of the Balkans. Thus, an occidental reader of East Europe must be able to contextualize various and often contradicting texts without naturalizing recorded experiences. He or she must also maintain a poignant awareness of how Western imperialism has constructed and reconstructed the region by journalism, memoir, artificial borders, ethnography, classification, historical absolutism, and financial exploitation. If this work simplifies or answers "What is Balkan?" then it has failed utterly. We can only hope to further complicate and challenge the dominant discourse of Balkanism to keep the reader's mind alive and questioning rather than dead and assured.Master of Arts
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Heaps, Denise Adele. "Gendered discourse and subjectivity in travel writing by Canadian women." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/NQ49882.pdf.
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LaFramboise, Lisa N. "Travellers in skirts, women and english-language travel writing in Canada." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq23012.pdf.
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McFarlane, Elizabeth Anne. "French travellers to Scotland, 1780-1830 : an analysis of some travel journals." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/21711.
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This study examines the value of travellers’ written records of their trips with specific reference to the journals of five French travellers who visited Scotland between 1780 and 1830. The thesis argues that they contain material which demonstrates the merit of journals as historical documents. The themes chosen for scrutiny, life in the rural areas, agriculture, industry, transport and towns, are examined and assessed across the journals and against the social, economic and literary scene in France and Scotland. Through the evidence presented in the journals, the thesis explores aspects of the tourist experience of the Enlightenment and post -Enlightenment periods. The viewpoint of knowledgeable French Anglophiles and their receptiveness to Scottish influences, grants a perspective of the position of France in the economic, social and power structure of Europe and the New World vis-à-vis Scotland. The thesis adopts a narrow, focussed analysis of the journals which is compared and contrasted to a broad brush approach adopted in other studies.
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Herndon, Christopher Michael. "The history of the architectural guidebook and the development of an architectural information system." Thesis, Available online, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007, 2007. http://etd.gatech.edu/theses/available/etd-07092007-114619/.
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Harrington, Ralph. "The neuroses of the railway : trains, travel and trauma in Britain, c.1850-c.1900." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:28dfe6cd-64ea-4924-a7bd-234c002c0fae.
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This thesis explores some aspects of the cultural history of the railway during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It argues that the railway was of central importance in creating and shaping Victorian attitudes to the machine and to mechanized civilization in a world increasingly dominated by large scale-technologies. In particular, it explores the significance of negative responses to the railway - fear, anxiety, nervousness, alarm, revulsion - in influencing a range of social, cultural and medical responses to the perceived degenerative threat of technological civilization. The four chapters of the thesis are organized so as to provide a progressive tightening of focus on particular aspects of the railway's significance in this context. The first, most wide-ranging, chapter explores the ways in which the Victorian railway was perceived as both an icon of progress and civilization and as a disruptive, threatening, destructive force. In particular, it seeks to establish the deep-rooted, enduring and influential nature of the fear and anxiety which the railway provoked. The second chapter is concerned with the railway journey as an experience, relating the ambivalence with which the railway was viewed to the journey as a sensory, physical and mental experience. The third chapter focuses on the accident as the most dramatic instance of the dangers of the railway, and relates its significance in contemporary culture to the wider context of the fears provoked by increasingly powerful and potentially destructive technologies. The fourth and final chapter explores the phenomenon of 'railway spine', the obscure nervous condition supposedly suffered by railway accident victims who had seemingly received no actual organic injury, but nonetheless displayed nervous, mental and physical symptoms of serious bodily disorder.
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Nikolovska, Kristina. "'Let it be known' : interrogating historical writing in Church Slavonic paratexts of Southeastern Europe (1371-1711)." Thesis, University of Kent, 2015. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/53887/.
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The period of Ottoman rule, pejoratively termed the ‘Turkish yoke’, is often regarded in the Balkans – a region divided by quests for self-definition – as a period of darkness and suffering. Given the paucity of South Slavic historical records, scholars have sought to corroborate evidence of the ‘yoke’ in ‘historical paratexts’, fragmentary records of historical events to be found in the margins of Church Slavonic manuscripts and early printed books. With the Ottoman Empire on the verge of collapse in the first decades of the twentieth century, scholars and folklorists from the several splintered nations that form the Balkans became very interested in archiving and compiling these paratextual materials into published compendia, a trend which continues up to the present day. They believed that conserving these presumed eyewitness testimonials would preserve the core of the nation, an idea that has been transmitted largely unchallenged. These paratexts are seen as ‘writing from below’ which records facts about the suffering brought about by Ottoman rule. Present scholarship in the Balkans has interpreted ‘znatise’ (‘let it be known’), the formulaic expression that announces some of these annotations, as indicative of a self-conscious tendency to create historically truthful records of the South Slavs under Ottoman rule. However, one only needs to sift through these various records to be struck by the repetitions and the limited scope of the patterns that pervade a majority of these inscriptions as opposed to the range of observations that could be expected to result from an autobiographical impulse. This thesis accounts for these patterns and challenges the dominant interpretation of these paratexts by locating them within the larger writing traditions to which they belonged. By interrogating the relationship between paratextual writing and Church Slavonic historiography, this study provides an alternative framework which explains and brings together sources that have otherwise been left disparate and scattered. The formula ‘let it be known’ is to be understood not as testimony but rather as apocalyptic prophecy. The thesis demonstrates that historical paratexts mainly recorded those events -- such as natural disaster, famine, the outbreak of disease and celestial phenomena -- that were understood as portents and figured in apocalyptic literature. In this light, the clergy’s tone towards the military successes and the Ottoman reign is shown to be determined by an apocalyptic understanding of history. We also see how South Slavic attitudes towards the Ottomans were diverse with references to the Sultan ranging from ‘son of perdition’ (Antichrist) to ‘Tsar’ depending on the political relations between a diocese and the Ottoman administration. The thesis also provides new readings of three important paratextual accounts: (i) Monk Isaija’s colophon of 1371 (ii) Deacon Dimitar’s colophon of 1466 and (iii) the self-narratives of Mihail of Kratovo written between 1649 and 1660. The labels of ‘truthfulness’, ‘factuality’, and ‘sincerity’ that have been attributed to these first person accounts are questioned by demonstrating the socially strategic and ambiguous nature of these paratexts.
