Author: Dimitrios Kassis
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443875155
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
Travel literature has always been associated with the construction of utopias which were founded on the idea of unknown lands. During their journeys in foreign lands, British travellers tended to formulate various critical opinions based on their background knowledge of the country visited. Their attempts to interpret other nations were often misinterpretations of the peoples in question as the Other. At the close of the eighteenth century, when Grand Tourism started to fade away and travelling became a mainstream activity for the middle-class Briton, travel writers attempted to identify with.
Author: Dimitrios Kassis
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144389396X
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
This book focuses on Iceland as a nineteenth-century utopian locus in the light of racial theories attached to the country’s national framework. In particular, it investigates the ways in which five nineteenth-century travellers define their national identity and gender in relation to Iceland during the Victorian period, during which European nationalism emerges as an idea of paramount importance. Owing to the gradual contemplation of this peripheral word as the cradle of the Germanic nations, Victorian travel writers endeavoured to reconstruct the image of Iceland in accordance with the racial theoretical framework that underlay the nineteenth-century British nation-building agenda.
Author: Dimitrios Kassis
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527552292
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 154
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Book Description
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.
Author: Dimitrios Kassis
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152754320X
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 119
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Book Description
As part of the “beaten track”, Germany did not conform to the Grand Tourist ideals of eighteenth-century British travellers that were influenced by the spirit of the Enlightenment, and, therefore, sought to trace vestiges of the Greco-Roman cultural tradition in their ventures across the continent. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the German landscape becomes the central theme of British travel discourse, marking the gradual shift of focus from the “saturated” image of classical Greece to the rediscovery of the Old Germanic culture of the sagas. Driven by an antiquarian interest in the German context, British travellers discovered Germany in the wake of the nineteenth century, when the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire not only signalled French expansionism in Protestant Europe, but also stimulated the appetite of the Victorians for the exploration of the German culture in an attempt to define themselves as being of pure Teutonic stock. Given the strenuous struggle of German thinkers to deal with the feelings of humiliation and shame caused by the Napoleonic rule, and, in view of a potential Gallicisation, nineteenth-century Germans mastered the fields of comparative philology and Northern antiquarianism to transform their political weakness into a new cultural paradigm that not only fostered pan-Germanism through the rediscovery of the folk tales and legends of their medieval tradition, but also ascribed to Germany a superior spiritual role, which was later incorporated into the racial discourses of Germany and Britain. This book is concerned with the views of British travel writers, focusing on travel narratives produced from 1794 until 1845. As such, it sheds light on instances which pertain to the representation of Germanness in relation to the British national context.
Author: Dimitrios Kassis
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527561291
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 122
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Book Description
Situated between Europe and Asia, Russia has systematically challenged the European theories attached to nationhood due to its geopolitical and cultural peculiarities. After the rise of European nationalist movements, imperial Russia posed a threat to the very existence of the Germanic empires of Britain, Germany and Austria, and was frequently evoked to epitomise European barbarism, paganism, despotism and the Orient. In its struggle to acquire a new identity, which would bridge the gap with Western empires, Russia could not conform to the rising Anglo-Saxon movements that sought to glorify Nordic supremacy at the expense of the Oriental Other. Drawing upon this binary opposition between the Orient and the Occident, the Russian Empire concentrated on the development of its own nation-building theories, which managed to incorporate the ascending Pan-Slavic wave into its nationalist agenda. The anti-Western rhetoric that often characterised Russian politics contributed to the subversion of the conventional Western perspective of the Orient and the emergence of Eurasianism as a political theory that exalted the different traits of its imperial system. This book sets the focus on the representations of the Russian Empire from 1792 until 1912 in the field of travel literature. To this end, it selects British and American travel narratives of the aforementioned period to explore all aspects of Russian identity and culture. For this reason, it addresses major issues attached to Russian history and culture that were investigated by Western travellers in their attempt to approach the Russian Empire.
Author: Dimitrios Kassis
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527520226
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 151
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Book Description
Since its annexation to the British Crown, Ireland has never ceased in forming the subject of an ardent national debate in Great Britain which resulted in the demonisation of the Celtic race as subaltern and backward. In its effort to forge a national identity, the British Empire adopted several collective identities on the basis of the racial and cultural findings of the 1850s which gave a new impetus to the systematic view of England as a typically Anglo-Saxon culture, staunchly opposed to the alleged Celtic backwardness and the rebellious spirit of the Irish. In view of the rising anti-Irish wave of sentiment in the British imperialist imagination, Irish nationalism was manifest through a series of uprisings, the majority of which sought to link the country to its ancient Celtic heritage. The Celticist movements of Young Ireland and the Irish Revival revealed the need of Irish Nationalists to acquire a new, collective identity, which proved to be a strenuous task, given the complex historical and ethnic background of the Irish. This book investigates the extent to which Irish identity is affected by the racist and nationalist discourses of the nineteenth century which emerged to either defend or oppose the image of Ireland as a cultural construct. The travelogues explored here include some of the most fundamental representations of Ireland by prominent Irish and British travel writers, whose impressions of the island might be linked to the utopian and dystopian dimensions of the country.
