Product Description: The late nineteenth century was a golden age for European travel in the United States. For prosperous Europeans, a journey to America was a fresh alternative to the more familiar ‘Grand Tour’ of their own continent, promising encounters with a vast, wild landscape, and with people whose culture was similar enough to their own to be intelligible, yet different enough to be interesting...read more

Product Description: Encountering China addresses the responses of early modern travelers to China who, awed by the wealth and sophistication of the society they encountered, attempted primarily to build bridges, to explore similarities, and to emulate the Chinese, though they were also critical of some local traditions and practices...read more

Product Description: This book deals with the De Bry collection of voyages, one of the most monumental publications of Early Modern Europe. It analyzes the textual and iconographic changes the De Bry publishing family made to travel accounts describing Asia, Africa and the New World...read more

Long before Magellan entered the Pacific in 1521 Westernersentertained ideas of undiscovered oceans, mighty continents, andparadisal islands at the far ends of the earth - such ideas would have along life and a deep impact in both the Pacific and the West. With thediscovery of Tahiti in 1767 another powerful myth was added to thiscollection: the noble savage. For the first time Westerners wereconfronted by a people who seemed happier than themselves. Thisrevolution in the human sciences was accompanied by one in thenatural sciences after Darwin's momentous visit to the GalapagosIslands.

Product Description: This volume surveys the history of cultural perception in western Europe from the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the National Socialists' party rallies in the Berlin of the 1930s. Travel writings are used as source material to enter the intricate discourses on national stereotypes.

Product Description: The contrast between the temperate and the tropical is one of the most enduring themes in the history of the Western geographical imagination. Caught between the demands of experience and representation, documentation and fantasy, travelers in the tropics have often treated tropical nature as a foil to the temperate, to all that is civilized, modest, and enlightened...read more

Product Description: This volume is a collection of contributions about the history and practice of travel and travel writing from a variety of academic disciplines including anthropology, history, linguistics and literary criticism. It brings together scholars from over ten different countries and reflects on what travel is and how travel writings function...read more

Product Description: Ranging from the early modern to the postcolonial, and dealing mainly with encounters in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, Perspectives on Travel Writing is a collection of new essays by international scholars that examines some of the various contexts of travel writing, as well as its generic characteristics...read more