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Warneke, Sara. "A ship of shadows : images of the educational traveller in early modern England /." Title page, contents and abstract only, 1991. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phw278.pdf.
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Polzella, Annie Kristina. "Self-Representation of Women in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Lady Anna Miller and the Grand Tour." Scholar Commons, 2017. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6746.
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The Grand Tour is known to scholars as a significant period of travel in which members of English society could immerse themselves in the foreign, while also adhering to established social customs. Scholarship previously regarded the Grand Tour as an intellectual journey for aristocratic Englishmen; however, an incorporation of women into this narrative has introduced many new and important themes that merit further study. Women’s increasing participation in the Grand Tour, which gained in popularity in the eighteenth century, reveals many unique aspects of British society in the period. The integration of women into the Tour is also an indication of increased mobility for an emerging class of Britons who sought amusement and distinction abroad. Cultural identity played an active role in not only shaping the traveler’s experience but also in dictating how travelers represented themselves on their journey. Traveler’s served as cultural intermediaries that represented their country while abroad and transported aspects of the foreign societies they encountered home with them. While cultural identity certainly shaped perceptions of travelers, this work endeavors to bring into focus additional points of analysis and emphasize emerging areas of study. The appropriation of foreign objects and the significance of their integration into domestic life and social practices, the pursuit of amusement and that pursuit’s influence on the Tour experience, and the essential role played by the body as another category of experience in travel are all areas of interest and focus in this additional interpretation of the Grand Tour.
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Geurts, Anna Paulina Helena. "Makeshift freedom seekers : Dutch travellers in Europe, 1815-1914." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2cfa072e-a9c4-42c9-a6b0-1e815d93b05c.
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This thesis questions a series of assumptions concerning the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century modernization of European spaces. Current scholarship tends to concur with essayistic texts and images by contemporary intellectuals that technological and organizational developments increased the freedom of movement of those living in western-European societies, while at the same time alienating them from each other and from their environment. I assess this claim with the help of Dutch travel egodocuments such as travel diaries and letters. After a prosopographical investigation of all available northern-Netherlandish travel egodocuments created between 1500 and 1915, a selection of these documents is examined in greater detail. In these documents, travellers regarded the possession of identity documents, a correct appearance, and a fitting social identity along with their personal contacts, physical capabilities, and the weather as the most important factors influencing whether they managed to gain access to places. A discussion of these factors demonstrates that no linear increase, nor a decrease, occurred in the spatial power felt by travellers. The exclusion many travellers continued to experience was often overdetermined. The largest groups affected by this were women and less educated families. Yet travellers could also play out different access factors against each other. By paying attention to how practices matched hopes and expectations, it is possible to discover how gravely social inequities were really felt by travellers. Perhaps surprisingly, all social groups desired to visit the same types of places. Their main difference concerned the atmosphere of the places where the different groups felt at home. To a large degree this matched travellers' unequal opportunities. Therefore, although opportunities remained strongly unequal throughout the period, this was not always experienced as a problem. Also, in cases where it was, many travellers knew strategies to work around the obstacles created for them.
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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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Peale, Anne Estelle. "Works of travel in a publishing empire : John Murray III and domestic markets for the far away, circa 1860-1892." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/29601.
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This thesis draws upon the literatures of historical geography, book history, and archival theory to investigate the production of travel narratives by the London publisher John Murray during the second half of the nineteenth century. It traces the processes by which in-the-field experiences of explorers and travellers were translated into a textual and physical object: the published book. By interrogating the practicalities and technicalities of geographical publishing, particularly in relation to travellers’ paratexts, the thesis draws attention to the need for geographers to consider the literary commercialisation of geographical knowledge. The John Murray Archive provides an unusual opportunity to examine geographical publishing across 33 years, 138 titles, and 102 authors. Murray’s extensive correspondence and detailed financial records provide source material for the first comparative study of these books. The structure of the thesis follows Murray’s publication process, from accepting or rejecting manuscripts to textual editing, the shaping of paratexts, production of illustrations, and, ultimately, sales, translations, and further editions of later nineteenth-century books of travel. It places remarkable works of travel Murray published in the later nineteenth century — books by authors including David Livingstone, Paul Du Chaillu, Heinrich Schliemann, and Isabella Bird — in the context of the unexceptional. In conclusion, this thesis furthers academic understanding of a nationally important archival resource, demonstrating the value of a longitudinal survey which accounts for economic as well as epistemic influences upon geographical publishing.
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Fowler, Corinne Suzanne. "Chasing tales : travel writing, journalism and the history of British ideas about Afghanistan from the early nineteenth century to the present." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.440857.
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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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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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Carr, Margaret Shipley. "The Temperance Worker as Social Reformer and Ethnographer as Exemplified in the Life and Work of Jessie A. Ackermann." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2009. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/1869.
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This project used primary historical documents from the Jessie A. Ackermann collection at ETSU's Archives of Appalachia, other books and documents from the temperance period, and recent scholarship on the subjects of temperance, suffrage, and women travelers and civilizers. As the second world missionary for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Ackermann traveled in order to establish WCT Unions and worked as a civilizer, feminist, and reporter of the conditions of women and the disadvantaged throughout the world.
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Childs, Cassie Patricia. "Traveling Women and Consuming Place in Eighteenth-Century Travel Letters and Journals." Scholar Commons, 2017. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6692.
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Traveling Women and Consuming Place in Eighteenth-Century Travel Letters and Journals considers how various women-authored travel narratives of the long eighteenth century employ food in the construction of place and identity. Chronologically charting the letters and journals of Delarivier Manley, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Janet Schaw, and Frances Burney, I argue that the “critical food moments” described in their letters and journals demonstrate material, cultural, and social implications about consumption. My interdisciplinary project is located at the intersection of three seemingly divergent topics: food studies, human geography, and women-authored travel narratives. Approaching “place” as a way of being-in-the-world, my project traces the connection between verbal constructions of place and issues of identity, national and gender, across the eighteenth century. Looking at what I term “critical food moments” during travel allows us particular insight into how food simultaneously serves a literal (intended for consumption) and a figurative (used as a literary topic and device) function, and how tropes of food—such as digestion—function as lexicons which offer women writers opportunities to better understand and criticize the nation and their own identities within the nation. I argue that food-centered moments allow us to better understand the lived experiences of women traveling in the eighteenth century, to analyze how material and sensory conditions influenced and shaped women’s understandings of themselves and their positions (places) in the world. Taken together, these four women authors represent a wide-range of perspectives from various social and economic backgrounds, and yet, what they have in common is crucial: a connection with the food, communities, and places they travel.
