This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination. It analyses foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot across non-fictional and fictional travel narratives, speeches, private journals and medical advice tracts. Well-known authors such as Joseph Conrad are placed in dialogue with minority writers such as Mary Seacole and Africanus Horton in order to understand their different approaches to representing white illness abroad. The project also considers postcolonial texts such as Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock to demonstrate that authors continue to 'write back' to the legacy of colonialism by using images of illness from climate.

This study explores the cultural and political impact of Victorian travelers' descriptions of physical and verbal violence in Africa. Travel narratives provide a rich entry into the shifting meanings of colonialism, as formal imperialism replaced informal control in the Nineteenth century. Offering a wide-ranging approach to travel literature's significance in Victorian life, this book features analysis of physical and verbal violence in major exploration narratives as well as lesser-known volumes and newspaper accounts of expeditions. It also presents new perspectives on Olive Schreiner and Joseph Conrad by linking violence in their fictional travelogues with the rhetoric of humanitarian trusteeship.

Juxtaposing the albums of Lady Brassey, an overlooked figure among Victorian women travelers, with Brassey's travel books, Nancy Micklewright takes advantage of a unique opportunity to examine the role of photography in the 1870s and 1880s in constructing ideas about place and empire. This study draws on a range of source material to investigate aspects of the Brassey collection. The book begins with an overview of Lady Brassey's life and projects, as well as an examination of issues relevant to subsequent discussions of the travel literature, the photographs, and the albums in which the photographs are assembled. Lady Brassey is next considered as a traveler and public figure, and the author gives an overview of Brassey's travel literature, placing her in her social and political context. Micklewright then considers the seventy volumes of photographs which comprise the Brassey album collection, taking an especially close look at the eight albums devoted to the Middle East. Analyzing the specific contents and structure of the albums, and the interplay of text and image within, she explores how the Brasseys constructed their presentation of the region. While confirming some earlier work about constructions of the Orient by the British during the time, this book offers a much more detailed and nuanced understanding of how photographic and literary constructions were related to individual experience and identity within a larger British identity. The first appendix explores the illustrative relationship between the photograph albums and Lady Brassey's travel books, yielding an understanding of the processes involved in transferring the photographic image to a printed one, at a particular moment in the development of book illustration. A second appendix lists the contents and named photographers of all seventy albums in the Brassey collection. All in all, Micklewright's study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex and unstable socia

These chapers include discussion of travel writing by such major figures as Mary Shelley, Isabella Bird Bishop, and Mary Kingsley as well as that of less-known travel writers such as Charlotte Eaton, Frances Elliot, Amelia Edwards, and Florence Dixie.

Travel writing has, for centuries, composed an essential historical record and wide-ranging literary form, reflecting the rich diversity of travel as a social and cultural practice, metaphorical process, and driver of globalization. This interdisciplinary volume brings together anthropologists, literary scholars, social historians, and other scholars to illuminate travel writing in all its forms. With studies ranging from colonial adventurism to the legacies of the Holocaust, The Long Journey offers a unique dual focus on experience and genre as it applies to three key realms: memory and trauma, confrontations with the Other, and the cultivation of cultural perspective.

The nexus between travel, writing and media in the contemporary world is dense: travel practice is increasingly interwoven with media; representations in old and new media are co-present and converge. Digitisation has had a profound impact on the practice and mediation of travel, but this volume aims to show that travel and its representation have always been enlaced with media. With contributions by experts in literary and cultural studies, journalism studies and informatics, the book takes a multi- and interdisciplinary approach and covers a wide range of media, from the hand-crafted album to social media. It illustrates how current transformations invite us to revisit earlier periods of travel writing and their media environments, and to explore the ways in which contemporary forms of mediation are prefigured by earlier practices and forms. The book addresses readers interested in travel writing, travel studies and cultural studies. Chapters Introduction, 3, 7 and 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. Funded by University of Freiburg.

Works of travel have been the subject of increasingly sophisticated studies in recent years. This book undermines the conviction with which nineteenth-century British writers talked about darkest Africa. It places the works of travel within the rapidly developing dynamic of Victorian imperialism. Images of Abyssinia and the means of communicating those images changed in response to social developments in Britain. As bourgeois values became increasingly important in the nineteenth century and technology advanced, the distance between the consumer and the product were justified by the scorn of African ways of eating. The book argues that the ambiguities and ambivalence of the travellers are revealed in their relation to a range of objects and commodities mentioned in narratives. For instance, beads occupy the dual role of currency and commodity. The book deals with Henry Morton Stanley's expedition to relieve Emin Pasha, and attempts to prove that racial representations are in large part determined by the cultural conditions of the traveller's society. By looking at Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it argues that the text is best read as what it purports to be: a kind of travel narrative. Only when it is seen as such and is regarded in the context of the fin de siecle can one begin to appreciate both the extent and the limitations of Conrad's innovativeness.