travel writing and identity

Introduction: Curiosity, Identities, and Knowledge in Travel Writings on Asia

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• First Online: 01 June 2022

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• Christian Mueller 9 &
• Matteo Salonia 9  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Series in Asia and Pacific Studies ((PSAPS))

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The first chapter reflects on the nature of travelling as the paradigmatic form of human experience and its literary reflection in travel writings. In linking travels and experiences of human encounters, the chapter enquires into the relations between time and space by linking the historiographical traditions of travel writings on Asian spaces as readings of space across time with a critical analysis of the development of conceptualisations and inventions of Asian spaces. In addressing the analytical concepts of curiosity, identities, and knowledge, the chapter questions the dominance of an ideologically biased framework based on the Foucault–Saidian power–knowledge nexus that privileges the ideological assumption that imperialist appropriations of space are the human condition of travel writings. The chapter re-establishes curiosity as a human intellectual capacity at the centre of analysis to capture transnational space of encounters in which mutual curiosities complement the ideological claims for conquest through writing down encounters of difference.

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• Orientalism

1 Travellers and Their Literary Reflections

In his late reflections on travel writings as part of the discovery and measurement of the earth, the famous nineteenth-century scientific explorer and global traveller Alexander von Humboldt addressed the fundamental premise that human movements irrespective of their intentions lead to forms of discovery.

The greatest of all mistakes that can be found in the geography of Ptolemy [in the opinion on the extension of Asia to the East], has led humankind to the greatest discoveries in relation to new parts of the earth. […] Everything that triggers movement, whatever the moving force may be: mistakes, unfounded speculations, instinctive divinations, deductions based on facts, will lead to the broadening of the horizon of ideas and to new ways of intelligent inquiries. Footnote 1

Alexander von Humboldt starts his “Critical Inquiries” in 1852 with the observation that the miscalculation of one authority has triggered many forms of human action in exploring the planet. It is for him the act of travelling that generates knowledge and ultimately drives forward human intellectual progress, even if the travellers themselves might be misguided. Human triggers and reasons for travelling can be numerous, but Humboldt also indicated that the mental mapping of the world might provoke individual difficulties in reconciling preconceived constructions of space with the encountered human geography. This process of curiosity and its individual and collective processing in configuring, reflecting, and readjusting knowledge and identities about Asia is the topic of this book.

The most prominent European example for the individual difficulty to readjust his curiosity and preconceptions of Asia with his experienced encounter could arguably be Christopher Columbus. Footnote 2 As early as 1470, Columbus claimed his plans for the westward voyage and his curiosity on “well founded scientific reasons” in establishing the distance between the Canary Islands off the North African coast and Asia (or rather Chipangu = Japan) at an optimistic 2.760 miles instead of the actual 12.000 miles. Footnote 3 When he finally reached the Caribbean in search for Chipangu and Cathay, nothing matched his spatially preconceived knowledge. Columbus elaborated in a letter to Luis de Santangel, Chancellor of the Exchequer of the Kingdom of Aragon upon his return in March 1493 the meandering travels through the Caribbean islands. “I followed its coast to the westward and found it so large that I thought it must be the mainland, - the province of Cathay; and, as I found neither towns nor villages on the sea coast […], I kept on the same route, thinking that I could not fail to light upon some large cities and towns.” Footnote 4 The absence of towns and in fact everything that China and Japan stood for in the European imaginary finally made Columbus partly readjust his mental image of the encountered space.

Travelling appears in the vast literature as the paradigmatic form of human experience. Semantically and conceptually, travel and experience are linked in Germanic languages while most other European languages connect travel to a laborious ordeal and connect acquired liberal education semantically to a widely travelled person. Footnote 5 Travels require a huge effort to mentally and cognitively appropriate a different world while the travellers remain rooted in the cultural, mental and social framework of their original background. Footnote 6 It is this specific combination of experience, generation of meanings, and the continuous articulation of space that make travel reports a unique source for the specific ways of thinking and interpretations of individual travellers. The results of this articulation, the travel reports, open windows to understand the human social and mental structures that conceptualise knowledge about space in different times. Footnote 7 This volume focuses on different actors from across the globe who travelled to, within, and through a geographical space that we may broadly consider as Asia. In reflecting upon their experiences and encounters in travelling this space in its diversity, the travel writers try to locate these within their diverse worldviews and preconceived knowledge. Even when discussing accounts penned by European travellers, the contributions to the volume trace some of these individual and collective attempts through the analytical lens of curiosity as a human capacity and a mode of observation that led to the creation of a plurality of Asias before and against the scholarly assumption of a coherent dominating othering of “the Orient.”

2 “In Space We Read time”—Historiographical Locations of Travel Writings on Asia

Friedrich Ratzel ( 1904 , 28). See Schlögel ( 2016 , 3–7), Osterhammel ( 2013 , 86–87).

In recent years, the historiography on travel writings and on the re-discovery of space as an analytical category has taken off to the extent that the fields of history, ethnography, anthropology, and cultural studies articulated emphatically a “spatial turn.” Footnote 8 The introduction reviews the different conceptual and analytical approaches to travel writing and travel and locates the volume in the literature by offering an analytical concept that has been largely neglected—the aspect of human curiosity. Footnote 9 Since the 1970s, scholarship has asked for a stronger conceptualisation of travel as a form of cultural practice. Footnote 10 In the last decades, different authors have proposed an interdisciplinary programme that would embrace the practice, the programmatic intentions, the literary representation, and the repercussions as the four themes for research. Footnote 11 It is striking that the field has seen a considerable amount of publications around these themes, yet mostly with a focus on Europe and the Americas, Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. Asia and East Asia in particular as a historical meso-region has not been the subject of prominent studies of travel writing on a larger scale or as part of a polycentric or integrative perspective on human travellers and their reflections on travel experiences and practices. Footnote 12

This is surprising for at least two reasons. Firstly, a strict historicisation and contextualisation of travels and travel practices allows us to integrate mechanisms of actions and biographical specificities of travellers in their specific historical circumstances. Asia as a spatial and perceived cultural meso-region offers a vast field for individual and collective perceptions and creations of space. The production of knowledge through the act of travel as a form of intellectual self-recognition (“Erkenntnis”) and the relationship of experience and text between semantics and social history with a clear regional focus on Asia offers the potential to understand the dialogic nature between the far and the near, the known and the yet unknown, and the self and the other. Footnote 13 These intellectual and existential processes are not confined to a mere “Western” or imperial act of travelling as generating power through knowing an Orientalised “Asia” in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Footnote 14 Europeans travelled with different mental capacities and ideological agendas, and they apply different modes of observation that do not necessarily add up in a coherent ideology to conquer. So did Chinese, Japanese, and other people. Footnote 15 Tuan and Wang have shown that Europeans were not the only expansionist powers who used “othering” and “imperial gazes” to inscribe ethnocentric ethnographies into Asian spaces. Footnote 16 At times, inscribing political or expansionist programmes through specific forms of travel was one of the outcomes of a guided curiosity to know and exercise influence. Many social groups and individuals in Asia also travelled and conceptualised their own mental maps and cultural geographies of Asia, yet with different coordinates of generating meaning. Footnote 17 However, the cultural and social formation of Asia from multiple actors inside and outside of Asia and its diverse historical, topographic, and cultural representations have been relatively under-researched.

Secondly, Asia in its more ideological form of the “Orient” has been at the forefront of theoretical and conceptual discussions on travel writing since the 1970s. Empirical studies take still for granted the stimulating yet overly schematic and simplistic assumptions of Edward Said. In following Foucault’s concept of knowledge as power, Said assumes rather than evidences the unity of an imperial ideology that all encounters between West and East entail, with the sole intention to dominate and rule the East. Footnote 18 “From travelers’ tales […] colonies were created and ethnographic perspectives secured.” Footnote 19 Said suggests that travel writings in particular create colonial power and discourse which are possessed entirely by the coloniser. Ambiguities, nuances, and in fact other forms of inquiry or knowledge that are not primarily understood in the form of discursive power are completely absent from the ideological conceptualisation of “Orientalism.” Other postcolonial theorists have held Said responsible for a historical and theoretical oversimplification in his quest for an assumed single “intentionality and unidirectionality” of all colonial power. Footnote 20 Interestingly, although equally adhering to a relatively unhistorical and ideological assumption of unified colonial power, Homi Bhabha has argued strongly for a much more diverse and open approach in studying especially prejudice as an ambivalent form of “appropriating” the East in colonial discourse. Footnote 21 However, many historical and literary studies on travel writings seem to focus on the “imperial gaze” under Said’s paradigm of unified ideological accusation rather than on Bhabha’s ambiguity as a heuristic tool when analysing Western and Asian travel writers. The volume seeks to fill the gap left by the fact that singularised narratives of imperialistic conquest have dominated the scholarly landscape where the recognition of a multiplicity of voices and nuances within those voices who entered the region of Asia cannot be subsumed under an ideological effort of postcolonial homogenization. On the contrary, the volume traces some of the writers travelling the world and Asia in order to know and understand the encountered spaces and populations, and to analyse how they utilised their gathered knowledge through different operations of curiosity to act upon the perceived spaces. Footnote 22 In doing so, the entrenched debates around Orientalism and Eurocentrism are considered conceptual inclines that as such do not represent theoretical absolutes, but perspectives with varying degrees of overlap that need to be supplemented with more categories to give full meaning to the narratives of travelling individuals.

Space has geographical and geological as well as mental dimensions. Research on maps and cartography has traditionally drawn on travel writings as part of the socio-cultural and political representations of physical geography. Although in 1824 Alexander von Humboldt celebrated the decline of opinionated representations of the world through the rise of exact mathematical and statistical tools, the “critical comparison of descriptive works,” mostly travel writings and missionary reports, remained a highly important source of mapping. Footnote 23 Critical cartography has contributed immensely to the understanding of the relationship between power and knowledge, especially when mapping non-European spaces. J.B. Harley in particular as representative of a critical Marxist cartography used Foucault and Said to reflect on mapping as an exercise of colonial power. Footnote 24 Yet, his focus was on physical maps as the product of imperial reflection, not on travel reports as the process of curious knowledge collection and inward roads into the understanding of individual perceptions of space and their social repercussions in disseminating them. Furthermore, the Saidian literature ignores how often, at the moment of encounter with non-European geographies, European writers have produced instances of anti-imperial argumentations and sustained self-criticism. Footnote 25 Our volume shows that there is no clear linear direction towards more imperialism and “Orientalist” gazes since the beginning of European overseas expansion in the sixteenth century, although imperial attitudes, moral and “racial” classifications of different centres relate to a European way of viewing, classifying, and knowing the world until the present.

In the context of the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences, interest has shifted towards the history of collective concepts of different global macro-regions as imagined historical and cultural spaces. The concept of a “mental map,” deriving from cognitive psychology, does not represent a clearly defined theory. Footnote 26 The mental maps as a concept “represent the world as it appears to the respective observer. […] It reflects the world as some person believes it to be; it need not be correct. In fact, distortions are highly likely.” Footnote 27 The spatial mental structures contain attributive values and meanings that relate the observer with their experience and encounter equally to their own backgrounds and to the encountered culture. In our volume, this concept lends itself readily to the study of descriptions, observations, and experiences of travels as we ask how individual concepts of Asia as a space were influenced by human assumptions about the self and society. This cultural semiotic process of reflecting and (re)creating our assumptions about the encountered also embraces the multiplicity inherent in this process that allows us to challenge the assumptions of an essentialist or reductionist approach by uncovering regularities instead of rules and exploring patterns and exceptions instead of insisting on prescriptions. We ask how the worldviews emerging from the travel writings are shaped through the encounters that demand a comprehensive inclusion of meaning of the encountered into existing systems of meaning of the observing travellers, and how shared collective representations of an experienced or imagined spatial environment in turn affect processes of cultural group and identity formations.