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Aalders, Cynthia Yvonne. "Writing religious communities : the spiritual lives and manuscript cultures of English women, 1740-90." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:786913a8-64a6-48ef-bce4-266b6fa70ff3.
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This thesis examines the spiritual lives of eighteenth-century English women through an analysis of their personal writings. It explores the manuscripts of religious women who practised their faith by writing letters, diaries, poetry, and other highly personal texts—texts that give unique access to the interior, spiritual lives of their authors. Concerned not only with the individual meaning of those writings but with their communal meanings, it argues that women’s informal writing, written within personal relationships, acted to undergird, guide, and indeed shape religious communities in vital and unexplored ways. Through an exploration of various significant personal relationships, both intra- and inter-generationally, this thesis demonstrates the multiple ways in which women were active in ‘writing religious communities’. The women discussed here belonged to communities that habitually communicated through personal writing. At the same time, their acts of writing were creative acts, powerful to build and shape religious communities: these women wrote religious community. A series of interweaving case studies guide my analysis and discussion. The thesis focuses on Catherine Talbot (1721–70), Anne Steele (1717–78), and Ann Bolton (1743–1822), and on their literary interactions with friends and family. Considered together, these subjects and sources allow comparison across denomination, for Talbot was Anglican, Steele Baptist, and Bolton Methodist. After an introductory chapter, Chapter Two focuses on spiritual friendship, showing how women used personal writings within peer relationships to think through religious ideas and encourage faith commitments. Chapter Three considers older women as spiritual elders, arguing that elderly women sometimes achieved honoured status in religious communities and were turned to for spiritual direction. Chapter Four explores the ways in which women offered religious instruction to spiritual children through the creative use of informal writings, including diaries and poetry. And Chapter Five considers women’s personal writings as spiritual legacy, as they were preserved by family and friends and continued to function in religious communities after the death of their authors.
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Chartrand, Alix. "A Recipe for Colonisation: The Impact of Seventeenth-Century Ireland on English Notions of Superiority and the Implications for India." Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/24252.
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This dissertation seeks to consider the colonial experiences of Britain in Ireland and India in a comparative context – to contrast their encounters with, and explorations of, early modern Ireland with the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian subcontinent. The early experience in Ireland helped shape the developing British belief in their own superiority, leading them to draw distinctions between themselves and other peoples. This laid the groundwork for later endeavours, notably in India. While separated by time and space, these British colonial experiences shared several important characteristics. Early modern Ireland provided the British with important guidelines and models for behaviour, many of which were later adopted in India. The manipulation of history in Ireland, the description of the Gaelic Irish in travel accounts and the application of the law as a tool of reform all provided valuable patterns for the ways in which the British structured their later empire in India.
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Ryder, Emily Jennifer Hana. "Memory, perception, reception : following the fate of the victims of Italy's anni di piombo through the writing of their children." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2015. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7056/.
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This thesis considers some of those who were killed in politically-motivated attacks, often referred to as ‘terrorism’, which took place during Italy’s anni di piombo. Six works written by victims’ children will be used as a lens through which to examine the collective memory and the victims’ place therein. In recent years, there has been a shift in the way that this period of Italian history - the anni di piombo – has been remembered. Where previously the perpetrators of the violence of those years dominated public discourse, in the last decade the principal narrative has become more victim-centred. The biographical works written by victims’ children have inevitably contributed to this change in the memory narrative. The techniques employed in their writing in order to change the existing public image of their fathers will be analysed in this thesis, along with certain themes that recur throughout the six works and broader victim-centred discussion of this period. Analysis begins with a thorough outline of the political and historical context of the anni di piombo, including case studies of two of the most famous victims of this period and a consideration of the written works of some of the former terrorists. Following this preliminary contextualisation, each of the six books and their authors will be studied in detail to provide a foundation for the analysis contained in the final three chapters. The themes examined in the second half of the thesis are second-generation writing, forgiveness and commemoration. Using these themes as a framework, a rigorous investigation of the place that the victims hold in collective memory; the role their children’s writing has played in shaping and maintaining their public image and the longer-term impact that these changes can be seen to have had within a broader societal and political perspective is undertaken. On the basis of this study, it is evident that the victims’ place in the collective memory of the anni di piombo has changed dramatically since that period of violence concluded. The victims’ children have been very significant in enacting this change and their writing has placed them in a position from which they can continue to exert influence and promote a victim-centred approach to history.
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Barefoot, Thomas B. "Pamphleteers and Promiscuity: Writing and Dissent between the English Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution." University of Akron / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1436714359.
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Lamarca, Eric Tadeu. "Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira e sua Viagem filosófica ao Rio Negro." Universidade de São Paulo, 2015. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8149/tde-15032016-155619/.
