So what does a guy do when most of his mates get married? For Roland, a 27-year-old public servant who lives with his parents, it results in a solo overseas trip that triggers a life-long obsession. Roland wanders the globe, through the continents of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. His journeys range from painstaking itinerant travel to the serendipity of spontaneous adventures and involve a plethora of unique experiences that enrich his knowledge, augment his appreciation of different cultures, impact his attitudes and uplift his spirits. However, approaching middle age, Roland feels it may be time for his travels to come to an end. Is it time to open a new chapter in his life and settle down to a comfortable existence in Australia? it is a question he wrestles with until circumstances ultimately decide his course.

"Ah, then, was it all spring weather? Nay! but we were young-and together." SHE had always adored him. From the first moment he came to the house-an overgrown, good-looking schoolboy, and had started to bully and domineer over her, Marie Chester had thought him the most wonderful person in all the world. She waited on him hand and foot, she was his willing bondslave; she did not mind at all when once, in an unusual fit of eloquence, she had confided in him that she thought it was the loveliest thing on earth to have a brother, young Christopher answered almost brutally that she "talked rot, anyway, and that sisters were a bally nuisance!" He looked at her with a sort of contempt for a moment, then added: "Besides, we're not brother and sister, really!" They were not; but their fathers had been lifelong friends, and when George Chester's wife inconsiderately-or so her husband thought-died without presenting him with a son, and almost at the same time young Christopher Lawless was left an orphan, George Chester promptly adopted him.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1838.

Brazilian popular culture, including music, dance, theater, and film, played a key role in transnational performance circuits—inter-American and transatlantic—from the latter nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Brazilian performers both drew inspiration from and provided models for cultural production in France, Portugal, Argentina, the United States, and elsewhere. These transnational exchanges also helped construct new ideas about, and representations of, “racial” identity in Brazil. Tropical Travels fruitfully examines how perceptions of “race” were negotiated within popular performance in Rio de Janeiro and how these issues engaged with wider transnational trends during the period. Lisa Shaw analyzes how local cultural forms were shaped by contact with imported performance traditions and transnational vogues in Brazil, as well as by the movement of Brazilian performers overseas. She focuses specifically on samba and the maxixe in Paris between 1910 and 1922, teatro de revista (the Brazilian equivalent of vaudeville) in Rio in the long 1920s, and a popular Brazilian female archetype, the baiana, who moved to and fro across national borders and oceans. Shaw demonstrates that these transnational encounters generated redefinitions of Brazilian identity through the performance of “race” and ethnicity in popular culture. Shifting the traditional focus of Atlantic studies from the northern to the southern hemisphere, Tropical Travels also contributes to a fuller understanding of inter-hemispheric cultural influences within the Americas.