A Highland Tour of Victorian Travel Writing

A Highland Tour of Victorian Travel Writing
Author: Dimitrios Kassis
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2023-10-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1527552292

During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Scotland was persistently viewed as a peripheral region, inhabited by savage Highlanders, epitomising the sublime and the grotesque as well as the distance of the Scottish Other from civilised Europe. However, the rediscovery of the Ossianic tradition, the Scottish link to the Norman invasion and the increasing appeal of Scottish historical narratives to the average Victorian set the pattern for the reconstruction of a literary utopia. Facing the risk of racial segregation due to their Celtic background, a significant number of Scottish writers and theorists succumbed to the rising Anglo-Saxonism, seeking every means to prove their Anglo-Saxon background at the expense of their Celtic roots. This volume includes a set of travel narratives and essays on Scotland, covering a period of more than two centuries (1722-1907). The travellers who flocked to Scotland were either driven by literary aspirations, or were on a mission to explore the country’s wild inhabitants, the Highlanders. In their attempt to define Scottish identity in accordance with the cultural, ideological and political standards of the English, Scottish and American travel writers often adhered to the Othering of the Scottish people, promoting images of backwardness and the sublime.

Stepping Westward

Stepping Westward
Author: Nigel Leask
Publisher:
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2020
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198850026

Stepping Westward is the first book dedicated to the literature of the Scottish Highland tour of 1720-1830, a major cultural phenomenon that attracted writers and artists like Pennant, Johnson and Boswell, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Hogg, Keats, Daniell, and Turner, as well as numerous less celebrated travellers and tourists. Addressing more than a century's worth of literary and visual representations of the Highlands, the book casts new light on how the tour developed a modern literature of place, acting as a catalyst for thinking about improvement, landscape, and the shaping of British, Scottish, and Gaelic identities. It pays attention to the relationship between travellers and the native Gaels, whose world was plunged into crisis by rapid and forced social change. At the book's core lie the best-selling tours of Pennant and Dr Johnson, associated with attempts to 'improve' the intractable Gaidhealtachd in the wake of Culloden. Alongside the Ossian craze and Gilpin's picturesque, their books stimulated a wave of 'home tours' from the 1770s through the romantic period, including writing by women like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. The incidence of published Highland Tours (many lavishly illustrated), peaked around 1800, but as the genre reached exhaustion, the 'romantic Highlands' were reinvented in Scott's poems and novels, coinciding with steam boats and mass tourism, but also rack-renting, sheep clearance, and emigration.

A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature

A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature
Author: Grzegorz Moroz
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2020-08-31
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9004429611

A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature offers a comprehensive, comparative and generic analysis of developments of travel writing in Anglophone and Polish literature from the Late Medieval Period to the twenty-first century. These developments are depicted in a wider context of travel narratives written in other European languages. Grzegorz Moroz convincingly argues that, for all the similarities and cross-cultural influences, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century non-fiction Anglophone and Polish travel writing have dynamically evolved different generic horizons of expectations. While the Anglophone travel book developed relatively steadily in that period, the Polish genre of the podróż was first replaced by the listy (kartki) z podróży, and then by the reportaż podróżniczy.

Highland Journey

Highland Journey
Author: Mairi Hedderwick
Publisher: Birlinn
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2009
Genre: Highlands (Scotland)
ISBN: 9781841587936

In Highland Journey, Mairi Hedderwick retraces the steps of an obscure Victorian artist, John T. Reid, who made a sketching tour around Scotland in 1876. Hedderwick, a witty and immensely readable author of children's books, achieves so much more than simply following in Reid's footsteps; wonderfully realized, her quest becomes obsessional at times as she struggles to understand her mentor and guide with whom she shares a passion to conserve Scotland's wild places and record them faithfully with exquisite illustration and insightful comment.

Prudence

Prudence
Author: Gail Carriger
Publisher: Orbit
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2015-03-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316212237

From NYT bestselling author Gail Carriger comes a witty adventure about a young woman with rare supernatural abilities travels to India for a spot of tea and adventure and finds she's bitten off more than she can chew. When Prudence Alessandra Maccon Akeldama ("Rue" to her friends) is bequeathed an unexpected dirigible, she does what any sensible female under similar circumstances would do -- she christens it the Spotted Custard and floats off to India. Soon, she stumbles upon a plot involving local dissidents, a kidnapped brigadier's wife, and some awfully familiar Scottish werewolves. Faced with a dire crisis (and an embarrassing lack of bloomers), Rue must rely on her good breeding -- and her metanatural abilities -- to get to the bottom of it all. . .