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No fim do século XVIII, ocorreu a Viagem Filosófica ao Rio Negro (Região Amazônica, Brasil) do naturalista Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira. Realizada entre 1783 e 1792 foi a primeira expedição científica patrocinada pelo Império Português, naquele vasto território, a qual produziu um enorme volume documental, com registros de grande riqueza e diversidade, na área da agricultura, botânica,etnologia, economia, zoologia e antropologia. No presente estudo, realizou-se uma releitura analítica da obra de Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, ou seja, a Viagem Filosófica ao Rio Negro, enaltecendo contextos históricos que a antecederam, bem como comparando-a com obras de viajantes, como Gabriel Soares de Sousa (1587) e André João Antonil (1711).As obras desses três autores parecem ter um papel social e econômico em comum, podendo-se dizer que seus textos têm uma razão política. Todos eles parecem ser influenciados ou motivados pelo mercantilismo. A expedição realizada por Ferreira recebeu influências da modernidade e do iluminismo, bem como das peculiaridades da reforma pombalina de Portugal.A Viagem Filosófica ao Rio Negro de Alexandre Ferreira da Silva é uma obra de grande importância no mundo colonial português, sendo um verdadeiro tratado de história natural, agropecuária e economia do Brasil, mas que ainda é pouco divulgado nos circuitos acadêmicos. O trabalho de um homem, servidor fiel de Sua Majestade que, com poucos recursos e uma equipe reduzida, fez o primeiro grande levantamento socioeconômico e ambiental da Amazônia brasileira.In the late XVIII century was the Viagem Filosófica ao Rio Negro (Amazon Region, Brazil) of the naturalist Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira. Conducted between 1783 and 1792 was the first scientific expedition sponsored by the Portuguese Empire, that vast territory, which produced a huge volume documentary with records of great wealth and diversity, in agriculture, botany, anthropology, economics, zoology and anthropology. In the present study, there was na analytical rereading the work of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, the Viagem Filosófica ao Rio Negro, highlighting historical contexts and comparing it to traveler works as Gabriel Soares de Sousa (1587) and André João Antonil (1711). The works of these three authors seem to have a social and economic role in common and could be said that his texts have a political reason. They all seem to be influenced or motivated by mercantilism. The expedition carried out by Ferreira received influences of modernity and the Enlightenment as well as the peculiarities of Pombal reform Portugal. The Viagem Filosófica ao Rio Negro of Alexandre Ferreira da Silva is a great work of importance in the Portuguese colonial world and is a true treatise of natural history, agriculture and Brazil\'s economy, but that is still not well known in academic circles. The work of one man, faithful servant of His Majesty that, with few resources and a reduced staff, made the first major socioeconomic and environmental survey of the Brazilian Amazon.
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Pengelley, Oliver C. H. "Rome in ninth-century Anglo-Saxon England." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0228e2f8-e259-46b7-85fc-346437db4d60.
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This thesis explores the impact of Rome upon Anglo-Saxon politics, religion, and culture in the ninth century. From the Gregorian mission onwards, Rome helped shape the ecclesiastical and devotional contexts of Anglo-Saxon Christianity and occupied a central place in the imaginations of early English writers. Yet the extent to which these links continued into and throughout the ninth century remains obscure, with scholarship about religion and culture often treating the period as a hiatus. In political narratives, the ninth century is treated as a crucial period, and Roman involvement is most visible in this sphere. By redressing the imbalance between religion and politics, this thesis achieves a thorough appreciation of the part played by Rome in these various fields of experience, as well as showing how Anglo-Saxon writers located themselves and their pasts in relation to the city. It does so over the course of five thematic chapters, which progress from an analysis of the most fundamental issues to more imaginative ones. Chapter one examines contact and communication between England and Rome, arguing that the two areas were closely and constantly connected across the century. The second and third chapters explore the impact of Rome on religion and kingship respectively, finding that while Roman influence on the church was most pronounced in the first half of the century, in political terms the city played a significant and changing role throughout the period. Chapters four and five consider the position of Rome in Anglo-Saxon historical thought and geographical understanding, examining how writers continued to define their position in a wider Christian world with reference to the city and its past. This thesis argues that, in the ninth century, Rome continued to play an important role in English life, while also influencing Anglo-Saxon thought and experience in new and dynamic ways.
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Farnsworth, John Seibert. "Coves of departure : field notes from the Sea of Cortez." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/21811.
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Coves of Departure: Field Notes from the Sea of Cortez is a literary natural history presented in mixed forms of nature memoir, personal essay and redacted field notes. Intended as narrative nonfiction for general readership, it focusses on the natural history of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, attending especially to the littoral zone of the Sea of Cortez. Numbered chapters narrate several sea kayak expeditions led by the author to the Isla Espiritu Santo archipelago of Baja California Sur. Chapters chronicling discrete expeditions are sectioned off by two long interludes that describe natural history explorations in the northern state, Baja California. The title essay, which transitions between the second interlude and the final chapter, investigates natural history from the perspective of material ecocriticism,.
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De, Sapio Joseph Jeffrey. ""This Mecca for the Pilgrims of Pleasure" : tourism, modernity, and Victorian London, 1840-1900." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5fb6f62c-0147-4447-8ba2-bf9c0a142a43.
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This dissertation argues that during the nineteenth century, the journey to London revealed a world undergoing systemic change as industrialisation steadily eroded the traditional rhythms of the countryside in favour of urban modernity; indeed, London is regarded as a synecdoche for the forces shaping the wider world. This work uses tourist narratives to London as investigative tools to examine the ways in which individuals comprehend the modern changes occurring around them, as represented by the British capital, and does so in a comparative fashion, investigating the British Empire, the United States, Britain itself, and continental Europe. In so doing, it addresses two questions: first, whether one’s acceptance or rejection of modernity was predicated upon specific social and national preconditions; and second, whether the idea of nineteenth-century modernity was itself a non-universal construction dependent upon a variety of socio-cultural outlooks. The evidence for this study is drawn from the published and unpublished narratives of tourists from the four different contexts mentioned above, and divided into four chapters to focus upon each group. This study is grounded in a theoretical context which establishes a correlation between the methods used to interpret the city’s spaces, and the methods used to interpret modernity more generally. I conclude that the changes occurring from the interaction between global modernity and local culture were regarded with ambivalence and uncertainty, judgments influenced by London’s impact on the visitors mentioned above. The city gives a physical dimension to the travellers’ imagined fears, benefits, or concerns over future progress. Victorian London is thus one focus for a transformation affecting large segments of the nineteenth-century world, illustrating that modern industrial changes were ultimately perceived as being ambiguous and ambivalent forces.
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Fouweather, Karen Helen. "Ten Pounds for Adults, Kids Travel Free: An essay on the effects of migration upon the children of the British migrants to Western Australia in the 1960s and 1970s ; and , The red pipe: a novella set in Port Hedland." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2013. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/688.