This volume addresses these inventions of Asian “realities” as documents of self- and other-recognitions. We suggest that in order to fully understand the process of aligning travel perceptions with the cognitive structures, the individual in their encounters and experiences through travel as well as the literary representation of their processed experiences needs to be taken seriously. While travellers expose intentions when they actively bring about cultural encounters and experiences on their travels, their motives and intentions cannot be assumed to match specific single concepts or even ideologies. Lifting the general suspicion of a unity of bourgeois imperial travellers to the East, the volume proposes to reconsider the very forms and motives of encounter with different, far away cultures and societies. Especially through the concept of curiosity that can be framed as less ideological than “Orientalism” and more open to understanding alignments, interferences, and collisions of culturally different expectations and experiences, the volume explores the possibilities of understanding individual practices of constructing Asia beyond a monolithic “Orientalist” suspicion. This however does not prescribe a naïve ignorance of the multiple motives that underlie individual actions. Rather, we propose a problematisation of standard dichotomies, and crucially, to this end we include chapters exploring also intra-Asian curiosities and travels. Specific motives and their ideological foundations must be read as part of the critical analysis of travel writings as historical sources.

3 In Time We Read Space—Continuities and Changes in Representing Asia

Asia is by itself not a unified single natural entity. Footnote 28 It is many. Thus, our concept of Asia is a term of human geography gone through human historical consciousness. This positions our sources, the travel reports, at the crossroads of source criticism between remains of unconscious human reports about their curiosity and conscious human narratives about the legacies and morals of their experiences. In deciphering these two distinct historical dimensions of individual operations in giving meaning to experienced environments, the humanities can first contribute to reading space in time, in an Asia that changes according to the historically bound context of the unconscious and conscious descriptions of a differentiated meso-region. Footnote 29 Further, the volume contributes to reading time in space, in a chronology of travel reports about Asia in which space emerges in different distinctions and subtle nuances as a continuously shifting meso-region with characteristics of subdivision and differentiations.

The assumed perception of superiority of Europeans in terms of civilisation facing Asian modernity loses its dogmatic strength when we look at the diversities of parallel synchronous and asynchronous interpretations of time in and between spaces. In this context, the perception of Asian space and spaces influences the perception of normative times of development and progress—notably more prominent after the seventeenth century. The perception of space and the way in which it is described also relates to the critique of the sources. In the tradition of source categories like the travel report, the education of the objective observing individual gives way increasingly to an observing authentic individual who appropriates reality of encountered spaces through a personal critique and not through an objective categorization of collecting knowledge. This becomes prominent and problematic around 1800. Footnote 30

Travellers were supposed to deliver authentic yet objective information. This preoccupation was already apparent in the Middle Ages, for example in the composition, transmission, and reception of the account of Marco Polo’s travels (1254–1324). Footnote 31 The emergence of an ars apodemica in the West in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the ethnographic observations in China starting from the Ming dynasty were utilised to turn objective facts into political and administrative knowledge. Footnote 32 While this knowledge–power nexus was to some extent always present, it did not predetermine the categories of observation or the anthropological constant of observing outside of given categories for the sense of curiosity itself—simply to know and to report what was not yet known. This trend to deliver information based on curiosity not channelled merely through the utilisation for power sees peaks in the sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries during the first European Encounters and the Enlightenment. In 1789, the French Anquetil-Duperron could still claim the aim of an educated traveller for the enhancement of the knowledge of humankind.

The true Traveller is someone who loves all humans like brothers and who is insusceptible to pleasures and needs, who stands beyond grandeur and low sentiments, praise and criticism, riches and poverty. Without binding himself to a special place, he rapidly moves throughout the world as an observer of good and evil, without interest in its origin or its motives within a specific nation. If this traveller is knowledgeable, he has a clear judgement and discovers at once what is ridiculous and untrue in a behaviour, a habit, or an opinion.” Footnote 33

The ideal traveller as described here is invented as a cosmopolitan citizen who is knowledgeable and prepared, but also abstracts from his own person and sentiments towards an elevated point of observation without suspending his own critical judgement. The purification of lower sentiments and the rational observation bestow upon the traveller the right of an opinion that is no longer bound to a European context of culture, but the true voice of reason. Most travel reports do not conform with this ideal, yet they mirror and reflect upon important elements of the problem of authenticity and critical reasoning to understand the generation of different types of knowledge about other cultures. Thomas Thornton highlighted in his Ottoman travels in 1809 the vital importance of impartiality, a superiority to prejudice, a sobriety of observation, and a patience of inquiry “which few travellers possess.” Footnote 34

This element of impartiality becomes an ambivalent feature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the tradition of romantic individualism that placed sentiments and experiences before factual accounts. The competition and differentiation between professional explorer and individual tourist gaze became already apparent in the normative evaluation of travellers. Friedrich Ratzel saw this professionalisation in danger when he insisted that the aim should always be to “elevate from a higher form of tourism towards a professionalized scientific travel.” Footnote 35 This rather European or Western shift in observations on Asia has profound repercussions for intra-Asian travel reports as they also shift from factual to normative accounts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ella Maillart when reflecting on her travel through Central Asia in 1935/6 famously captured this. “When I crossed Asia with my friend Peter Fleming, we spoke to no one than each other during many months, and we covered exactly the same ground. Nevertheless my journey differed completely from his.” Footnote 36 Subjective observations multiplied views on Asia, but also opened the doors of entry for ethnocentric and racial hierarchies that attributed civilizational stages in a linear historical process of development to regions in Asia.

This is however not necessarily a process of Western appropriation of Asian spaces only. European and North American travellers increasingly attempt to appropriate Asia as a diversified space on moral grounds and those of racial distinction. But in adopting Western ideas of progress beyond the fiction of a distinction between Western technology and Asian values ( ti yong - 体用), Asian travellers equally applied a linear element of historical progress to characterise the differentiation of Asian spaces and ultimately claims to leadership on Pan-Asian ideas. Footnote 37 The ideological origins of a normative progressive pattern with the West against the West can be traced in the adoption of normative observations on intra-Asian difference by experiencing, conceptualising, and ultimately understanding space through a new conceptualisation of linear and normative progress in time.

4 Curiosity, Knowledge, Identity—Reflections on the Analytical Categories for the Travelling Construction of Asia

The current volume follows a more specific and modest, yet analytically much clearer concept. It focuses on the self-definition of the traveller as they move across Asian human geographies in different epochs to understand the forms of knowledge about the East generated in specific contacts and encounters. Footnote 38 In uncovering the core human desire of meaning-making individuals to seek and to relate to their findings, the volume connects individual traveller experiences from the Middle Ages to the modern vlogs and social media travels. Although the cases picked are mostly featuring elite men in travelling, the volume is cognisant of the still largely unwritten history of women and non-elite men travellers across Asia. Yet, in focusing on male perspectives, the volume presents a more specific interpretation of gendered narratives to argue for nuances beyond the male colonial gaze in the exploration and conceptualisation of Asia. Footnote 39

Among those categories of encounters, contributions will discuss religion and spirituality, governance and legitimacy, practices and symbolism of different forms of mobility, and the question of knowledge as a tool of reasoning, judgement, and power. All contributions will take up the perspectives of the travellers to reflect upon the act of personal observation as source of authenticity and legitimacy to investigate the intricate dialogic relations between the knowledgeable observing subject and the observed object. This changing relationship does not follow a clear-cut chronology, nor easy categorizations of Western and Eastern. At times, Christian and Islamic travellers entering Asia manifest a genuine curiosity, even as they accept civilizational discourses and hierarchies. More importantly, such hierarchies are not necessarily self-referential and self-congratulatory, but rather often based on a concept of civilization that could be shared transculturally. Footnote 40 On the other hand, early modern and modern examples that are also considered in this volume exemplify both Western and intra-Asian (Japanese) narratives that sometimes accompany empire-building efforts and either assume or conceptualise methods for the study of “others.” Even in these cases, instances of scepticism and self-criticism complicate the picture, so that our case studies on the reverberations of curiosity and the testing of self-perception in travel writing truly problematize current dichotomies and a reductive focus on the category of power in the literature on encounters. Such problematization is relevant and challenging also for those who study (and live in) a contemporary world where the tensions and opportunities surrounding the relations between East and West appear more pressing, and where the phenomenon of de-territorialised identity formation across Asia involves both transnational communities and people moving within a nation-state.

The history of travel writing and the historical dimension of Asia’s human geographies are two fields that continue to produce important scholarly works. For instance, recently Boris Stojkovski has carefully collected in two volumes an enjoyable array of essays on travel writing that touch upon themes such as flora and fauna, music and spirituality, from Herodotus to the twenty-first century. Footnote 41 And with regard to intra-Asian encounters, Upinder Singh’s and Parul Pandya Dhar’s book on connections, imperial expansion, and historical networks represents a gem for any reader interested in the flows of ideas, political and cultural patterns across this continent. Footnote 42 Edited volumes have turned out to be the most flexible means also to gather essays at the intersection of these two topics, exploring the history of travel literature specifically treating voyages and encounters across Asia. Footnote 43 And we now have an increasingly clear and varied picture of changing descriptions of Asian social and physical landscapes across time.

Still, the existing literature, even when surveying the intersection between travel accounts and Asian spaces, and even when alternating different chronologies and rationales for the juxtaposition of certain case studies, is lacking in conceptual depth and chronological breath. What ideas are particularly well suited to open windows into the reasoning and emotions behind the written record of travellers moving across Asia? And what continuities can we trace over time and among both non-Asian and intra-Asian travellers? In their book A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s , Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn combined a narrow chronological focus coinciding with the aftermath of the Opium War with the choice to look only at English-speaking writers. Footnote 44 This undeniably deepens our grasp of preoccupations and agendas of Anglophone travellers during a key century in the history of China, but it also determines much of the tone and many of the conclusions found throughout the volume, which ultimately in many of its essays finds what it seeks: European “othering” and imperialist gazes. Readers interested in longer trends, comparative reflections, and nuanced conclusions remain unsatisfied.

Attempts to stress the openness and curiosity of European travellers to Asia during the Enlightenment have also turned out to be promising but problematic. Through a brilliant and compelling analysis of materials from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, Jürgen Osterhammel has portrayed the Enlightenment as an exceptional period in the history of European encounters with (and representations of) Asian human geographies. Footnote 45 However, in doing so, he has indirectly reinforced the presumption that, before and after this exception, European travel writers were supposedly unable to experience and express similar forms of openness and curiosity. Moreover, we should not assume that civilizational discourses were always proceeding on different, mutually unintelligible tracks. Interestingly, Steve Clark and Paul Smethurst have questioned this assumption by including in their collection of essays studies of Asian authors, but their chronological focus is still quite narrow, while their volume is not regionally focused as it considers also the impact of Asians travelling to the West. Footnote 46 In the present collection of essays, we focus on one global region, Asia, and we aim to broaden the chronological framework—beyond an admittedly important yet uncharacteristic century such as the one following the Opium War, and beyond a period surrounded by an aura of exceptionality such as the Enlightenment.

We also wish to both expand and problematize Gerard Delanty’s suggestion that commonalities and links between East and West are more relevant than apparent dichotomies. Footnote 47 Indeed, to some extent, it is relatively easy to develop comparative analyses that stress apparent similarities, and the study of the experiences and reconstructions of the same Asian landscapes by different Eurasian actors is no exception. Since at least the late medieval period, a basic definition of civilised societies was shared transculturally by the “three eyes”—Christendom, the Islamic world, and China. This common understanding of ordered polities and civilizational traits, in turn, sparked genuine curiosity as well as production of knowledge among European and Asian travellers, both before and after the Enlightenment—which was therefore not exceptional. Footnote 48 Yet, it is crucial to recognise that, besides this shared idea of civilization and shared notions of space and movement, each traveller also articulated unique discourses underpinned by locally rooted meanings, and political, cultural, and/or spiritual identities. The desire to stress commonalities should not blind us to the fact that Christian and Islamic universalisms engendered intellectual and cosmological world-scapes that differed radically from those of China, or to the fact that Columbus had Jerusalem in mind while seeking Asia—something that can only be explained by taking locally rooted identities seriously. Footnote 49 The contributors to our volume are sensitive to this reality, which rules out the option of merely universalising post-modernist categories and probes the terminologies and narratives usually employed in global history. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism has truly been a dimension of the encounters taking place across Asia, underscoring the poverty of reducing human interactions to power structures, or the generation of knowledge about social landscapes to univocally European “othering.” On the other hand, the global turn is not applicable seamlessly across chronologies and should not be a license to only focus on networks and convergences. Permanence(s) gave value to encounters and networks. And underneath the experiences of travellers and the intelligibility of cosmopolitan institutions, there remain local identities, value systems and audiences, which deserve attention if we want to decipher the origins and literary uniqueness of different texts.