Author: Tim Youngs
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Examines the cultural and social aspects of travel writing on Africa, Asia, America, the Balkans, and Australasia.
Author: Petra Rau
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100942551X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 787
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Book Description
How has Europe shaped British literature and culture – and vice versa – since the Middle Ages? This volume offers nuanced answers to this question. From the High Renaissance to haute cuisine, from the Republic of Letters to the European Union, from the Black Death to Brexit -- the reader gains insights into the main geographical zones of influence, shared intellectual movements, indicative modes of cultural transfer and more recent conflicts that have left their mark on the British-European relationship. The story that emerges from this long history of cultural interactions is much more complex than its most recent political episode might suggest. This volume offers indispensable contexts to the manifold and longstanding connections between British and European literature and culture. This book suggests that, however the political landscape develops, we will do well to bear this exceptionally rich history in mind.
Author: Dimitrios Kassis
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443817597
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 119
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Book Description
The emergence of the racial theories of Nordicism and Anglo-Saxonism at the threshold of the twentieth century changed the cultural and political mapping of the world, and gave a new impetus to the construction of national discourses both in Europe and overseas. In its complex situation as a former colony and a rising empire, America strove to forge a new identity based on the biological findings of fresh scientific fields, the so-called “pseudosciences”. In their travel texts, American travel writers wished to revive their ties with the Old Norse world, embarking on trips which aimed to link the discovery of Vinland, by the Vikings, with the nineteenth-century rediscovery of the Old Norse culture, by Victorian and American scholars. This book explores American perceptions of the Nordic countries which contributed to the construction of the nineteenth-century American national identity. The concepts of Nordic unity and the Americanisation of Northern Europe, in response to the increasing immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, are connected to American travellers’ parallel attempt to reflect upon the Nordic societies from a utopian perspective.
Author: Mary Elizabeth Hotz
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 0791476596
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
Explores Victorian responses to death and burial in literature, journalism, and legal writing. Literary Remains explores the unexpectedly central role of death and burial in Victorian England. As Alan Ball, creator of HBOs Six Feet Under, quipped, Once you put a dead body in the room, you can talk about anything. So, too, with the Victorians: dead bodies, especially their burial and cremation, engaged the passionate attention of leading Victorians, from sanitary reformers like Edwin Chadwick to bestselling novelists like Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker. Locating corpses at the center of an extensive range of concerns, including money and law, medicine and urban architecture, social planning and folklore, religion and national identity, Mary Elizabeth Hotz draws on a range of legal, administrative, journalistic, and literary writing to offer a thoughtful meditation on Victorian attitudes toward death and burial, as well as how those attitudes influenced present-day deathway practices. Literary Remains gives new meaning to the phrase that serves as its significant theme: Taught by death what life should be. ...Literary Remains is a fantastic literary companion and is worth reading even if youre not initially interested in burial practices. M/C Reviews Hotz not only contextualizes her readings within a historical framework surrounding the passage of the Burial Acts, the building of large public cemeteries in the suburbs, and the late-century introduction of cremation as a widespread social practice, but offers a perceptive and compelling rhetorical analysis of the sociological, political, and theological discourse about burial. Victorian Studies the painstaking research on debates about funerary reform that Hotz brings together will be valuable for future investigations of death in Victorian culture. Studies in English Literature This is an ambitious, energetic and rigorous attempt to do that very difficult thing, integrate detailed and historically informed analysis of the documents of nineteenth-century burial reform and of major literary texts into a lucid and complex argument that doesnt fight shy of contradiction and difficulty. Mortality Drawing on a vast range of primary sourcesofficial documents, newspapers and periodicals, travel guidesand the work of anthropologists, historians, and the substantial engagements within literary studies dealing with representations of death and the dead, Hotzs perceptive, engaging, and eloquent study will be welcomed by a range of scholars in the humanities and social sciences. CHOICE I read this fascinating book with great pleasure. It makes a valuable contribution to the study of Victorian practices of death and burial and will be an essential supplement to existing studies of the culture of Victorian melancholy and bereavement. Joel Faflak, author of Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery