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This study comprises an essay entitled ‘Ten Pounds for Adults, Kids Travel Free’ and a creative component entitled ‘The Red Pipe: a Novella Set in Port Hedland’. The essay focuses upon the children of the ‘golden era’ of British migration to Australia, between 1961 and 1971, when over 300,000 arrived as part of an unprecedented post-war population drive. Most travelled under an assisted passage scheme in which adults paid £10 towards their fare and their children travelled free of charge. Consequently, these assisted British immigrants were known by Australians as the ‘Ten Pound Poms’. Two decades on from the introduction of the scheme, immigration motives had shifted from the desperation born of immediate post-war austerity to the heightened expectations of the increasingly affluent Sixties and Seventies. The vast majority of these later British migrants came in family units, for the future of their children was a major consideration for most of the parents. Many of them faced significant struggle settling in to what was promised to be a ‘British way of life’, whilst, in reality, Australia was becoming an increasingly multicultural and unfamiliar society. This study is distinctive in that it examines the long-term consequences of migration upon the lives of the British children. It seeks to acknowledge, but ultimately to shift the focus from, the decisions and achievements of the parents to their children, the ‘second generation’, who travelled for free. It also considers the ongoing ramifications of the migration decision, as the parents age and pass on and their children, themselves, become parents and grandparents. It does so by utilising the recollections of a focus group of 31 British migrants, who travelled to Australia during this period. Eleven of these participants were parents at the time of migration, whilst the remaining interviewees were aged under eighteen. This thesis has a predominant focus upon Western Australia, for most of the participants originally disembarked in Fremantle. Today, all except two live in this state. The key child protagonists of the creative component are both British child migrants who immigrated to Western Australia with their families during the late 1960s. The novella, entitled The Red Pipe, is loosely based upon the author’s childhood experience of Cyclone Joan’s visit to Port Hedland in 1975. Joan was the most destructive cyclone to affect the Pilbara district in over thirty years. Over eighty-five per cent of the buildings were damaged and the town was left without power and communications for days. The author spent a harrowing night waiting out the storm with her family, narrowly escaping injury when the cyclone breached the family home. Utilizing the perspectives of two pivotal child protagonists, the novella traces the circumstances, severity and aftermath of Cyclone Joan upon the town and its culturally eclectic inhabitants. This little-known, yet significant incident in the history of Western Australia is set in a geographically significant port town, at a time before the mining boom. The ferocity of nature upon an ancient and isolated landscape provides the catalyst for the resultant exploration of the tenacity of childhood, set against the inherent fragility of the nuclear family unit and interwoven with the transient nature of the migrant condition.
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Tucker, Joanna. "A new approach to medieval cartularies : understanding manuscript growth in AUL SCA MS JB 1/3 (Glasgow Cathedral's Registrum Vetus) and the Cartulary of Lindores Abbey in Caprington Castle." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2017. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/8466/.
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Medieval cartularies have been the focus of many studies in the past few decades. Rather than simply repositories for charter texts, cartularies are now regarded by those who study them as carefully curated collections of texts whose contents and arrangement reflect the immediate concerns and archival environment of the communities that created them. One feature of cartularies which has not received attention is the ‘growth’ of their manuscripts beyond the initial phase of creation. This growth refers not only to the addition of fresh gatherings but also to the piecemeal addition of texts into the available spaces, often in a haphazard order and by many scribes working across a number of decades. ‘Manuscript growth’ is not an uncommon feature of cartularies from the central middle ages, particularly from the thirteenth century onwards. As a phenomenon, however, it has not been recognised or studied, for the good reason that it is difficult to discuss haphazard manuscript growth in a systematic way. This thesis offers a new methodology which engages with multi-scribe contributions to ‘active’ cartularies. It takes a holistic approach which integrates the textual and ‘physical’ evidence of cartularies, and embraces all forms of scribal activity. By studying the growth of cartulary manuscripts, we can gain significant insights into the contemporary use and perception of these valuable objects. This thesis therefore takes a fresh look at the ‘genre’ of medieval cartularies through the eyes of the manuscript evidence itself, and what this can reveal about its medieval scribes and readers. Two manuscripts are taken as the basis of this study: the older cartulary of Glasgow Cathedral (AUL SCA MS JB 1/3) and the older cartulary of Lindores Abbey (in private ownership in Caprington Castle). Chapter 1 introduces the field of cartulary studies, with reference to new work in this area (particularly in relation to cartularies in France and England). Central questions in this field are introduced, such as the definition of a cartulary, their creation and function. It also discusses approaches to analysing complex codices and multi-scribe activity within other manuscript genres. In Chapter 2, a new methodology will be introduced for analysing manuscript growth. This involves rethinking our approach to some familiar elements of manuscripts: their codicology, binding history, the scribes, as well as the challenge of dating the various contributions to the cartularies. New concepts and terminology will be introduced (such as ‘relative dating’ and ‘series’) that have been developed in response to these two complex cartularies. By applying this new methodology, the creation and subsequent growth of each manuscript can be examined in detail in Chapter 3 (for Glasgow Cathedral’s cartulary) and Chapter 4 (for Lindores Abbey’s). It is shown that the contemporary experience of these two cartularies was as a collection of simultaneously ‘active’ units (either unbound or in temporary bindings), offering new scribes a choice of where to place their material. Chapter 5 draws together the analysis, and focuses on the initial creation of the cartularies, the nature of their growth by piecemeal additions, and the reasons for this growth. This reveals two communities that took an active approach to reading and extending their cartularies, treating these manuscripts as a shared space. The vexed question of ‘repeated’ texts within cartularies is reconsidered in this light. The analysis allows us to develop a deeper understanding of the cartularies’ function and the role of their scribes as primarily readers, whose interactions with the manuscript were responsive and dynamic. The institutional setting is also discussed. The thesis concludes by considering the implications of this study for our understanding of the function and typology of cartularies, their relationship to archives of single-sheet documents, and as sources for institutional identity, as well as the potential of the methodology to act as a starting point for studying scribal interactions and scribes as readers in other manuscript genres with multi-scribe growth.
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Taylor, Helena. "The lives of Ovid : secrets, exile and galanterie in writing of the ‘Grand Siècle’." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4571c071-a499-44e7-a870-ed747d69bdc5.