The three concepts proposed in this volume—curiosity, identities, knowledge—are flexible enough to shed light on voyages taking place across different chronologies. They also allow our contributors to test the limits of continuities and delve into specific cultural backgrounds that distinguished travel writers, their anxieties, expectations, responses, and motives. Curiosity is intended here as a genuine, persistent interest towards unknown or partly known areas and societies of the Asian continent, expressed in deeds and words by travellers moving to Asia or within it. Other historians studying travel literature about Asia have already toyed with the idea of curiosity, Footnote 50 but they never placed it centre stage in their analysis, maybe to avoid charges of naiveté. Yet, taking curiosity seriously does not imply abandoning a rigorous study of travel accounts: to the contrary, it expands it by acknowledging the role played by emotions and by the expectation of encountering intelligible social institutions and human actions. Besides, genuine curiosity itself contributes to colour our understanding of self-interested and self-conscious authorship, because inquisitiveness—more than often half-baked political agendas—links the author’s frustrations and successes to the readership, assigning value to information about civilised polities and uncharted spaces.

Identity is a fundamental analytical concept to contextualise the experience of the traveller, both when he/she moves and when he/she writes. While it is certainly true that the experience of encounter can challenge and change the identity of the traveller, we should not overlook the multiform ways in which the identity of the traveller can draw unnoticed and apparently counterintuitive networks on a map of Asia—such as in the case of the spiritual networks drawn by the Japanese Otani expeditions and discussed in one of our chapters. Identity determines also the locally rooted value assigned to the intellectual images of spaces and ordering of geographies. For instance, as evidenced in the writings of Ma Huan (c. 1380–1460), by the Ming period Chinese intellectuals were developing a tradition of Sinocentric discourses that categorised Asian societies according to an increasingly self-confident imperial geography. Footnote 51 This tributary worldview was relatively recent, in the long history of Chinese civilization. As reconstructed by Mingming Wang, ethnocentric discourses had emerged during the Song-Yuan period, should be placed within a broader, more varied tradition of Occidentalism, and need to be contextualised in a changing geopolitical and economic landscape where travels to the “Western Ocean” had ceased to be primarily pilgrimages and had become profit- and tribute-seeking. Footnote 52

Finally, travel literature illuminates the modes and channels through which knowledge about Asian spaces, polities and peoples has been produced and disseminated in different contexts and centuries. To be sure, we shall not be blind to the role often played by knowledge in the construction and elaboration of hierarchies and political discourses for the original readership. However, it is also true that knowledge about the vast Asian landscapes across which different civilizations encountered each other could be produced to express human emotions, to crystallise memories, and then disseminated to quench genuine curiosity just as much as to claim an active role in a specific intellectual tradition. Aristotle famously noted that human beings enjoy seeing above all other senses, not merely with the intention to use the absorbed information, but also, simply, seeing for the sake of seeing. Footnote 53 The Italian readers of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s sixteenth-century collection of travel accounts were the same crowds chasing and interrogating Giovanni da Empoli (1483–1517) upon his return from “the Indies:” they desired to complete the geographic knowledge of the ancients, by harmoniously integrating it with their generation’s voyages to Asia. Footnote 54 These are dimensions of knowledge that can be recovered only when we move away from narratives of naked power structures and instead take curiosity and identity seriously. This is not to say that our volume ignores writings produced in political and military contexts such as British imperialism and the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. On the contrary, we aim to offer to readers a more balanced and varied picture of continuities and changes in travel literature on Asia across the centuries.

5 Navigating the Constructions of Asia—The Contributions

The volume opens with two chapters on the history of travel, encounters, and travel writing in Asia during the Mongol period. Claire Taylor invites readers to appreciate the different experiences and emotions lived by two late medieval authors entering Asia from the West: the Franciscan missionary and envoy William of Rubruck and the pilgrim adventurer Ibn Battuta. Their narratives reflect the different circumstances of their voyages, and Taylor’s careful contextualization and nuanced comparison allows us to go beyond apparent divergences and to uncover how geopolitical situations could prompt the two authors to redefine the very notions of space, home, and other, thereby affecting the images of Asia created for Frankish Christian and north-African Islamic audiences. Joseph Benjamin Askew integrates this picture of mobilities across Eurasia during the so-called Pax Mongolica by questioning the extent to which this period favoured trade and by shedding light on the different motivations of an array of travel writers who journeyed across Asia during those centuries. The writers considered by Askew include not only Europeans like the merchant Francesco Balducci Pegolotti and the Franciscan friar Odoric of Pordenone, but also intra-Asian travellers like the Korean official Ch’oe Pu. The overall picture emerging from these opening chapters offers an invaluable introduction to Asia in the Mongol period. Islamic, European and intra-Asian travellers moved across Eurasia for different reasons and with different expectations, sharing at times similar mental attitudes, such as curiosity, but also eventually constructing a human geography profoundly influenced by their identities and by resilient cultural and religious frameworks.

The next two chapters in the volume explore the theme of curiosity in European writings about Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Matteo Salonia guides readers through the Asian sections of Antonio Pigafetta’s account of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition. It is a voyage across the Pacific Ocean and then through vivid descriptions of Asian ceremonies, including friendly banquets, funerary rites, courtly audiences, and sexual practices. Pigafetta is an inquisitive yet also empathetic observer who avoids judgements and captures his audience in a constant invitation to draw their own conclusions. His account is, crucially, also a text saturated with Christian chivalry. Compassion and locally rooted identity therefore coexist, and incidentally the periodization separating medieval and early modern mindsets is yet again found wanting. Georg Schindler’s chapter about European discussions on the dynastic transition between the Ming and the Qing dynasties continues this reflection on curiosity by exploring the responses of Catholic missionaries to political changes in China. Texts by Martini, Schall, and Navarrete are compared to reflect the different agendas and responses of these authors, but also to reflect on the pervasive curiosity about news from China in the European audience. Schindler demonstrates that European Catholic attitudes towards the East were very far from dismissive or uniformly colonial, as these important writers recognised the sophisticated civilization of the Chinese empire and even agreed that the conquering Manchu were not “barbarian.” Moreover, this chapter will be of interest to scholars interested in the opportunity to flesh out political theories and conceptualizations of legitimacy in the international stage from early modern travel literature and ethnography.

That simplistic Saidian narratives are completely confounded by a serious hermeneutical study and a respect for the often conflicting and not seldom self-critical thoughts of individual travel writers—even when one reaches the period of more intense European colonialism—is confirmed by the splendid analysis of Duncan McPherson’s writing, which is offered in Chapter 6 . Here, Ruairidh J. Brown compellingly argues that even in a text that is punctuated by imperialist rhetoric and dichotomies, things are not as simple as they may at first appear. McPherson’s determination to spread what he triumphantly perceived as rational scientific knowledge leads him to label some Chinese traditions as “barbaric,” but also to denounce some British customs as reckless. Dichotomies do not correspond to East vs West, and they instead overlap throughout the text to show the lights of reason and the sufferings brought by passion and irrationality wherever they can be found. China is re-conceptualised according to Enlightenment ideas of progress, becoming a space where human reason struggles to emerge victorious, among Europeans and Asians alike. Such nuanced and fruitful approach to nineteenth-century sources is evident also in Christian Mueller’s chapter on German imperial dreams in the Far East. In the writings of Ferdinand von Richthofen we find a peculiar vision of industrial and commercial progress, where across Eurasia peoples at different civilizational stages would cooperate, and where China in particular is assigned an important role and independent agency. Richthofen’s curiosity, to be sure, is still guided by a clearly Eurocentric understanding of material development, but his images of the East do not correspond to crude racial stereotypes and are actually characterised by a genuine inquisitiveness and a desire to learn more about Asian peoples. This is noticeable especially about nations like Japan, on which Richthofen had very limited knowledge before reaching the East. Taken together, Brown’s and Mueller’s chapters demonstrate how, even during the period of most intense imperial expansion, European travel literature about Asia does not fit broad generalisations. If one trait emerges more clearly, it is the confidence in material progress and human reason applied to science and industry—something that is not perceived as entirely alien to Asian spaces and human geographies.

Continuing the discussion of intra-Asian travel sketched by Joseph Askew for the pre-modern period, Chapters 9 and 10 present two modern case studies. Stephen W. Kohl and Ronald S. Green investigate some of the Ōtani expeditions seeking Buddhist treasures and establishing non-political Tibetan-Japanese connections at the start of the twentieth century. Nagatomi Hirayama writes about Japanese imperialism in Manchuria in the 1930s. Besides expanding the scope of the volume to include a sustained reflection of intra-Asian travel literature, these topics also integrate each other. On the one hand, the Ōtani expeditions so captivatingly reconstructed by Kohl and Green were moved by a genuine interest in discovering archaeological remnants of Buddhism along the Silk Road and in developing spiritual networks and friendly relations between temples across Asian spaces and, significantly, around obstacles posed by political tensions and imperial rivalries. While on the other hand, the Japanese texts presented by Hirayama were part of a Japanese propaganda effort aiming to reimagine entire areas of the Asian continent to spatialize Japanese interests and stabilise a project of intra-Asian colonialism. Therefore, these chapters represent pivotal contributions to the discussion of a wide array of themes, including respectively informal exchange of knowledge through long-distance religious networks and the production of geographic and ethnographic “knowledge” at the service of an expanding, militarised state. Yet taken together they also offer a striking juxtaposition of two alternative geographies: a state-driven one easily seen on political maps of imperial Japan, and a religious one drawing lines of communication and fellowship underneath political borders as well as across time.

Chapter 10 focuses on a specific decade, the 1960s, to illustrate the surprisingly divergent agendas and guided curiosities with which different genres of Western literature approached Asian spaces. Salonia and Mueller do so inviting the reader to juxtapose political and tourism narratives from the 1960s—at times reaching back to travel experiences across China and Central Asia in the 1930s like the influential novel travelogues by André Malraux—with the reportages from China written by the Italian novelist Goffredo Parise. The final chapter by K. Cohen Tan continues the reflection on intra-Asian mobilities by exploring contemporary issues of identity and the inscription of power as they relate to space and migration in China. The importance of the contribution is to consider different forms of travel as mobilities and their influence on the re-articulation of space. This re-articulation of space and curiosity in a very guided and preconfigured way is also part of the rise of modern consumerism and tourism since the 1860s. European perspectives on Asia would highlight and even call for the curiosity of the travellers to correct the Baedekers and Thomas Cook handbooks since the early twentieth century. The claims to provide “independence of travel” to “open the eyes of the tourist to the possibilities of finding something different, something new” suggest a curiosity that is increasingly countered with the clear structure of hierarchically organised knowledge and sights that must be seen. Footnote 55 “To-day the Chinese people are as simple and primitive in their habits and customs as they have been for ages past” is a clear testimony to the shift of curiosity guided towards the consumption of the expected. Footnote 56 This, however, happens in intra-Asian travel reports as much as in Western travel reports on Asia and relates much more to the overarching structure of reading a modernisation concept of time as stages of progress into a differentiated Asian space.

Humboldt ( 1852 , 34). The addition in the quote appeared in Humboldt’s footnote.

Navarrete ( 1853 , 80–82). See already Humboldt ( 1852 , 35–38).

