![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > Sport & Leisure > Travel & holiday > Travel writing > Classic travel writing
H.W. Tilman's Two Mountains and a River picks up where Mount Everest 1938 left off. In this instalment of adventures, Tilman and two Swiss mountaineers set off for the Gilgit region of the Himalaya with the formidable objective of an attempt on the giant Rakaposhi (25,550 feet). However, this project was not to be fulfilled. Not one to be dispirited, Tilman and his various accomplices - including pioneering mountaineer and regular partner Eric Shipton - continue to trek and climb in locations across China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other areas of Asia, including the Kukuay Glacier, Muztagh Ata, the source of the Oxus river, and Ishkashim, where the author was arrested on suspicion of being a spy ... Two Mountains and a River brims with the definitive Tilman qualities - detailed observations and ever-present humour - that convey a strong appreciation of the adventures and mishaps he experiences along the way. With a new foreword from prominent trekker, climber and lecturer, Gerda Pauler, this classic mountaineering text maintains Tilman's name as a unique and inquisitive explorer and raconteur.
This book brings together theories of spatiality and mobility with a study of travel writing in the Victorian period to suggest that 'idleness' is an important but neglected condition of subjectivity in that era. Contrary to familiar stereotypes of 'the Victorians' as characterized by speed, work, and mechanized travel, this books asserts a counter-narrative in which certain writers embraced idleness in travel as a radical means to 're-subjectification' and the assertion of a 'late-Romantic' sensibility. Attentive to the historical and literary continuities between 'Romantic' and 'Victorian', the book reconstructs the Victorian discourse on idleness. It draws on an interdisciplinary range of theorists and brings together a fresh selection of accounts viewed through the lens of cultural studies as well as accounts of publication history and author biography. Travel texts from different genres (by writers such as Anna Mary Howitt, Jerome K. Jerome and George Gissing) are brought together as representing the different facets of the spectrum of idleness in the Victorian context.
For centuries, travel was an important part of a gardener's initial and continuing professional training. Educational journeys to parks and gardens at home and abroad were consistently recorded in lengthy reports and articles for professional journals. The travel report by Hans Jancke (1850-1920), a court gardener who served the Prussian kings in Potsdam, Germany, is typical of this genre. Jancke's manuscript, which until now remained unpublished, describes his 1874-1875 apprenticeship at Knowsley, the seat of the Earl of Derby near Liverpool, England.
'No sea voyage can be dull for a man who has an eye for the ever-changing sea and sky, the waves, the wind and the way of a ship upon the water.' So observes H.W. 'Bill' Tilman in this account of two lengthy voyages in which dull intervals were few and far between. In 1966, after a succession of eventful and successful voyages in the high latitudes of the Arctic, Tilman and his pilot cutter Mischief head south again, this time with the Antarctic Peninsula, Smith Island and the unclimbed Mount Foster in their sights. Mischief goes South is an account of a voyage marred by tragedy and dogged by crew trouble from the start. Tilman gives ample insight into the difficulties associated with his selection of shipmates and his supervision of a crew, as he wryly notes, 'to have four misfits in a crew of five is too many'. The second part of this volume contains the author's account of a gruelling voyage south, an account left unwritten for ten years for lack of time and energy. Originally intended as an expedition to the remote Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, this 1957 voyage evolved into a circumnavigation of Africa, the unplanned consequence of a momentary lapse in attention by an inexperienced helmsman. The two voyages described in Mischief goes South covered 43,000 miles over twenty-five months spent at sea and, while neither was deemed successful, published together they give a fine insight into Tilman's character.
First published in 1735, this account focuses on the customs, food, languages and religions of the peoples in the islands and settlements visited. It also has remarks on the gold, ivory and slave trades.
'See my hand up-tipped, learn the secret of my human heart...' Soaring, freewheeling snapshots of life on the road across America, from the Beat writer who inspired a generation. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.
Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was a war hero whose exploits in Crete are legendary, and above all he is widely acclaimed as the greatest travel writer of our times, notably for his books about his walk across pre-war Europe, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water; he was a self-educated polymath, a lover of Greece and the best company in the world. Artemis Cooper has drawn on years of interviews and conversations with Paddy and his closest friends as well as having complete access to his archives. Her beautifully crafted biography portrays a man of extraordinary gifts - no one wore their learning so playfully, nor inspired such passionate friendship.