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This study examines the constructions and uses of the figure of Ovid in French writing of the second half of the seventeenth century, and explores how they were modulated by contemporary aesthetic and cultural concerns. As the influence of Ovid’s poetry made itself felt in various ways – in the mythopoeia of the Sun-King and the fashionable galant salons – interest in the story of Ovid’s life blossomed. This, I argue, was facilitated by new forms of ‘life-writing’, the nouvelle historique and histoire galante, and fuelled in unexpected ways by the escalating querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Research has been done on the reception and influence of Ovid’s poetry in this period, but little attention has been paid to the figure of Ovid. This thesis offers a new perspective and, informed by recent renewed interest in life-writing, argues that analysis of biographical depictions is vital for establishing a coherent picture of the uses of Ovid in the ‘Grand Siècle’. I explore a diverse range of textual descriptions of Ovid (Vies; prefatory material attached to translations and editions of his work; correspondence; dialogues des morts; biographical dictionaries and historical novels), organized according to their different, though intersecting, ways of writing about this poet. He was constructed as a historical figure, an author, a fictional character and a ‘parallèle’ – a point of identification or contrast for contemporary writers. Through close analysis of a multi-authored corpus, this thesis identifies and examines two instances of paradox: though an ancient poet, Ovid became emblematic of 'Moderne' movements and was used to explore aspects of galanterie; and, though his creative work was mobilized in the service of royal propaganda, Ovid, as a figure for the exiled poet, was also used to express anxieties about the sway of power and the machinations and pitfalls of the world of the court.
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Hamilton, Tom. "Pierre de L'Estoile and his world in the Wars of Religion, 1546-1611." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:848fc095-05a9-48e0-8633-76d63d06b663.
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Pierre de L'Estoile (1546-1611) kept an extraordinary diary and collection in Paris during the Wars of Religion, recording everything from high-political scandals to low-life criminality during this crucial turning point in early modern history. The first extensive study of L'Estoile in any language, this thesis demonstrates how he negotiated and commemorated the conflicts that divided France as he engaged creatively with the rumours, ephemeral prints, poems, pictures, and books that he assembled in his diary and cabinet. It argues that the story of his life and times is the history of the civil wars in the making. While historians and literary scholars depend on L’Estoile’s diaries as an essential source of information, citing him as a mere passive observer, this thesis instead explores his subjectivity and interprets a wide range of hitherto unseen or neglected manuscript evidence that situates him in the Parisian society of royal office-holders and demonstrates his significance in the republic of letters. It follows a microhistorical approach to L'Estoile and his world in order to challenge established interpretations of his sources as evidence of a widespread mentality of eschatological anxiety in sixteenth-century France, instead focusing on L’Estoile’s personal responses to pieces in his collection. In this way, it critiques a common trend in cultural history to roam freely among ‘collective representations’ and argues for the importance of a precise analysis of social context, materiality, and individual subjectivity in reception studies.
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Bremmer, Magnus. "Konsten att tämja en bild : Fotografiet och läsarens uppmärksamhet i 1800-talets Sverige." Doctoral thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för kultur och estetik, 2015. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-116564.
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The present study inquires into the problematization of attention in the reception and distribution of photography in 19th-century Sweden. It investigates how photography’s alleged abundance of detail and indiscriminate reproduction became a problem in the reception of the medium. The problem became urgent when photographs were put to use by established discourses; specifically, when used in printed publications meant for a public. The thesis therefore argues that the problem of attention had a profound influence on how printed photographic or photographically illustrated editions (photo-texts) were modelled and arranged. For this purpose, the study affirms a particular focus on attention practices: the various ways in which the printed editions aim to regulate the reader’s attention before the supposedly distractive image. Specifically, the thesis focuses on how texts in these printed editions are arranged or juxtaposed in relation to the image, how they speak of and to the images, what values they reflect, and what effects they could be said to produce. Consequently, the present study is more than an investigation of a problem; it is also an inquiry into the various attempts to overcome this problem. The problem and its responsive practices will have different characteristics in the various contexts of individual discourses. Therefore, the study situates the problem of attention in four prominent genres of 19th-century photography: the topographical albums of photographic views, art books with photographic reproductions, the scientific atlas, and the photographically illustrated travelogue. These genres and forms of publication, as well as the discourses of attention relating to them, are discussed in separate chapters. Every chapter departs from a specific Swedish photographic edition from the nineteenth-century. In sum, the thesis aims – with its focus on the problematization of attention – at giving a new historical perspective on the emergent relation between photography and the printed word.
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Bischoff, Liouba. "Nicolas Bouvier ou l'usage du savoir. Essai d'épistémocritique." Thesis, Lyon, 2018. http://www.theses.fr/2018LYSE3040.
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Depuis les années quatre-vingt-dix et le succès croissant du Festival Etonnants Voyageurs, Nicolas Bouvier est devenu l’incarnation d’un art de voyager, et son premier livre, L’Usage du monde, s’est imposé comme un nouveau classique du genre viatique. Mais la critique sur son œuvre est encore très parcellaire, notamment parce qu’elle tend à se cantonner aux récits de voyage sans exploiter tout le corpus d’essais, à caractère historiographique ou iconographique, qui constitue une part essentielle de son œuvre. Car l’exploration du monde et celle des bibliothèques constituent les deux faces complémentaires d’un usage du savoir que ce travail de thèse se propose d’étudier, notamment grâce aux carnets inédits qui apportent un précieux éclairage sur sa méthode de travail, ses influences et ses conceptions. Dans une perspective épistémocritique, l’usage du savoir désigne à la fois la façon dont l’écrivain se positionne face à l’ignorance et à la connaissance, et le rapport qu’il entretient avec les savoirs extérieurs à la littérature. S’il fait l’éloge du non-savoir pour mieux recevoir les leçons de la route et tenir à distance, comme Montaigne et Michaux, le pédantisme et le dogmatisme, Bouvier n’en conçoit pas moins son œuvre comme une somme encyclopédique. Sans prétendre à l’autorité du spécialiste, il réinvestit la fonction épistémique que le romantisme avait évacuée du récit de voyage pour transmettre un savoir sur le monde issu de ses lectures et de ses observations, et contribue ainsi au rapprochement entre littérature et sciences humaines qui s’opère depuis plusieurs décennies : son rapport subjectif et spontané à l’histoire, à la géographie et à l’ethnologie témoignent de la capacité de la littérature à « fai[re] tourner les savoirs », sans en « fétichis[er] aucun », selon la formule de BarthesSince the 1990s and the increasing success of the Étonnants Voyageurs Festival, Nicolas Bouvier has become the incarnation of the art of travelling, and his first book, L’Usage du Monde (The Way of the World), has established itself as a contemporary classic of the travelogue. But the critique of his writings is still very fragmentary, particularly because it tends to confine them to travel writing, without exploiting the entire corpus of historiographic and iconographical essays, which constitute an essential part of his work. The exploration of the world and that of libraries form two complementary sides of a use of knowledge that this PhD dissertation proposes to examine, especially through unpublished notebooks, which shed valuable light on Bouvier’s working methods, influences and conceptions. In an epistemocritical perspective, the use of knowledge designates both the way in which the author positions himself faced with ignorance and knowledge, and the relationship he maintains with knowledge outside literature. Although he lauds ‘not knowing’ to better learn along the way and to keep pedantry and dogmatism at a distance, like Montaigne and Michaux, Bouvier nonetheless conceives his work as an encyclopaedic whole. Without claiming to be a special authority, he reinvests the epistemic function that Romanticism had drained from travel writing to transmit knowledge about the world from his readings and observations. He thus contributes to the coming together of literature and human sciences that has been occurring over several decades: his subjective and spontaneous relationship to history, geography and ethnology attests to literature’s capacity to “make knowledge go around”, without “fetichising any of it”, according to Barthes’ expression
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Owen, Ceri. "Vaughan Williams, song, and the idea of 'Englishness'." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:117f2c64-3b63-43aa-9dd3-15a7ce2f9339.
