Sex, Lies and European Hegemony: Travel Literature and Ideology

… journal of travel and travel writing, 2000

This introduction to the Ars Apodemica and early modern Travel Advice Writing, 1500-1850 originally appeared in the popular history online magazine Renaissance Hub.

PMLA, 2014

”, Literature Compass 2, RE 135: 1-13, 2005

Travel is an experience of cultural encounters; the account that witnesses and represents that experience is not only a literary text but also a cultural document, involving issues of power, knowledge, and identity. In sixteenth-century England the popularity of travel accounts, which documented colonial aspirations, quixotic voyages, and mercantile ventures, manifests that the book as an integral part of the voyage has the power to inform and instruct. Narratives by authors such as Sir Walter Ralegh, Robert Dallington, Fynes Moryson, and Thomas Dallam, depended on the pun between travel ( journeying) and travail (toil, pain), presenting the adventures and adversities of travelers together with information on geographical areas with their human societies and cultures, linked to questions of nationality, race, and gender. The written record of the great number of early travels, represented in Richard Hakluyt's and later in Samuel Purchas's collections, attests to the rise of England's colonial and commercial power, as well as to the significance of travel writing in English literary history. Despite the contemporary debate over the purpose of going abroad and representing foreign countries, travel, like translation – a word semantically related to it – functioned as a cross-cultural process challenging the boundaries of both geographical and ideological insularity.

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2005

European History Online (EGO), 2022

In the period 1450-1900, Europeans travelled to places both near and far, encountering landscapes and people. These encounters changed the world. New contact zones influenced how Europeans perceived themselves and the "other", and transformed the circulation of knowledge, objects and ideas, both locally and globally. Travelogues, which are relics of these processes, come in different shapes and sizes. Each of them has been shaped by an endless number of factors, but portrays a unique "reality". These "realities" varied widely, both diachronically and synchronically, but during the modern period an increasing volume of travel literature was produced all over Europe and became more and more accessible to all parts of society.

2018

Philosophy & Geography, 2004

Early Modem European travelers sought to gather and disseminate knowledge through narratives written for avid publishers and public. Yet not all travelers used the same tools to inform their readers. Despite a shared interest in conveying new knowledge based on eyewitness authority. Grand Tour accounts differed in an important respect from travelogues about Asia: they were less likely to include maps until the late eighteenth century. This paper examines why, using travel accounts published between 1600 atid 1800 about Italy and France (Europe) and India and Japan (Asia). It argues that maps of different types-coastlines, city platis, country topographies-appeared more frequently in accounts of Asian trips in part because of Europeans' more limited geographical knowledge about Asian destinations. More important, however, zvas the purpose of travel, the type of information gathered, and the intended audience of accounts. Seventeenth-century authors of Grand Tour experiences focused on single topics, ignored what seemed to be the familiar countryside they passed through, and showed little interest in geography. Their counterparts visiting Asia took an opposite tack, covering a wide range of subjects, including space, and cartographic representation was an important element within the account. Only in the eighteenth century, when the strange locale had become familiar and the familiar European destination became strange with new types of travel through it, were maps an important part of narrative.

2001