Stepping Westward

Stepping Westward
Author: Nigel Leask
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2020-02-27
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0192590227

Stepping Westward is the first book dedicated to the literature of the Scottish Highland tour of 1720-1830, a major cultural phenomenon that attracted writers and artists like Pennant, Johnson and Boswell, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Hogg, Keats, Daniell, and Turner, as well as numerous less celebrated travellers and tourists. Addressing more than a century's worth of literary and visual representations of the Highlands, the book casts new light on how the tour developed a modern literature of place, acting as a catalyst for thinking about improvement, landscape, and the shaping of British, Scottish, and Gaelic identities. It pays attention to the relationship between travellers and the native Gaels, whose world was plunged into crisis by rapid and forced social change. At the book's core lie the best-selling tours of Pennant and Dr Johnson, associated with attempts to 'improve' the intractable Gaidhealtachd in the wake of Culloden. Alongside the Ossian craze and Gilpin's picturesque, their books stimulated a wave of 'home tours' from the 1770s through the romantic period, including writing by women like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. The incidence of published Highland Tours (many lavishly illustrated), peaked around 1800, but as the genre reached exhaustion, the 'romantic Highlands' were reinvented in Scott's poems and novels, coinciding with steam boats and mass tourism, but also rack-renting, sheep clearance, and emigration.

Scotland, Britain, Empire

Scotland, Britain, Empire
Author: Kenneth McNeil
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0814210473

Scotland, Britain, Empire takes on a cliché that permeates writing from and about the literature of the Scottish Highlands. Popular and influential in its time, this literature fell into disrepute for circulating a distorted and deforming myth that aided in Scotland's marginalization by consigning Scottish culture into the past while drawing a mist over harsher realities. Kenneth McNeil invokes recent work in postcolonial studies to show how British writers of the Romantic period were actually shaping a more complex national and imperial consciousness. He discusses canonical works--the works of James Macpherson and Sir Walter Scott--and noncanonical and nonliterary works--particularly in the fields of historiography, anthropology, and sociology. This book calls for a rethinking of the "romanticization" of the Highlands and shows that Scottish writing on the Highlands reflects the unique circumstances of a culture simultaneously feeling the weight of imperial "anglobalization" while playing a vital role in its inception. While writers from both sides of the Highland line looked to the traditions, language, and landscape of the Highlands to define their national character, the Highlands were deemed the space of the primitive--like other spaces around the globe brought under imperial sway. But this concern with the value and fate of indigenousness was in fact a turn to the modern.

Literature of Travel and Exploration

Literature of Travel and Exploration
Author: Jennifer Speake
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1425
Release: 2014-05-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1135456631

Containing more than 600 entries, this valuable resource presents all aspects of travel writing. There are entries on places and routes (Afghanistan, Black Sea, Egypt, Gobi Desert, Hawaii, Himalayas, Italy, Northwest Passage, Samarkand, Silk Route, Timbuktu), writers (Isabella Bird, Ibn Battuta, Bruce Chatwin, Gustave Flaubert, Mary Kingsley, Walter Ralegh, Wilfrid Thesiger), methods of transport and types of journey (balloon, camel, grand tour, hunting and big game expeditions, pilgrimage, space travel and exploration), genres (buccaneer narratives, guidebooks, New World chronicles, postcards), companies and societies (East India Company, Royal Geographical Society, Society of Dilettanti), and issues and themes (censorship, exile, orientalism, and tourism). For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia website.

Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770–1914

Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770–1914
Author: Katherine Haldane Grenier
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351878654

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, legions of English citizens headed north. Why and how did Scotland, once avoided by travelers, become a popular site for English tourists? In Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770-1914, Katherine Haldane Grenier uses published and unpublished travel accounts, guidebooks, and the popular press to examine the evolution of the idea of Scotland. Though her primary subject is the cultural significance of Scotland for English tourists, in demonstrating how this region came to occupy a central role in the Victorian imagination, Grenier also sheds light on middle-class popular culture, including anxieties over industrialization, urbanization, and political change; attitudes towards nature; nostalgia for the past; and racial and gender constructions of the "other." Late eighteenth-century visitors to Scotland may have lauded the momentum of modernization in Scotland, but as the pace of economic, social, and political transformations intensified in England during the nineteenth century, English tourists came to imagine their northern neighbor as a place immune to change. Grenier analyzes the rhetoric of tourism that allowed visitors to adopt a false view of Scotland as untouched by the several transformations of the nineteenth century, making journeys there antidotes to the uneasiness of modern life. While this view was pervasive in Victorian society and culture, and deeply marked the modern Scottish national identity, Grenier demonstrates that it was not hegemonic. Rather, the variety of ways that Scotland and the Scots spoke for themselves often challenged tourists' expectations.

V!VA Travel Guides

V!VA Travel Guides
Author: Paula Newton
Publisher: Viva Publishing Network
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2008
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 0979126428

Viva members around the world contribute to the travel guides' creation and updating. They provide information concerning hotels, restaurants, tours, shopping, and activities.