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It is now broadly accepted that Vaughan Williams's music betrays a more complex relation to national influences than has traditionally been assumed. It is argued in this thesis that despite the trends towards revisionism that have characterized recent work, Vaughan Williams's interest in and engagement with English folk materials and cultures remains only partially understood. Offering contextual interpretation of materials newly available in the field, my work takes as its point of departure the critical neglect surrounding Vaughan Williams's contradictory compositional debut, in which he denounced the value of folk song in English art music in an article published alongside his song 'Linden Lea', subtitled 'A Dorset Folk Song'. Reconstructing the under-documented years of the composer's early career, it is demonstrated that Vaughan Williams's subsequent 'conversion' and lifelong attachment to folk song emerged as part of a broader concern with the intelligible and participatory quality of song and its performance by the human voice. As such, it is argued that the ways in which this composer theorized an idea of 'song' illuminate a powerful perspective from which to re-consider the propositions of his project for a national music. Locating Vaughan Williams's writings within contemporaneous cultural ideas and practices surrounding 'song', 'voice', and 'Englishness', this work brings such contexts into dialogue with readings of various of the composer's works, composed both before and after the First World War. It is demonstrated in this way that the rehabilitation of Vaughan Williams's music and reputation profitably proceeds by reconstructing a complex dialogue between his writings; between various cultural ideas and practices of English music; between the reception of his works by contemporaneous critics; and crucially, by considering the propositions of his music as explored through analysis. Ultimately, this thesis contends that Vaughan Williams's music often betrays a complex and self-conscious performance of cultural ideas of national identity, negotiating an optimistic or otherwise ambivalent relationship to an English musical tradition that is constructed and referenced through a particular idea of song.
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Langdell, Sebastian James. "Religious reform, transnational poetics, and literary tradition in the work of Thomas Hoccleve." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a2e8eb46-5d08-405d-baa9-24e0400a47d8.
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This study considers Thomas Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a “religious” writer: as an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels – and in environments that are at once London-based, national, and international. The chapters focus, respectively, on the role of reading and moralization in the Series; the language of “vice and virtue” in the Epistle of Cupid; the moral version of Chaucer introduced in the Regiment of Princes; the construction of the Hoccleve persona in the Regiment; and the representation of the Eucharist throughout Hoccleve’s works. One main focus of the study is Hoccleve’s mediating influence in presenting a moral version of Chaucer in his Regiment. This study argues that Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not a pre-established artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention, and it indicates the transnational literary, political, and religious contexts that align in Hoccleve’s presentation of his poetic predecessor. Rather than posit the Hoccleve-Chaucer relationship as one of Oedipal anxiety, as other critics have done, this study indicates the way in which Hoccleve’s Chaucer evolves in response to poetic anxiety not towards Chaucer himself, but rather towards an increasingly restrictive intellectual and ecclesiastical climate. This thesis contributes to the recently revitalized critical dialogue surrounding the role and function of fifteenth-century English literature, and the effect on poetry of heresy, the church’s response to heresy, and ecclesiastical reform both in England and in Europe. It also advances critical narratives regarding Hoccleve’s response to contemporary French poetry; the role of confession, sacramental discourse, and devotional images in Hoccleve’s work; and Hoccleve’s impact on literary tradition.
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SCHULZ-FORBERG, Hagen. "London-Berlin : authenticity, modernity and the metropolis in urban travel writing, 1851-1939." Doctoral thesis, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1814/5973.
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Defence date: 13 January 2003Examining board: Prof. Bo Stråth (European University Institute, Florence) ; Prof. Hartmut Kaelble (Humboldt University, Berlin) ; Prof. Hans-Erich Bödeker (Max-Planck-Institute for History, Göttingen) ; Prof. Peter Becker (European University Institute, Florence)
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017
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Cox, Philip. "The politics & poetics of Gulliver’s travel writing." Thesis, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/11112.