Columbus ( 1969 , 13). See also Parry ( 1981 , 222–223).

Columbus ( 1870 , 2).

Bauerkämper et al. ( 2004 , 9–14), Gebhardt ( 1986 , 97–99), Fernández-Armesto ( 2006 , 1–2).

Kennedy ( 2014 , 5–7), Robinson ( 2014 , 21–22), Tuan ( 1974 , 30, 37).

See e.g. Harbsmeier ( 1982 ), Parry ( 1981 ), Duncan and Gregory ( 1999 ), Hulme and Youngs ( 2002 ), Osterhammel ( 2013 , 139–142), Das and Youngs ( 2019 ), Youngs and Pettinger ( 2020 ). For Asia see in particular Strassberg ( 1994 ), Tuan ( 1974 , 30–38), Hostetler ( 2001 ), Hargett ( 2018 ).

Osterhammel ( 1998 ), Schlögel ( 2005 ), Döring and Thielmann ( 2008 ). See the new publications in Bavaj et al. ( 2022 ), esp. Bavaj ( 2022 , 1–5, 9–17).

On curiosity see: Blumberg ( 1983 , 229–444), Parry ( 1981 , 42–47) Gebhardt ( 1986 , 97–113), Stagl ( 1995 , 1–12), Ball ( 2013 , 2, 16, 98), Osterhammel ( 2013 , 27–29; 2018 , x), Pennock ( 2019 , 1–31), Gustafsson Chorell ( 2021 , 242–248).

Maczak and Teuteberg ( 1982 ), Bauerkämper et al. ( 2004 ).

See e.g. Bauerkämper et al. ( 2004 , 9–31).

Tuan ( 1974 ), Hostetler ( 2001 ), and Hargett ( 2018 ) address the relative lack of research on travel, knowledge, ethnocentrism, and power in Asia (China in particular) but also do not attempt to connect this insight with a more inclusive reflection on travel writings as a source of space and identity construction in encountering non-Asian actors. Wang ( 2014 ) has provided an insightful perspective on China’s anthropological and cosmological views of East and West, stressing how the concept of Orientalism in the tradition of Said diminishes China’s rich intellectual history and denies its own agency and “world-scapes” (Wang 2014 , 7–17).

Blumberg ( 1983 , 235–236), Gebhardt ( 1986 , 97–102), Wang ( 2014 , 12), Osterhammel ( 2018 , x).

Osterhammel ( 2013 , 400–405; 2018 , x), Hostetler ( 2001 , xvii), Reinhard ( 2015 , 4–8).

See Tuan ( 1974 , 37), Strassberg ( 1994 , passim), Hostetler ( 2001 , xvii, 21), Wang ( 2014 , 12–16 and passim), Hargett ( 2018 , 13).

Tuan ( 1974 , 36–38), Wang ( 2014 , 13–17).

Tuan ( 1974 , 30–37), Rubiés ( 2002 , 243, 250–251), Wang ( 2014 , 1–17, 179–211, and passim).

Said ( 1978 , passim), Said ( 1994 , xviii-xix, 58), Bhabha ( 1983 , 24–27).

Said ( 1978 , 58–9, 117 (Quote)), Said ( 1994 , 58–59). Few sources in the nineteenth century are so explicit and audacious as Sven Hedin in his Autobiography published in 1925: “When I reached home, in the spring of 1891, I felt like the conqueror of an immense territory; for I had traversed Caucasia, Mesopotamia, Persia, Russian Turkestan, and Bokhara, and had penetrated into Chinese Turkestan. I therefore felt confident that I could strike a fresh blow, and conquer all Asia, from west to east.” Hedin ( 2003 , 80).

Bhabha ( 1983 , 25).

Bhabha ( 1983 , 24–26).

Paradigmatic are the contributions on travel writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See e.g. Pratt ( 2008 ). Osterhammel discusses this critically in the different editions of his book Unfabling the East . Osterhammel ( 2013 ), Nachwort; Osterhammel ( 2018 , x–xii), and the discussions on “pre-colonialism” and Global Middle Ages: Phillips ( 2014 , 2016 ).

Humboldt ( 1824 , 208, 215).

Harley ( 1988 ).

The most significant example here would be the first debate on human rights, in the sixteenth-century Spanish Empire. Hanke ( 1949 ), Schuster ( 1966 ), Clayton ( 2009 ), Fitzmaurice ( 2014 , 33–51), Sison and Redín ( 2021 ). But cases of self-criticism among European travel writers are widespread beyond the great Spanish debate. See for example Salonia ( 2021 ) and several of the contributions in this volume, including Ruairidh Brown’s and Christian Mueller’s chapters. For a broader discussion of rights’ discourses in the Western tradition, see Tierney ( 2004 ).

Gould and White ( 1974 ), Schenk ( 2013 ), Osterhammel ( 2015 , 86–94). See also Osterhammel ( 1998 ).

Gould and White ( 1974 , 6).

Koselleck ( 2018 , 28).

The practices of travellers offers us individual windows into analysing spatial differentiation across time through different imagined perceptions of Asia. The individual analyses also comprise detailed understandings of Asian spaces that emerge at the same time in front of the observing and curious travellers. They show imagined times of development among and across cultures as a synchronous development towards a prescribed normative development of civilization or as an independent emergence of comparable and compatible systems of values and societal rules. The exploration of asynchronous developments and their perceptions as well as the tolerance of ambiguity towards synchronous developments of social and cultural forms that are comparable is part of the programme to take serious the views of our observing protagonists in their curious descriptions and conceptualisations of Asia in its variety and diversity.

Osterhammel ( 2018 , ix–x, 400–404).

Busi ( 2018 ).

Gebhardt ( 1986 , 98–100), Stagl ( 1995 , 51–55), Hostetler ( 2001 ). See for an early modern example Bauch ( 1712 ).

Anquetil-Duperron ( 1789 , V). See also Osterhammel ( 2013 , 146–147).

Thornton ( 1809 , I, 3).

Ratzel ( 1884 , 154).

Maillairt ( 1951 , 5). Her writings convey this focus on the relationship between travel and the exploration of the self: “[Travelling to escape] cannot be done since one travels with one’s mind. It is always one’s self on finds at the end of the journey.” See also Maillart ( 1936/2009 ), Forsdick ( 2009 ) and Mulligan ( 2008 ).

Carrier ( 1995 , 3).

See among others Foltz ( 2010 , 19–20), Mills ( 1991 ), Smith ( 2001 ), Wang ( 2013 ).

Our attempt follows the nuanced approach found in Rubiés ( 2000 ). For a beautiful discussion of a shared, cross-cultural concept of civilization in Latin Christian, Muslim, and Chinese travel writings, starting from the example of the late medieval proverb of the “three eyes of the world,” see Rubiés ( 2009 , 37–112).

Stojkovski ( 2020 ). An important, more theoretical volume on this historical field is Hulme ( 2002 ).

Singh and Dhar ( 2014 ).

This is not to say that there are no important monographs in this field, best exemplified by Emma Teng’s fascinating work on Chinese colonial representations of Taiwan (Teng 2004 ).

Kerr and Kuehn ( 2007 ).

Osterhammel ( 2018 ).

Clark and Smethurst ( 2008 ).

Delanty ( 2006 ).

Rubiés ( 2009 ).

On Columbus’s cosmology and motives, see Delaney ( 2011 ).

See for instance Paolo Chiesa’s essay in Odoric of Pordenone ( 2002 , especially 42–43).

Ma Huan ( 2019 ), for instance in his evaluation of the countries around China on 11–13. On the emergence of the idea of Asia among Chinese intellectuals, see Xiangyuan ( 2021 ).

Wang ( 2014 , 200–211).

Lear ( 1988 , 1–2).

On Ramusio see the reflections in Small ( 2012 ). On Giovanni da Empoli see Salonia ( 2019 , 2021 ).

Baedeker ( 1914 , iv–v), Cook ( 1924 , Introduction, n.p.).

Cook ( 1924 , Introduction, n.p.).

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Matteo Salonia

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Mueller, C., Salonia, M. (2022). Introduction: Curiosity, Identities, and Knowledge in Travel Writings on Asia. In: Mueller, C., Salonia, M. (eds) Travel Writings on Asia. Palgrave Series in Asia and Pacific Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0124-9_1

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Travel, Travel Writing, and the Construct of European Identity

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It has become a Structuralist truism in the social sciences to state that individuals define themselves by what they are not. It has equally become evident that travel—and particularly the voluntary, temporary, and perspectival type that we call tourism—is predicated on interaction with the Other. Travelogues are particularly salient “social facts” in this regard, for they both index such processes of identity formation, as well as contribute to them. Two edited volumes, Rolf-Hagen Schulz-Forberg's Unraveling Civilisation: European Travel and Travel Writing (2005) and John Zilcosky's Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey (2008) provide compelling examples of how the multifarious and complementary processes of travel and travel writing not only index, but construct, European identity.

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Chapter 4 Imagology and the Analysis of Identity Discourses in Late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century European Travel Writing by Charles Dickens and Karl Philipp Moritz

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This article analyses processes of collective and individual identity formation in European travel writing from the late eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century and argues that these processes are based not least on the national stereotypes described and performed in the texts. I explore how the genre-specific stylistic elements of multilingualism and intertextuality inform the performance of auto- and hetero-images and in doing so suggest converging travel writing studies and imagological studies. To illustrate my thesis, I analyse travelogues by Charles Dickens and Karl Philipp Moritz.

From the late eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century, travel writing was an extremely popular genre in Europe, not least because it accompanied and shaped the far-reaching political and social transformations that took place at the time; that is, the formation of European national states and identities on the one hand, and the formation of a middle class on the other. Although travelogues have been referred to as major sources of literary auto- and hetero-images, especially in earlier imagological studies, the subsequently emerging field of travel writing studies, particularly in the Anglophone countries, hardly considered imagological theory and methodology. In this article I propose to examine collective and individual identity discourses in travel writing by European authors of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by approximating travel writing studies and imagological approaches. More precisely, I suggest to analyse the “grammar,” as Leerssen has called it (2000, 271), of auto- and hetero-images in European travel writing with reference to structural features that, although typical for the genre, hitherto have not been studied in detail—that is, its multilingualism and intertextuality. 1 To illustrate my argument, I present analyses of two travelogues: Charles Dickens’s Pictures from Italy (1846) is a typical travelogue of its time in the sense that it talks about a popular and well-known destination—Italy. What is more, it was written in the middle of the nineteenth century, when already a plethora of travel writing about Italy had been published. Dickens thus had to find an individual approach to the subject. Multilingualism, though an element that can often be found in travel writing, is used by Dickens for this purpose and it strengthens the auto-image the traveller/narrator gives of himself, as I will show in my analysis. As a second text, I chose Karl Phillip Moritz’s Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahre 1782 ( Travels in England in 1782 ) 2 as an example from the late eighteenth century, in which the transformation of the genre to a more subjective account of the journey is clearly visible. In my analysis I will concentrate on the intertextual references applied by Moritz. Again, this is a common feature in travel writing that, however, is rarely looked at in detail. I argue that the intertextual references play a decisive role in the negotiation of identity, be it that of others or that of oneself. As Moritz was a passionate reader not least of English literature, his text is a very suitable example for such an analysis.