This eight-volume set in two parts gives voice to some intrepid women travellers touring post-Napoleonic France. The volumes are facsimile editions and are introduced and edited by experts in their field.
'One of the most fascinating travel books of all time' Times Literary Supplement 'He could not have been more 'modern' if he had been born in the twentieth century' Evening Standard Ibn Battuta was the only medieval traveller who is known to have visited the lands of every Muhammadan ruler of his time and the extent of his journeys is estimated to be at least 75,000 miles. His work presents a descriptive account of Muhammadan society in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, which illustrates, among other things, how wide the sphere of influence of the Muslim merchants was. Ibn Battuta's interest in places was subordinate to his interest in people and his geographical knowledge was gained entirely from personal experience. For his details he relied exclusively on his memory, cultivated by the system of a theological education. This edition, translated afresh from the Arabic text, provides extensive notes which enable the journeys to be followed in detail. Important historical and religious background to the Travels is also added by H. A. R. Gibb.
Charles R. Cockerell (1788-1863) was one of the most significant nineteenth-century British architects and a major player in the cultural shift from the Georgian eighteenth to the Victorian nineteenth century. Charles R. Cockerell (1788-1863) was one of the most significant nineteenth-century British architects and a major player in the cultural shift from the Georgian eighteenth to the Victorian nineteenth century. Cockerell's travelsin the eastern Mediterranean between 1810 and 1817 were the formative experience of his life. His forty letters from this period, held in the archives of the Royal Institute of British Architects and published here for the first time, give crucial day-to-day insights into his actions, thoughts and feelings in relation to the intricate histories of the re-discovery and sales of the Aegina and Bassae marbles and, equally importantly, illuminate his hugely significant work on temple architecture and sculpture in mainland Greece, the great cities of Asia Minor, and the significant temples of Sicily. Drawing on these letters, and on some 150 unpublished letters sent by his friends while they were all in Greece and now held in the British Museum, this book elucidates what Cockerell did and why by analyzing his methods of work and their significance. It discusses Cockerell's aesthetic and conceptual development during his time abroad, particularly his influential part in the changing vision of Greek sculpture and architecture, from Winkelmann's static ideal to one rooted in dramatic tension and contextual contingency. The book unravels the emergence of Cockerell's crucial historical perspective and shows how he arrived at a new view of the ancient Greek past as made up of real lived lives, rather than just existing as a back drop to the present. By offeringa complete edition of the RIBA letters, this book fills a significant gap in our understanding of the thought and work of one of the formative spirits of nineteenth century visual historical culture. SUSAN PEARCE is Professor Emeritus of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. THERESA ORMROD has extensive experience in archival research, manuscript transcription and editing.
This eight-volume facsimile set comprises firsthand accounts of continental travel in the early nineteenth century. Anne Carter witnesses the monarchy's return to power and the capital in her visit to Paris, while Frances Jane Carey ranges all over the country and particularizes the customs and everyday existence of its people. Marianne Baillie ventures much further afield in her 1819 work, exploring France, Italy and Switzerland, among other nations, while Elizabeth Byron daringly rides a boat along the Loire, defying the gendarmes as she navigates the culture and history she finds on the river's banks as well as the contemporary political exchanges that threaten to stop her tour. Each writer is excited about visiting new realms while also affirming the differences between their own country's practices and landscapes and those they witness on their Continental tours.
This is a lavish pictorial record produced in collaboration with the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). It features 200 unique photographs taken by Isabella Bird that transport the reader to the China of the late 19th century. It includes supporting text by travel photography expert Debbie Ireland. Ammonite Press is proud to collaborate with the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in celebrating the achievements of Isabella Bird in this lavish pictorial record of her last great journey through China, in the closing years of the 19th century, with supporting text by travel photography expert Debbie Ireland. Bird was in her mid-sixties when she undertook her travels, to a land that was largely unknown and largely misunderstood in the West, where a woman travelling alone was greeted with incredulity and, occasionally, hostility. The highlight of her visit was journeying by boat and sedan chair to make a major tour of the valley of the Yangtze River and much beyond, right up to the border with Tibet.
Artists and writers from the colder climes of northern Europe have long felt the lure of the South of the continent. Goethe was revitalised by his encounters with Mediterranean culture on his journey to Italy. Nietzsche took flight southwards to begin his life anew, while DH Lawrence sought the health-giving southern sun in Sicily and Sardinia. But across the centuries, other outposts of the South have provoked a similar obsession. The South Seas cast a spell over figures such as Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin. The American Deep South and the southermost reaches of Latin America have been celebrated in the works of writers as diverse as John Muir, Jack Kerouac and Jorge Luis Borges. While the Great White South of the Antarctic has provided the backdrop to the darkest imaginings of Coleridge, Poe and Lovecraft. Even London, south of the river, is a place where novelists compete today to stake out a literary territory of their own. Moving between geography and mythology, literature and history, South is the first book to look at all things Southern in one volume. It examines the idea of the South as a symbol of freedom and escape, as well as the depository for many of our deepest unconscious fears and desires. It also charts the history of the South as the chosen location for the utopian visions of the North. From the beaches of Tahiti to the streets of Buenos Aires, from Naples to New Orleans, Merlin Coverley's brilliant and wide-ranging study throws light on the ways in which the idea of the South, in all its forms, has come to exert such a powerful hold on our collective imaginations.
Fanny Parkes, who lived in India between 1822 and 1846, was the ideal travel writer - courageous, indefatigably curious and determinedly independent. Her delightful journal traces her journey from prim memsahib, married to a minor civil servant of the Raj, to eccentric, sitar-playing Indophile, fluent in Urdu, critical of British rule and passionate in her appreciation of Indian culture. Fanny is fascinated by everything, from the trial of the thugs and the efficacy of opium on headaches to the adorning of a Hindu bride. To read her is to get as close as one can to a true picture of early colonial India - the sacred and the profane, the violent and the beautiful, the straight-laced sahibs and the more eccentric "White Mughals" who fell in love with India and did their best, like Fanny, to build bridges across cultures.
In 1793, Lord Macartney led the first British diplomatic mission to China in over one hundred years. This five-volume reset edition draws together British travel writings about China throughout the next century. The collection ends with the Boxer Uprising which marked the beginning of the end of informal British empire on the Chinese mainland.
We are obsessed with 'barbarians'. They are the 'not us', who don't speak our language, or 'any language', whom we depise, fear, invade and kill; for whom we feel compassion, or admiration, and an intense sexual interest; whom we often outdo in the barbarism we impute to them; and whose suspected resemblance to us haunts our introspections and imaginings. This book looks afresh at how we have confronted the idea of 'barbarism', in ourselves and others, from the conquest of the Americas to the Nazi Holocaust, through the voices of many writers, including Montaigne, Swift and Shaw.
Accounts of travel to England reached unprecedented levels of popularity in the German states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Competition therefore increased for travel writers to produce travelogues which offered the most authentic, original and vibrant picture of England. The wider range of narrative strategies which travellers consequently deployed increasingly drew on the emotional responses of their audience whether to serve a political purpose, show concern for the darker side to the Industrial Revolution or simply demonstrate the humanitarian interests of the travellers themselves. In this broad-ranging study, Alison E. Martin draws on a variety of travellers, men and women, canonical and forgotten, to chart the fascinating variety of styles and approaches which mark this highly interdisciplinary genre.