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Working at the intersection of narrative studies and political theory, this thesis performs an original critical intervention in Gulliver’s Travels studies to establish the work as an intertextual response to the hegemonic articulations of European travel writing produced between the 15th and 18th centuries under the discourse of Discovery. My argument proceeds through two movements. First, an archeology of studies on Gulliver’s Travels that identifies key developments and points of significance in analyses of the satire’s intertextual relationship with travel writing. Second, a discursive analysis of the role of Discovery generally, and travel writing specifically, in constructing European hegemony within a newly global context. Together these movements allow me to locate Gulliver’s Travels firmly within the discourse of Discovery and to specify the politics of the text and the poetics of its operations. For this analysis I adopt a conceptualization of hegemony elaborated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), which defines discourse as a structured totality of elements of signification, wherein the meaning and identify of each element is constituted by articulatory practices competing to fix the differences and equivalences between it and others within the discourse. An hegemonic discourse is one that successfully limits the possibility of novel articulations according to a particular governing logic. In the Age of Discovery, this governing logic, I argue, is a socio-spatial logic that constructed the “European” subject through its difference from the “Non-European,” the “civilized” subject through its difference from the “savage,” and the “free land” of the “savage” peoples through its difference from the occupied lands of the “civilized.” To conduct the concomitant critical analysis of Gulliver’s Travels, I draw upon Jacques Rancière’s conception of the “distribution of the sensible,” which refers both to the partitions determined in sensory experience that anticipate the distributions of parts and wholes, the orders of visibility and invisibility, and the relationships of address or comportment beneath every community; and to the specific practices that partake of these distributions to establish the “common sense” about the objects that make up the common world, the ways in which it is organized, and the capacities of the people within it. This enables me to establish travel writing as an articulatory practice that utilized a narrative modality to “reveal” the globe in a Eurocentric image dependent upon the logic of Discovery: a discursively constructed paradigm that I identify as what others have labeled “travel realism,” which organized the globe into a single field of discursivity predicated upon the “civilizational” and “rational” superiority of Europeans over their non-European Others. Gulliver’s Travels, I conclude, intervenes in this distribution of the sensible by utilizing the satirical form as a recomposing logic to upend the paradigm of travel realism and break away from the “sense” that it makes of the bodies, beings, and lands it re-presents.Graduate
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Dorgelo, R. "Travelling into history : the travel writing and narrative history of William Dalrymple." Thesis, 2011. https://eprints.utas.edu.au/11717/1/dorgelo-thesis.pdf.
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William Dalrymple is a popular, bestselling author, initially known for his travel writing and subsequently for his popular narrative histories. He is also a prolific journalist and reviewer. His major publications include: In Xanadu: A Quest (1990), City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1993), From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (1997), The Age of Kali: Indian Travels & Encounters (1998), White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (2002), The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (2006), and Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (2009). In each of these works, Dalrymple focuses on his interactions with India and the Middle East.
This thesis examines Dalrymple’s travel writing and histories from a postcolonial perspective in order to map the relationship between travel and history writing, especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Travel writing is a textual representation of cultural interactions, even (or especially) if what eventuates is more a reflection of the “home” country than the traveller’s destination. In a similar way, the strategies by which we negotiate, choose and fashion historical narratives construct our place in the present. Dalrymple’s texts repeatedly consider the British Raj and its legacies. The thesis analyses the ways in which Indians, Britons, and the relationships between them are represented. It argues that the British Empire is represented through a sentimental and nostalgic lens, resulting in an overwhelmingly positive portrayal. This thesis is also interested in the ways in which Dalrymple’s texts construct their authority. This narrative authority is achieved principally through an emphasis on the first-person, autobiographical experiences of the narrator, blended in varying degrees with an invocation of the importance of history (which is expressed through the narrator’s relationship with primary source material). Dalrymple then uses the cultural capital that this authority provides to argue for the value of his version of travel and history writing over other (particularly theoretical, postcolonial) approaches.
In addition to his myriad print publications, Dalrymple has also written and performed in radio and television documentaries, and recently complemented his public speaking appearances (to promote Nine Lives) with a travelling stage show featuring Indian song, dance and religious practices. Dalrymple’s influence extends beyond that of simple author, to that of an expert, celebrity figure who operates across media platforms to reach his audiences. This thesis undertakes a close reading of each of Dalrymple’s monographs, as well as the ways in which they are positioned in the public sphere, both by their author and by reviewers and critics. This reading enables an analysis of the arguments made about the past and present relationship between India and Britain within and outside the texts.
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WILDING, Nick. "Writing the book of nature : natural philosophy and communication in early modern Europe." Doctoral thesis, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/1814/6017.
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Defence date: 22 September 2000Examining board: Peter Becker, European University Institute ; Mario Biagioli, Harvard University ; John Brewer, University of Chicago (thesis supervisor) ; Paula Findlen, Stanford University ; Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge (external supervisor)
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017
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Uhlman, James Todd. "Geographies of desire Bayard Taylor and the romance of travel in bourgeois American culture, 1820-1880." 2007. http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.16788.
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Regan, Jayne Patricia. "National Landscapes: The Australian Literary Community and Environmental Thought in the 1930s and 1940s." Phd thesis, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/132934.
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In 1944 Nettie Palmer, a leading figure in the Australian literary community, asked ‘what is the human value of this last Continent, which stepped straight into the age of industry, world-communications, world-wars, and accepted them all?’ Her question, posed at the height of World War Two, captures well the anxieties that drove Australian literary production across the 1930s and 1940s. During these decades the atmosphere of international catastrophe mingled with a variety of distinctly Australian colonial insecurities and incited a literary effort to enhance the country’s cultural ‘value’. Writers set themselves the task of ushering in an era of cultural ‘maturity’ in Australia as a bulwark against a variety of perceived external and internal threats. This thesis explores the ways that the Australian environment was co-opted into this mission. I argue that unlocking the supposedly untapped and elusive spiritual and material potential of the continent was considered a critical step toward both economic prosperity and national and cultural adulthood. Writers responded to environmental events and problems that were specific to the 1930s and 1940s: their writing registered changing approaches to closer settlement, the rise of institutionalised science, the environmental implications of new technologies and an emerging ecological consciousness. Their imaginative engagement with these processes – available to us in the books, poems, stories and letters they left behind – reveal the ways that contemporary environmental issues provoked and deepened literary concerns about white Australian belonging on the continent. This thesis is a fusion of historical, literary and environmental approaches. I highlight specific authors – Nettie Palmer, Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Frank Dalby Davison and Brooke Nicholls, M. Barnard Eldershaw, Ian Mudie, William Hatfield and Flexmore Hudson – who wrote directly or indirectly about the Australian landscape in the 1930s and 1940s. Although they did not always share a unified environmental, political or even literary sensibility, this cohort was united by a sense of the social responsibility of writers and a desire to locate in Australia’s varied landscapes a national culture that they hoped would prove robust in the face of the catastrophes of the early to mid-twentieth century.