1 Travel Writing (Studies) and Imagology

Travelogues have been called one of the key genres of imagology and, in fact, many ethnotypes—I use Leerssen’s term to refer to “representations of national character” (2016, 16)—first emerged and were later adapted and perpetuated on the basis of the information conveyed in supposedly factual reports about foreign people and places, be it other nations or distinct regions of the same nation (cf. Meier 2007 ). Moreover, (re)presentations created in travel writing, both of the other and of the self, have been a major focus of travel writing studies, a field of literary studies that has emerged mainly in the Anglophone countries since the 1990s. 3 Contemporary scholars of travel writing have emphasized that these depictions are not to be read as mimetic representations of empirical reality, but that they are constructs which depend on the discourse surrounding them, on the authors’ intentions, and on the targeted readership. Nonetheless, contemporary travel writing studies have not engaged with imagology (or image studies) on a broader scale. That is to say that (imagological) key terms such as auto- and hetero-images have not found their way into travel writing studies, nor the development of imagology and its turn toward an analysis of structural features (the “grammar”) of national stereotypes. 4 Rather, stereotypes and the stereotyping performed in travel writing and/or the readers’ perception have been studied by applying a postcolonial approach. 5 This obviously works well in (post)colonial circumstances; still, the transfer of postcolonial theory to other historical situations is debated and brings with it a number of problems, especially if the conditions of power distribution, dependencies, historical development, and so forth are very different. It may lead to a certain blindness with regard to a number of features, be it on the level of content or on a structural (or formal) level. Although the postcolonial focus increases the critical awareness of notions such as the stereotyping of colonized subjects, processes of othering, symbolic appropriation of the colonized space, 6 and strategies of (postcolonial) writing back, other dynamics in travel writing, especially if it deals with travels in a European context, may be overlooked. I propose an alternative analysis that is situated at the intersection of travel writing studies and imagology: the application of a cutting edge, twenty-first-century imagology and its methodology to the analysis of travel writing can help to identify further aspects, forms, and functions of cultural stereotyping, of representations of self and other. It can help, moreover, to identify the forms and functions of the “grammar” of national prejudice and thus enable us to recognize the different levels of identity discourses that are at play in travel writing, a genre that spans a great variety of texts and in so doing aims at and attracts a wide readership with different hermeneutic interests.

From the end of the eighteenth century, numerous travel accounts were published by professional writers, but also by diplomats, officials, explorers, and so on, and it was one of the most translated genres at the time. 7 What is more, even clearly fictitious travel accounts (such as travels to the moon or under the sea; just think of Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson) were much sought after. A number of reasons for this popularity have already been identified: in addition to the interest in other places, regions, and countries, as well as in the activity of travel, the genre satisfied the general appetite for knowledge at the time, sparked by the Enlightenment. Furthermore, travel writing was an important medium that helped to establish and consolidate colonial power. However, I believe that there is more to it: in that particular period, travel writing was a fundamental medium in Europe, in both the process of nation building and in the process of the development of the middle class and, with it, the formation of a more defined idea of the individual, the bourgeois; that is, in two different processes of identity formation, namely that of collective and that of individual identity. During this period, which Reinhart Koselleck (1972) called the Sattelzeit , discussions about a united German nation (both in a political and in a cultural sense, cf. the term of the Kulturnation ) were a major topic among German-speaking intellectuals. 8 In Italy, too, first efforts toward a united state governed by the Italians were under way. At the same time, the formation of the middle class, the development of new media (in particular journals and newspapers), and the creation of new forms of consumption and cultural activities meant that individuals became increasingly aware of their possibilities and their identity as members of a growing social class. These sociopolitical processes—at their height during the period in question—are depicted, described, and performed in travel writing, and not least based on the auto- and hetero-images the texts convey. Consequently, the different images that we find in the texts cannot be separated from identity discourses. Or, rather: to identify identity discourses we need to identify auto- and hetero-images of the self and the other(s). Image and identity are therefore not the same thing but are closely linked—a fact we should be aware of in our analyses.

With the notion of the grammar of national prejudice, Leerssen refers to invariant structural factors of stereotyping, such as the opposition between North and South, weak versus strong, and central versus peripheral. In his examples, Leerssen (2000 , 275–278) suggests elements mainly found on the level of plot (or, per Genette (1994) , on the level of histoire ). Yet I would like to take this one step further and look not only at the deep structures of national stereotyping but, in particular, at the deep structures of stereotyping and identity building—two notions that I would like to converge in what follows—in travel writing. I suggest that in travel writing (as in other texts), an analysis of this particular grammar (in Leerssen’s sense) needs to take into account formal characteristics of the text, that is, the question of how these elements are narrated. In fact, there are a number of generic elements that serve, not least, to further the discourses on identity and the auto- and hetero-images in the texts in question. These features, such as multilingualism, meta- and intertextuality, and the oscillation between fact and fiction, although typical for the genre, have previously not been studied in detail, especially not with reference to their role in the performance of identity. 9 For identity is performed rather than static; as Manfred Pfister reminds us: “it emerges from, takes shape in, and is constantly defined and redefined in individual and collective performances” (2008, 9). Travel writing is one of the cultural performances where—individual and collective—cultural identity is shaped (and continuously reshaped, as this is an ongoing process). These performances of identity feed into and form the images of the travellers and all the other people the travellers meet on their recounted journeys. Hence, auto- and hetero-images, too, are not static but dynamic; they change according to their function in distinct historic and political contexts. 10 There is a further dynamic aspect to the performance of identity and thus to the creation of auto- and hetero-images in travel writing: as travellers often move between cultures, travel writing is mostly of an intercultural character. Such intercultural performances and transactions, however, provoke a more intense negotiation of cultural identity and of difference; it seems that there is a greater need to draw a line between oneself and the other—no matter how these two poles may be defined. In fact, the definitions of self and other may vary significantly in different travel accounts. If for the moment we concentrate on the figure of the traveller/narrator, their definitions of self and other depend on various social categories and identity-forming aspects, such as gender, age, ethnicity, nation, religion, or social class. Notions such as these inform the travellers’ identity and their view of the world, they intersect ; therefore, rather than analysing them individually, one should focus on their interdependence, as the concept of intersectionality reminds us. 11 What is more, a close look at travelogues shows us that the self and the other may not be in such a binary position as it may seem at first. 12 Rather, besides the natives of a place, there might be a number of protagonists that are perceived as the other, for instance, other travellers. Manfred Pfister mentions the “triangulation of gazes” (2008, 14) that can be observed in travelogues on Italy: “travel writers do not only look at Italy but also look at the English or respectively German travellers looking at Italy” (ibid.). Consequently, identity and difference are constructed not only with regard to the destination but likewise in response to other travellers one meets. Furthermore, the travellers/narrators and their readers might be sketched as different groups. Or, rather, the travellers/narrators might be outlined as so individual that their auto-image is not necessarily to be confounded with that of their readers.

Two generic elements whose analysis can help us to better understand these complex entanglements are multilingualism and intertextuality. In what follows, I will analyse their role in the description, negotiation, and performance of collective and individual identity. Both aspects share a multidirectional quality, pointing toward the self (the traveller/narrator, as well as the readers who identify with them) as well as the others (the ones observed, other travellers, other texts, other writers, etc.), and they invite us to read the accounts within a wider (cultural, linguistic, literary, etc.) context. This renders these aspects particularly interesting for the present case study.

2 Multilingualism to Stage the Self

Although translation has been a topic in travel writing studies (cf. Bassnett (2019) ; Cronin (2000) ; Martin and Pickford (2012) ), the multilingualism of these texts has hardly been studied to date. Still, I suggest that an analysis of literary multilingualism in travel writing can give us new insights into the former’s function in the depiction, performance, and negotiation of identities. The use of multilingualism, that is, of different languages (code-switching and other forms), in travel writing can either defy nationalist developments or, rather, enforce the idea of cultural identity and/or difference. In what follows, I analyse this aspect with regard to the traveller/narrator figure in Charles Dickens’s Pictures from Italy (1846). Dickens travelled to Italy and stayed there for a year from 1844 to 1845. He voyaged with his family from Great Britain through France, where he visited cities such as Paris, Lyons, and Avignon, and then proceeded to Italy. There the family rented a place in Genoa, from where Dickens, either on his own or with his wife, travelled to various places: he visited a number of northern Italian cities, such as Verona, Mantua, Milan, and Venice, and eventually journeyed to Rome and Naples. He recorded his impressions and experiences during these travels in the travelogue Pictures from Italy .

The entire text is highly multilingual and is interspersed with insertions in Italian and French, mainly forms of code-switching on an intrasentential level. That is to say that Dickens uses one (or more) word-interferences, single words, or a small number of words in Italian and French in his otherwise English text, and he does so mainly to refer to realities and facts: for place names, buildings, objects, or local customs, he uses the original names. Here are some examples: Genoa’s famous “Strada Nuova,” now Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, and “Strada Balbi,” now Via Balbi (both Dickens [1846] 1998 , 39), “the church of the Annunciata” (ibid., 48), and the “Monte Faccio” (ibid., 55) in Genova are mentioned with their Italian names. Also the French original for the dungeon in the Palace of the Popes in Avignon, where about sixty people were killed during the French Revolution in 1791, is given: The people were buried beneath a load of quicklime “in the dismal tower des oubliettes ” (ibid., 21, Dickens’s emphasis). The woman who guides the Dickens family through the former rooms of the Inquisition in the Palace of the Popes tells them about her profession as a “Government Officer,” and her original job title in French is given in parentheses: “[S]he told us, on the way, that she was a Government Officer ( concierge du palais apostolique ), and had been, for I don’t know how many years” (ibid., Dickens’s emphasis). These one-word-interferences render the text more authentic—the place names as well as the job title are verifiable and underline the validity of Dickens’s report and of his own authority. Minor errors, such as the fact that the correct name of the Monte Faccio most likely is Monte Fasce, would probably not be detected by his readers. Furthermore, Dickens uses such one-word-interferences to create atmosphere; he can be quite sure that his Italian travelogue is not the first read by his audience—in fact, he himself in his introduction to the travel book, entitled “The Reader’s Passport,” refers to the “many books [that] have been written upon Italy” (ibid., 5)— and hence can count on his readers’ familiarity with certain terms, such as “vetturíno” (ibid., 60, a cabman or coachman)—a word most readers of travel writing would have already known from other texts. In a similar vein, references to food are given in the original: for instance, Dickens mentions the “real Genoese dishes, such as Tagliarini” and “Ravioli” (ibid., 38) and he watches “sellers of maccaroni and polenta” (ibid., 42–43). Unlike some of the French expressions mentioned above, these Italian words are not translated, and they are not even italicized, thus suggesting the level of familiarity the author expects from his readers. This kind of multilingualism serves to inscribe Dickens and his travelogue into the genre of travel writing. Not only does he recognize and refer to the bulk of travelogues and therefore acknowledge his familiarity with the genre’s history, its topics, and its style; by issuing a passport to the reader, Dickens in addition installs himself as a major authority in the field. What is more, his multilingual insertions present him as an educated, sophisticated traveller who acts as a cultural mediator for his readers; in this manner, the multilingual elements inform the traveller’s/narrator’s auto-image. Later in the text, Dickens even advises his readers on pronunciation: to a number of Italian words, he adds accents that serve to indicate stresses: “Vetturíno” (ibid., 60), “Avvocáto” (ibid., 62), “bambíno” (ibid., 132). On one occasion, in a similar vein, he even imitates the local pronunciation: “Ecco Fióri! Ecco Fior-r-r!” (ibid., 127). This didactic attitude is visible in other instances, too; for example when Dickens guides his readers to supposedly new concepts in Italian or when he briefly describes the long white veil worn by women in the region around Genoa and then calls it by its original name, “the ‘mezzero’” (ibid., 35). Even stronger than before, in these instances, Dickens becomes a guide, perhaps even a teacher to his readers. He does so tongue-in-cheek, yet he never lets go of his superior position upon which, however, he does not reflect. The English white male traveller’s auto-image is that of a distant observer who never loses control or is swept away by what he sees. The fact that he himself is never depicted as using either Italian or French underlines this aspect; the use of multilingualism on the level of the narrative implies that he knows both languages well enough.

At times, Dickens leaves the level of one-word-interferences and switches languages between sentences or, at least, longer phrases (intersentential switching). At one point, he significantly does so when referring to a national stereotype: Dickens cites the phrase “ dolce far’ niente ” (ibid., 33), which he chooses not to translate. Rather, dolce far’ niente is supposed to be a stereotype known to English readers as something typically Italian, which they will recognize. 13 What is more, Dickens chooses an ironic manner to reinforce the cliché: it is some “perfect Italian cows” that enjoy the dolce far’ niente all day long (cf. ibid.) in their stables in a suburb of Genoa. Not only does he exploit the stereotype, but he enforces it by equating Italians and animals. Here Dickens combines multilingualism with irony in order to refer to and trigger the national stereotype of the lazy Italian. He scores by getting his readers’ laughs, reinforces the stereotype, and, at the same time, plays with it by not ascribing it to the Italians directly.

3 Performing Images through Intertextual References

In his travelogue Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahre 1782 ( Travels in England in 1782 ), Karl Philipp Moritz describes a relatively short journey of a couple of months, from the end of May to the middle of July in 1782, from London toward the north, to the Peak District and the Peak Cavern at Castleton, an unusual itinerary and destination for German travellers at the time. Moritz then returned south to London via Loughborough, Leicester, and Northampton before sailing back to Germany. Most of the time, he travelled on foot, a mode of traveling that was then quite unusual in England. Heide Hollmer notes that, for the autobiographical narrator in Moritz’s travelogue, literature and nature (at times experienced through literature) are entangled (cf. Hollmer [1783] 2000 , 192). In the text, as Hollmer writes, this entanglement becomes visible in the form of a “tissu de citations” (ibid.), a “fabric of quotations,” as Roland Barthes calls it. 14 In fact, the travelogue in question is a highly intertextual account in the sense that it engages with literature, other texts, and their authors in different ways. The term “bookish,” which Michel Butor (1974 , 14) uses to describe Romantic travel writing, also applies to Moritz’s (slightly earlier) text. 15

The author most often referred to in Moritz’s text is John Milton (1608–1674), whose Paradise Lost (1667) he takes with him on the journey. References to Milton’s masterpiece at times are a way of paying homage to the author and the text, but more often than not they are of a dialogic nature and have diverse functions. 16 For instance, the description of the edition Moritz carries with him—“For two shillings, I bought a Milton in duodecimo in French binding which is very convenient to carry in my pocket.” 17 —is used as a starting point for a paragraph on the book market in England, in which Moritz discusses different editions of books, their prices and the places where books can be bought (cf. Moritz [1783] 2000 , 32–33). In another instance, the observation that one of Moritz’s landladies reads Milton is used as an example of the fact that in England, the classical authors are read by the people, unlike in Germany, where only the scholars and the middle classes read, but not the common people. 18 Moritz by this means suggests the hetero-image of a reading nation, an idea that conforms with the notion of England as the country where the Enlightenment originated. This image becomes even stronger due to the particular example Moritz chooses: he describes how his landlady, and hence a female representative of the common people, reads Milton.

At the same time, the many instances when Moritz pauses along the road in order to read Milton serve to present himself as a reader (cf. Moritz [1783] 2000 , 74, 83, 84, 93, 104). Here he is a reader of Milton, but in connection with the references to other English authors in the travelogue, it becomes clear that Moritz has read English literature extensively and is therefore an expert, though one with understatement (and in this way similar to Dickens): his readers may assume—though it is not spelled out explicitly—that he reads all these texts in English, just as his travel edition of Paradise Lost is in English. He even cites from the latter in English without providing translations (this aspect is perhaps less humble on Moritz’s part but implies a certain education and social standing on the part of his readers) 19 (cf. Moritz [1783] 2000 , 132–133, 155, 168).

Finally, these instances of intertextuality confront us with the reaction of Moritz’s environment. Several times in his travelogue, Moritz mentions that as a walking traveller, many people are rather suspicious of him. At the time, walking was not a common way of traveling in England and those who are neither settled nor traveling by coach or on horseback are suspected to be either beggars or criminals. 20 Consequently, Moritz encounters problems in finding accommodation at times, and even has to leave some villages because he is not welcome. This gets even worse when he stops in order to read (Milton’s Paradise Lost ) at the side of the road: “[T]he ones riding and driving past stared at me with such amazement and made such unambiguous faces as if they thought me crazy. It must have seemed very odd to them to see somebody sitting next to a public road and reading a book.” 21 The process of walking, reading, and thinking that becomes so important to Moritz (and eventually to his alter ego Anton Reiser in Moritz’s later novel of the same title; cf. Hollmer [1783] 2000 , 192) and that is an image of illuminated emancipation, is thus presented as something that is often misunderstood or simply seen as crazy by others (such as other travellers, but also, in Moritz’s and Anton Reiser’s case, their families). 22 In his travelogue, though, Moritz shares this process with his readers, who are invited to sympathize with him and to understand the threefold experience that is so important to him and, eventually, to partake in it. This intertextual strategy can be identified as part of a rhetoric of sensibility and the mobilization of his readers’ powers of imagination and their sympathies that Alison Martin detects in Moritz’s text (cf. Martin 2003 , 2008 ). Martin identifies Moritz’s concentration on the personal impression of the journey, the reproduction of direct speech, and his descriptions of the sublime; but in the same manner, he uses intertextual references “to make visual and affective reality of the text” ( Martin 2003 , 86). In so doing, Moritz invites the readers to share the auto-image he gives of the traveller/narrator who, in the end, is just as much a traveller through England as through the Enlightenment project.

4 Conclusion

In his travelogue on Italy, Charles Dickens uses multilingualism for various reasons, many of which feed into the performance of the narrator’s/traveller’s identity and the creation of stereotypes. Dickens employs multilingualism to present himself as a well-instructed traveller who is familiar with the facts and able to convey them to his readers. This auto-image includes language skills—by insertions in French and Italian and guidance on how to pronounce words, Dickens presents himself as someone who knows these two languages well and can even teach them to his readers (together with the facts that are connected with them). Besides, he uses insertions in other languages to create atmosphere, as for instance in the description of the tour of the dungeon in Avignon. Thus Dickens inscribes himself into the tradition of travelogues on Italy by applying the stylistic devices he uses in his novels—irony, humour, social criticism—also in his travel writing. Apart from that, Dickens’s use of multilingualism has an anthropological quality, that is, he uses it to describe what he sees, and stages himself as an attentive observer without really being involved; he does not openly reflect on language but uses it for his own stylistic purposes. Those described—the others—remain rather one-dimensional, if not stereotypical.

In Moritz’s text, intertextual references have multiple functions: on the one hand, he uses them to create the hetero-image of England as a nation of readers. He does so at various points in his text and by allusions on different levels (to the book market, book editions, authors, texts, readers, etc.). On the other hand, Moritz applies intertextuality in order to create an auto-image of himself as a reader and, in particular, as a connoisseur of English literature. Moreover, by presenting his experiences as a traveling reader, he suggests a connection between walking, reading, and thinking, and invites his readers to join him in this practice.

The analysis of two of the aspects of the “grammar” of national stereotypes (to use Leerssen’s term one more time) in travel writing—multilingualism and intertextuality—confirm a focus on the travellers/narrators in these texts that is part of a change of the genre. In fact, from the late eighteenth century onward, the genre of the travelogue undergoes a transformation from encyclopaedic, scientific, and positivist to more literary, openly subjective reports in which the travellers’ experiences and their impressions of the journey come to the fore. 23 Accordingly, in these new travelogues, often written by professional writers rather than diplomats or civil servants, it is the self rather than the other that is negotiated. 24 This is a trend that has continued to the present day: rather than being about a different place, the majority of travelogues tell us more about the writers/travellers and the cultural, social, and political context they come from. 25 The auto-image is often at the centre and feeds into the performance of individual identity. However, the I of the travelogue does not necessarily (or only to a certain extent) identify with his/her readers; rather, there is the attempt to draw a distinct image of the traveller/narrator that may or may not coincide with the image of their readers. Thus the triangle Pfister proposes is probably not enough to take into account all the gazes and (re)presentations that are performed in travel writing. Rather, especially with the development of the travelogue to an ever more subjective report about a unique experience made by a distinct individual (and therefore not repeatable for others, unlike for instance the guide book, a genre that started to emerge at about the same time in the early nineteenth century), the auto-image the individuals give of themselves in the travelogue is an individual one that, to a certain extent, needs to be distinguished from the image of their readers. The analysis of the grammar of national stereotypes in travel writing can provide us with more insight into these different auto- and hetero-images and may eventually lead us to a more complex, nonbinary theoretical model that can tell us more about the emergence and performance of stereotypes. Furthermore, such an analysis approximates imagology and travel writing studies, and helps to examine the function of formal features used in travel writing that hitherto have been neglected.

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was supported by the European Union as part of the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie-Actions program. The “European Travel Writing in Context: The Socio-Political Dimension of Travelogues 1760–1850” ( EUTWIC ) project, Individual Fellowship, Grant Agreement No. 751378.

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Beller , Manfred , and Joep Leerssen , eds . 2007 . Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters: A Critical Survey . Amsterdam/New York : Rodopi .

Bourguinat , Nicholas . 2017 . “Et in Arcadia Ego…” Voyages et Séjours de Femmes en Italie, 1770–1870 . Montrouge : Aux Éditions du Bourg .

Bridges , Roy . 2002 . “ Exploration and Travel outside Europe (1720–1914) .” In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing , edited by Hulme and Youngs , 53 – 69 .

Butor , Michel . 1974 . “ Travel and Writing .” Mosaic 8 , no. 1 : 1 – 16 .

Cronin , Michael . 2000 . Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation . Cork : Cork University Press .

Dickens , Charles . ( 1846 ) 1998 . Pictures from Italy . London : Penguin Books .

Genette , Gérard . 1994 . Die Erzählung . Translated by Andreas Knop . Munich : Fink .

Görbert , Johannes . 2014 . Die Vertextung der Welt. Forschungsreisen als Literatur bei Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt und Adelbert von Chamisso . Berlin/Munich/Boston : De Gruyter .

Hentschel , Uwe . 2010 . Wegmarken: Studien zur Reiseliteratur des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts . Frankfurt : Peter Lang .

Hollmer , Heide . ( 1783 ) 2000 . “ Nachwort. ‘Fata und Abenteuer’ in der Heimat der Aufklärung .” In Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahre 1782 , by Karl Philipp Moritz , 177 – 194 . Frankfurt am Main : Insel .

Horz , Andrea . 2022 . “ ‘… the first singer, a born German’: Notions of Nationality as a Field of Conflict in Operatic Music of the 1770s .” In New Perspectives on Imagology , edited by Katharina Edtstadler , Sandra Folie , and Gianna Zocco , 403 – 417 . Boston/Leiden : Brill .

Hulme , Peter , and Tim Youngs , eds . 2002 . The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press .

Köhler , Ulrike . 2022 . “ Toward a Production-Oriented Imagology .” In New Perspectives on Imagology , edited by Katharina Edtstadler , Sandra Folie , and Gianna Zocco , 93 – 111 . Boston/Leiden : Brill .

Koselleck , Reinhart . 1972 . “ Einleitung .” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland , edited by Otto Brunner , Werner Conze , and Reinhart Koselleck , Vol. 1 ., xiii – xxvii . Stuttgart : Klett-Cotta .

Kõvamees , Anneli . 2013 . “ The Construction of Italy in Soviet Travelogues .” Interlitteraria 18 , no. 2 : 412 – 422 .

Leerssen , Joep . 2018 . “ On Imagology .” www.imagologica.eu [ August 21 , 2021 ].

Leerssen , Joep . 2016 . “ Imagology: On Using Ethnicity to Make Sense of the World .” Iberic@l / Revue d’études ibériques et ibéro-américaines 10 : 13 – 31 . http://iberical.paris-sorbonne.fr/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/[email protected] .

Leerssen , Joep . 2007 . “ Image .” In Imagology , edited by Beller and Leerssen , 342 – 344 .

Leerssen , Joep . 2000 . “ The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey .” Poetics Today 21 , no. 2 : 267 – 292 .

Martin , Alison E. 2008 . Moving Scenes: The Aesthetic of German Travel Writing on England 1783–1830 . London : Legenda .

Martin , Alison E. 2003 . “ German Travel Writing and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Karl Philipp Moritz’s Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahr 1782 .” In Cross-Cultural Travel: Papers From the Royal Irish Academy Symposium on Literature and Travel, National University of Ireland, Galway, November 2002 , edited by Jane Conroy , 81 – 88 . New York : Peter Lang .

Martin , Alison E. , and Susan Pickford , eds . 2012 . Travel Narratives in Translation, 1750–1830: Nationalism, Ideology, Gender . Abingdon/New York : Routledge .

Meier , Albert . 2007 . “ Travel Writing .” In Imagology , edited by Beller and Leerssen , 446 – 450 .

Meier , Albert . 1989 . “ Von der enzyklopädischen Studienreise zur ästhetischen Bildungsreise. Italienreisen im 18. Jahrhundert .” In Der Reisebericht. Die Entwicklung einer Gattung in der deutschen Literatur , edited by Peter Brenner , 284 – 305 . Frankfurt : Suhrkamp .

Moritz , Karl Philipp . ( 1792–1793 ) 2013 . Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien in den Jahren 1786 bis 1788 . Berlin : Die Andere Bibliothek .

Moritz , Karl Philipp . ( 1983 ) 2009 . Journeys of a German in England: A Walking Tour of England in 1782 . Translated by Reginald Nettel . London : Eland .

Moritz , Karl Philipp . ( 1783 ) 2000 . Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahre 1782 . Frankfurt am Main : Insel .

Moritz , Karl Philipp . 1886 . Travels in England in 1782 . [No translator indicated]. London : Cassell & Company . https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5249/5249-h/5249-h.htm [ August 21 , 2021 ].

Moritz , Karl Philipp . ( 1795 ) 1797 . Travels, Chiefly on Foot, Through Several Parts of England in 1782, Described in Letters to a Friend . Translated from the German by a Lady . London : G.G. and J. Robinson . https://archive.org/details/travelschieflyo00morigoog/page/n5 [ August 27 , 2021 ].

Neumann , Birgit . 2010 . “ Grundzüge einer kulturhistorischen Imagologie: Nationale Selbst- und Fremdbilder in britischer Literatur und anderen Medien des 18. Jahrhunderts .” KulturPoetik 10 , no. 1 : 1 – 24 .

Pfister , Manfred . 2008 . “ Introduction: Performing National Identity .” In Performing National Identity. Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions , edited by Manfred Pfister and Ralf Hertel , 9 – 30 . Amsterdam : Rodopi .

Pfister , Manfred . 1993 . “ Intertextuelles Reisen, oder: Der Reisebericht als Intertext .” In Tales and “their telling difference.” Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Narrativik , edited by Herbert Foltinek , 109 – 132 . Heidelberg : Winter .

Pratt , Mary . 2008 . Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation . London/New York : Routledge .

Scheitler , Irmgard . 1999 . Gattung und Geschlecht: Reisebeschreibungen deutscher Frauen 1780–1850 . Tübingen : Niemeyer .

Solnit , Rebecca . 2000 . Wanderlust: A History of Walking . New York : Viking .

Thompson , Carl . 2011 . Travel Writing . London : Routledge .

Walgenbach , Katharina , Gabriele Dietze , Antje Hornscheidt , and Kerstin Palm , eds . 2007 . Gender als interdependente Kategorie: Neue Perspektiven auf Intersektionalität, Diversität und Heterogenität . Opladen/Farmington Hills, MI : Barbara Budrich .

Youngs , Tim . 2013 . The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press .

In a similar manner, Ulrike Köhler in her contribution to this volume (part 1, chapter 3 ) applies a production-oriented imagology to, among others, English travel writing of the Romantic period. She demonstrates how generic elements without a national connotation can also contribute to generating national images.

Moritz’s travelogue was translated into English several times. The titles of these translations vary: the first translation, published in 1795 (and reprinted several times), was Travels, Chiefly on Foot, Through Several Parts of England in 1782, Described in Letters to a Friend . A later translation (based on the first one), published in 1886, was entitled Travels in England in 1782 . The translator of these two editions remains anonymous; in the 1795 edition it simply says: “Translated from the German by a Lady.” In 1965 Reginald Nettel published a new translation of Moritz’s text; it was republished in 1983 and 2009 by Eland and is called Journeys of a German in England: A Walking Tour of England in 1782 .

This importance is illustrated, for instance, by the structure of Carl Thompson’s introduction to travel writing, where he dedicates one major section to the question of “Revealing the Self” (2011, 96–129) and another to the act of “Representing the Other” (ibid., 130–167).

See, for instance, the absence of references to this critical approach and the relevant terminology in leading introductions to travel writing and travel writing studies such as Hulme and Youngs (2002) , Thompson (2011) , and Youngs (2013) . Individual case studies applying imagological methodology are the exceptions that prove the rule; see for instance Anneli Kõvamees’s research (e.g. 2013) on images in Estonian travelogues.

The reason for the ignorance of imagological approaches in travel writing studies may lie in the fact that imagology was mainly developed in non-Anglophone European contexts, such as France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and “was rejected by more aesthetically-oriented critics” ( Leerssen 2018 ) in Anglophone contexts. The field of literary travel writing studies, however, emerged and is most lively precisely in the Anglophone world, as is confirmed by the introductory works to the field published in English and the two major academic journals in the same language ( Studies in Travel Writing and Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing ).

An example of such an appropriation would be “monarch-of-all-I-survey scenes,” as Mary Pratt has called them (2008, 197–204). In such scenes, quite common in travel writing, the narrators survey the country/region they visit, often from a (geographically) elevated point of view, enumerate what they see (e.g. fertile land, livestock, villages) and in this manner take dominion of it, at least in their mind. Especially in colonial contexts, this often led to or was part of actual political domination. Furthermore, the narrators in this way literally position themselves above the local population and underline their superiority (cf. Thompson 2011 , 120–121).

On the distribution of translated travelogues see Martin and Pickford (2012) ; Scheitler (1999 , 17).

See Andrea Horz’s contribution to this volume (part 5, chapter 20 ) on the role of national ideas in public discourse about the opera in the 1770s.

Recently, Johannes Görbert (2014) has applied a similar “grammatical” approach to travel writing and showed how features such as prefaces and paratexts, among others, serve to create an auto-image of the writers/travellers (in his case Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, and Adelbert von Chamisso).

See Leerssen (2007) and Neumann (2010) who have retained that images are mobile and changeable.

See, for instance, Walgenbach et al. (2007) .

On the binary construction of the self and the other in travel writing see for instance Susan Bassnett who claims that travel writing “is premised on a binary opposition between home and elsewhere,” by writing “about oneself” and “the cultural other” (2003, xi).

See Joep Leerssen, who underlines the familiarity which stereotypes have gained through frequent reiteration (2000, 280), and Neumann (2010) , who builds on Leerssen’s statement.

In his well-known essay The Death of the Author (1967), see Barthes (1984) .

Butor eventually arrives at the conclusion that to travel writers, “travel is writing” (1974, 14, emphasis in the original).

With the term “dialogic” I refer to Manfred Pfister’s systematization of intertextuality in travel writing, see Pfister (1993) . By dialogic intertextuality, Pfister means that texts are not just cited or referred to but that the authors inscribe themselves into a literary network and thus become part of a dialogue or conversation. It can also comprise a very critical relation with one’s predecessors, but this is not the case in Moritz.

“Ich habe mir für zwei Schillings einen Milton in Duodez in niedlichem Franzband gekauft, der sich äußerst bequem in der Tasche tragen lässt” ( Moritz [1783] 2000 , 32). All translations are mine unless indicated otherwise.

“[die] Gelehrten, der Mittelstand” ( Moritz [1783] 2000 , 32). The saddler whom Moritz meets later while walking northward and who is very familiar with Homer, Horace, and Virgil is another example of this argument.

See Ulrike Köhler, who in a similar vein in her contribution to this volume (part 1, chapter 3 ) asserts that intertexts in travel writing portray “the implied addressee in the travelogue as an educated member of the middle classes” ( Köhler 2022 , 106).

This changed significantly shortly after Moritz: for instance, in 1790, William Wordsworth walked through France to Italy; some years later, in 1802, Johann Gottfried Seume walked all the way to Sicily—and there are reports by and on many other wayfarers. On travelling on foot, see Albrecht (1999) ; Solnit (2000) .

“[D]ie Vorbeireitenden und Fahrenden [gafften mich] immer mit einer solchen Verwunderung [an und machten] […] solche bedeutenden Mienen […], als ob sie mich für einen Verrückten hielten, so sonderbar mußte es ihnen vorkommen, einen Menschen an der öffentlichen Landstraße sitzen, und in einem Buche lesen zu sehen” ( Moritz [1783] 2000 , 83).

Both Karl Philipp Moritz and his protagonist Anton Reiser came from poor, conservative, and pious families who did not support their education and interest in literature.

See for instance Hentschel (2010) ; Meier (1989 ; 2007 , 447); Scheitler (1999) ; and for a comprehensive summary of this transformation Thompson (2011 , 96–129).

This is not to say that travelogues of a different kind did not continue to exist—rather, less than of a transformation of the whole genre we could speak of the development of new forms of travel writing that complemented other forms. What is more, the focus on the self (e.g. the white, male explorer, but not only) at times meant a complete marginalization of the other, as has been shown in many studies. For an overview on this see for instance Bridges (2002) .

Nicolas Bourguinat has described this by comparing the new form of travel writing to windows to the authors’ inner self as opposed to the mirrors of older travelogues (merely reflecting what the authors see). See Bourguinat (2017 , 406).

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  Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women's Travel Writing Ed. Kristi Siegel. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004, ISBN: 978-0-8204-4905-0, 320 pages. $32.95. To order: Contact Peter Lang Publishing at www.peterlang.com , or order through Barnes & Noble - website or Amazon - website .  Description: Women experience and portray travel differently; gender matters —irreducibly and complexly. Building on recent scholarship in women’s travel writing, these provocative essays affirm the impact of gender, but also cast women’s journeys against coordinates such as race, class, culture, religion, economics, politics, and history. The book’s scope is unique: women travelers range in time from Victorian memsahibs to contemporary “Road girls,” the topics presented are as diverse as Anna Leonowens’s slanted portrayal of Siam—later popularized in the movie, The King and I —and the rhetoric of peril long associated with women’s travel. The extensive array of writers examined includes Frances Trollope, Cameron Tuttle , Lady Mary Montagu, Catherine Oddie, Kate Karko, Nancy Prince , Frances Calderón de la Barca, Rosamond Lawrence, Zilpha Elaw, Alexandra David-Néel, Amelia Edwards, Erica Lopez, Paule Marshall, Bharati Mukherjee, and Marilynne Robinson.

From Sara Mills, Professor of Linguistics, Cultural Studies, Sheffield Hallam University: “The contributors to this book are well aware of the complexity of gender and the way that gender operates in different ways in different contexts. The women travellers considered here do not have much in common, since they are divided by historical period, privilege, class, race and wealth, but it is perhaps the diversity of the women represented here which is the book's greatest strength, because although the women do not write in the same way as each other, gender nevertheless manifests itself clearly and makes its presence felt. In this way we are able to see the way that gender operates in particular contexts. This book enables us to move away from assuming that women travellers write in a particular way or in a particular style, with certain themes predominating and towards a type of contextualised analysis which is subtle enough to unpick the intricacies of the way gender operates."                                      

Table of Contents

Introduction: Women's Travel and Theory Kristi Siegel

Part One - Gender

Chapter One The Gaze of the Victorian Woman Traveler: Spectacle and Phenomena Ruth Y. Jenkins - California State University-Fresno Chapter Two Lady Mary Montagu and the "Boundaries" of Europe  Sukanya Banerjee - University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chapter Three Woman's Travel and the Rhetoric of Peril: It's Suicide to Be Abroad Kristi Siegel - Mount Mary College Chapter Four The Daughters of Thelma and Louise: New? Aesthetics of the Road Jessica Enevold - G ö teborg University Chapter Five Women Writers and the Internal Combustion Engine: Passing Penelope Pitstop Rachel A. Jennings - Antelope Valley College

Part Two - Genre

Chapter Six Frances Trollope's American and Anna Leonowens's Siam: Questionable Travel and Problematic Writing Chu-chueh Cheng - National Chung-hsing University in Taiwan Chapter Seven Nancy Prince and her Gothic Odyssey: A Veiled Lady Sarah Brusky -  University of Florida Chapter Eight Zilpha Elaw's Serial Domesticity: An Unsentimental Journey Rosetta R. Haynes - Indiana State University Chapter Nine Women's Travel Writing and the Politics of Location: Somewhere In-Between Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson - University of Central Lancashire Chapter Ten The Problem of Narrative and Authority: Catherine Oddie and Kate Karko Corinne Fowler - 

Part Three - Identity

Chapter Eleven A Protestant Critique of Catholicism: Frances Calder ón de la Barca in Nineteenth-Century Mexico Linda Ledford-Miller - University of Scranton Chapter Twelve Identity in Rosamond Lawrence's Indian Embers : "I Cannot Somehow Find Myself" Terri A. Hasseler - Bryant College Chapter Thirteen American National Identity Abroad: The Travels of Nancy Prince Kristin Fitzpatrick - Tunghai University Chapter Fourteen Alexandra David-N éel's Home in the Himalayas: Where the Heart Lies Margaret McColley - University of Virginia Chapter Fifteen A Feminist Lens for Binx Bolling's Journey in The Moviegoer : Traveling Toward Wholeness Kathleen Scullin - Mount Mary College

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Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing Paperback – July 19, 2004

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Biographical notes

Kristi Siegel (Volume editor)

The Editor: Kristi Siegel is Associate Professor of English and Division Chair of Languages, Literature, and Communication at Mount Mary College (Milwaukee, Wisconsin). She is the author of Women’s Autobiographies, Culture, Feminism (Peter Lang, 1999, 2001) and the editor of Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle, and Displacement (Peter Lang, 2002). In addition, she serves as General Editor for the book series Travel Writing Across the Disciplines (Peter Lang) and has published various articles on postmodernism, feminism, cultural theory, travel writing, and autobiography.

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The 2025 Real ID deadline for new licenses is really real this time, DHS says

If you plan on flying around the country in 2025 and beyond, you might want to listen up.

You have about 365 days to make your state-issued driver’s license or identification “Real ID” compliant, per the Department of Homeland Security.  

The Real ID compliance is part of a larger act passed by Congress in 2005 to set “minimum security standards” for the distribution of identification materials, including driver’s licenses. This means that certain federal agencies, like the Transportation Security Administration or DHS, won’t be able to accept state-issued forms of identification without the Real ID seal.

It's taken a while for the compliance to stick, with DHS originally giving a 2020 deadline before pushing it back a year, then another two years and another two years after that due to “backlogged transactions” at MVD offices nationwide, according to previous USA TODAY reports.

You won’t be able to board federally regulated commercial aircraft, enter nuclear power plants, or access certain facilities if your identification documents aren’t Real ID compliant by May 7, 2025. 

Learn more: Best travel insurance

Here’s what we know about Real IDs, including where to get one and why you should think about getting one.

Do I have to get a Real ID?

Not necessarily. 

If you have another form of identification that TSA accepts, there probably isn’t an immediate reason to obtain one, at least for travel purposes. But if you don’t have another form of identification and would like to travel around the country in the near future, you should try to obtain one. 

Here are all the other TSA-approved forms of identification:

◾ State-issued Enhanced Driver’s License

◾ U.S. passport

◾ U.S. passport card

◾ DHS trusted traveler cards (Global Entry, NEXUS, SENTRI, FAST)

◾ U.S. Department of Defense ID, including IDs issued to dependents

◾ Permanent resident card

◾ Border crossing card

◾ An acceptable photo ID issued by a  federally recognized , Tribal Nation/Indian Tribe

◾ HSPD-12 PIV card

◾ Foreign government-issued passport

◾ Canadian provincial driver's license or Indian and Northern Affairs Canada card

◾ Transportation worker identification credential

◾ U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Employment Authorization Card (I-766)

◾ U.S. Merchant Mariner Credential

◾ Veteran Health Identification Card (VHIC)

However, federal agencies “may only accept” state-issued driver’s licenses or identification cards that are Real ID compliant if you are trying to gain access to a federal facility. That includes TSA security checkpoints.

Enhanced driver’s licenses, only issued by Washington, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, and Vermont, are considered acceptable alternatives to REAL ID-compliant cards, according to DHS. 

What can I use my Real ID for?

For most people, it's all about boarding flights.

You can only use your Real ID card to obtain access to "nuclear power plants, access certain facilities, or board federally regulated commercial aircrafts," according to DHS.

The cards can't be used to travel across any border, whether that's Canada, Mexico, or any other international destination, according to DHS.

How do I get a Real ID? What does a Real ID look like?

All you have to do to get a Real ID is to make time to head over to your local department of motor vehicles.

Every state is different, so the documents needed to verify your identity will vary. DHS says that at minimum, you will be asked to produce your full legal name, date of birth, social security number, two proofs of address of principal residence and lawful status.

The only difference between the state-issued forms of identification you have now and the Real ID-compliant card you hope to obtain is a unique marking stamped in the right-hand corner. The mark stamped on your Real ID compliant cards depends on the state.

Starting in 2025, REAL ID will be required to fly in the U.S.

S tarting in 2025, anyone taking a domestic flight or visiting certain federal facilities must use a REAL ID-compliant driver's license or ID card. 

The new ID law for air travel will go into effect on May 7, 2025.

"REAL ID" itself is a federal law, not a specific ID card, so there are multiple options for Washington residents to choose from. The Washington State Department of Licensing  set up a website to help residents navigate the process.

An extension for the REAL ID law was granted in 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

What is a REAL ID?

There are several options that meet the residency and proof of identity requirements, including a Washington state-enhanced driver's license and a passport.

Where will I need a REAL ID-compliant document?

You will need a REAL ID-compliant document to fly, and you may need one to visit military bases like Joint Base Lewis-McChord. You do not need one to drive or ride a bus or train or visit national parks or social security offices.

"Federal agencies, including DHS and TSA, may only accept state-issued driver’s licenses and identification cards as identification for purposes of accessing federal facilities, including TSA airport security checkpoints if the license or card was issued by a REAL ID compliant state in accordance with the REAL ID security standards (meaning the license or card must include the REAL ID compliant star marking)," according to the Department of Homeland Security. "Enhanced Driver’s Licenses (EDL) issued by Washington, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, and Vermont are considered acceptable alternatives to REAL ID-compliant cards and will also be accepted for official REAL ID purposes. Most EDLs do not contain the star marking and this is acceptable."

What are the options for WA residents to be REAL ID compliant?

Here is a full list of compliant documents, according to the Transportation Security Administration . 

• U.S. passport
• U.S. passport card
• DHS trusted traveler cards (Global Entry, NEXUS, SENTRI, FAST)
• U.S. Department of Defense ID, including IDs issued to dependents
• Permanent resident card
• Border crossing card
• State-issued Enhanced Driver’s License
• An acceptable photo ID issued by a federally recognized , Tribal Nation/Indian Tribe
• HSPD-12 PIV card
• Foreign government-issued passport
• Canadian provincial driver's license or Indian and Northern Affairs Canada card
• Transportation worker identification credential
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Employment Authorization Card (I-766)
• U.S. Merchant Mariner Credential
• Veteran Health Identification Card (VHIC)

Will my normal WADOL driver's license work?

A basic driver's license will not count. An enhanced driver's license will.

Is the WADOL expecting a surge in appointments, and how can people secure one?

The department of licensing options for many renewal appointments are now available online , hopefully freeing up some appointment space. But the department still advises to act on EDL appointments early, if you want one.

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Description.

Get help on a variety of tasks whenever inspiration strikes—on everything from writing to analysis to math—from Claude, your trusted AI assistant. INSTANT ANSWERS With Claude you have a world of intelligence right in your pocket. Just start a chat, send Claude a photo, attach a file—and ask away. FASTER DEEP WORK Collaborate with Claude on critical tasks, brainstorming, and complex problems to make significant progress while you’re on the go. LESS BUSY WORK Claude can help draft your emails, summarize your meetings, and assist with all the small tasks you don't want to do. INTELLIGENCE AT YOUR FINGERTIPS Claude is powered by the Claude 3 model family—powerful AI models built by Anthropic—giving you instant access to knowledge on every subject. TRUSTED PARTNER Claude is designed to be reliable, accurate, and helpful. It's brought to you by Anthropic, an AI research company dedicated to building safe and dependable AI tools. Claude is free to use. If you want access to 5x more Claude usage and our most powerful model (Claude 3 Opus), consider upgrading to our paid Pro plan. Terms of Service: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms Privacy Policy: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy

Version 1.0.1

Improvements and bug fixes.

Ratings and Reviews

434 Ratings

Good work + Feature Request

Nice work on the app guys. What I’d love is if you would allow the iPad version to be installed on apple silicon mac devices. The ChatGPT app disallows this currently and I really believe that Claude would appeal more to technically-savvy users (hackernews demographic certainly) if you simply flip the switch and enable your official app on macOS. Using the iPad version on macOS would be particularly tolerable for this type of application. Moreover, typical mac users would not stumble upon your app because the macOS store search is awful; you wouldn’t be dealing with complaints of how the designed-for-iPad app UX is lacking. Please consider enabling it 🙂

Good so far

It appears Claude does not know the privacy policy of Anthropic, when I asked it to summarize it. I recommend copying and pasting the policy into Claude and asking it to help you understand it, if you’re interested in having an idea of what data is collected and shared to third parties. It’s almost a given that reading the various policies doesn’t occur enough by the average user, not the user’s fault. However, using AI, it’s now possible to understand what the end user is agreeing to without spending an hour on the toilet trying to decipher legal/policy jargon. Happy learning!

Amazing just like the web version

I have been waiting for the app publisher to release an iOS app version of this and now that it’s here, I am more than happy. Was so intuitive to use on the web and I can confirm that you get the same experience on the app. Response time to chat inputs is so fast and the accuracy I’m used to is still there. 10/10 I would recommend!

App Privacy

The developer, Anthropic PBC , indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .

Data Linked to You

The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:

• Contact Info
• User Content
• Identifiers
• Diagnostics

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

Information

• Claude Pro $20.00
• Developer Website
• App Support
• Privacy Policy

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Check your travel documents — REAL ID required for domestic travel starting 2025

by Cristina Flores, KUTV

SALT LAKE CITY (KUTV) — The Department of Homeland Security announced that starting May 7, 2025, all travelers over age 18 will be required to possess a REAL ID to board domestic flights and/or cross the border.

This directive serves as a reminder for people to ensure they have the necessary documentation for future travel plans.

Most Utahns are already compliant with REAL ID requirements . The Utah Department of Public Safety said REAL IDs have been issued in the state for years, and around 80 percent of Utahns have them.

If you want to verify, check your Utah driver license or state ID and make sure it bears a gold star.

If you want to travel internationally, you will still need a passport.

MORE: Fans following Taylor Swift to Europe after finding Eras Tour tickets less costly there

Veteran Utah travel agent Suzy Gustafson of SG Travel Two, said she's more concerned about travelers having valid passports than having REAL IDs, since most Utahns have them.

Gustafson said people who travel out of the U.S. often overlook the fact that many countries, except for Mexico, require passports to be valid six months beyond the date of the return flight.

That means passport holders should treat the document as if it expires after 9.5 years, not 10 years.

She has known travelers who have been turned away at the airport for international flights because their passport does not meet that requirement.

"They will not let you on the plane," she said.

The risk of financial loss due to improper documentation is real if you miss your flight and lose hotel rooms or other accommodations.

Gustafson said most travel insurance plans will not cover you if you miss a flight because your documents aren't in order.