Early modern Europe was obsessed with borders and travel. It found, imagined and manufactured new borders for its travellers to cross. It celebrated and feared borders as places or states where meanings were charged and changed. In early modern Europe crossing a border could take many forms; sailing to the Americas, visiting a hospital or taking a trip through London's sewage system. Borders were places that people lived on, through and against. Some were temporary, like illness, while others claimed to be absolute, like that between the civilized world and the savage, but, as the chapters in this volume show, to cross any of them was an exciting, anxious and often a potentially dangerous act. Providing a trans-European interdisciplinary approach, the collection focuses on three particular aspects of travel and borders: change, status and function. To travel was to change, not only humans but texts, words, goods and money were all in motion at this time, having a profound influence on cultures, societies and individuals within Europe and beyond. Likewise, status was not a fixed commodity and the meaning and appearance of borders varied and could simultaneously be regarded as hostile and welcoming, restrictive and opportunistic, according to one's personal viewpoint. The volume also emphasizes the fact that borders always serve multiple functions, empowering and oppressing, protecting and threatening in equal measure. By using these three concepts as measures by which to explore a variety of subjects, Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe provides a fascinating new perspective from which to re-assess the way in which early modern Europeans viewed themselves, their neighbours and the wider world with which they were increasingly interacting.
The area of Middle Eastern geography and travel has attracted large numbers of scholars over the last fifty years. This new collection from Routledge features key articles from the field to create a major and continuing resource for scholars and students alike. The first volume concentrates on the Islamic geographers who mapped and made navigable the routes followed by later travellers. While travel, and in particular the rihla (or 'travel to Mecca') did not depend for its impetus on formal geography, both were highlighted in the travellers' diaries and travelogues which helped to make known and illuminate the boundaries of an expanding empire. Links between geography and the pilgrim routes to Mecca and Medina are particularly significant. Because of their huge significance in illuminating the medieval world of Islam, a very large number if articles deal with the travels of Ibn Jubayr (1145-1217) (Volume II) and Ibn Battuta (1304-368/9 or 1377) (Volume III), while Volume IV covers the post-medieval and early modern period.
This original, witty, illustrated study offers the first analytical history of the rise and development of literary tourism in nineteenth-century Britain, associated with authors from Shakespeare, Gray, Keats, Burns and Scott, the Bronte sisters, and Thomas Hardy. Invaluable for the student of travel and literature of the nineteenth century.
Peter Nasmyth has lived in and travelled extensively throughout Georgia for the last 32 years. Georgia in the Mountains of Poetry is his fascinating account of this historically rich and drama loving country, based on his travels and hundreds of wide-ranging interviews. Reprinted numerous times, it remains the only comprehensive book on Georgia's history and culture written for the general reader, now substantially revised and expanded for this new edition. Georgia - no larger than Ireland - is the most geographical diverse country in the world for its size. It borders on the Black Sea and contains the heart of the Caucasus mountains, as well as subtropical wetlands and semi-arid regions. Stone towers attest to its 3,000-year-old history, which has witnessed the thousand-year reign of the Bagratuni monarchy, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, a bitter civil war, the celebration of its independence in 1991 and the arrival of full democracy in 2012. Yet little is known about this remarkable nation outside its borders. Georgia in the Mountains of Poetry is the first book to provide its full inner story and remains essential reading for anyone interested in this fascinating region set on the historic far borders of Europe and Asia.
A remarkable nineteenth-century account of Istanbul - which begins with a dazzling description of the city gradually appearing through the fog as the author's ship approaches the harbour - Constantinople expertly combines personal anecdote, breathtaking visual observation and entertaining historical information. An invaluable record of the metropolis as it used to be - a fascinating crossroads between Eastern and Western civilization and one of the most cosmopolitan cities of its time - as well as a vivid example of a European tourist's reaction to it - part delight, part incomprehension - this book will provide an enriching read for lovers of history or those planning to visit Istanbul themselves.
A collection of writings on travels undertaken in the Victorian era. The texts collected in these volumes show how 19th century travel literature served the interests of empire by promoting British political and economic values that translated into manufacturing goods.
This an authoritative scholarly edition of Mansfield's camping journal, offering new understandings of her colonial life. Katherine Mansfield filled the first half of the 'Urewera Notebook' during a 1907 camping tour of the central North Island, shortly before she left New Zealand forever. Her camping notes offer a rare insight into her attitude to her country of birth, not in retrospective fiction but as a nineteen year old still living in the colony. This publication aims to be the first scholarly edition of the 'Urewera Notebook', providing an original transcription, a collation of the alternative readings and textual criticism of prior editors, and new information about the politics, people and places Mansfield encountered on her journey. As a whole, this edition challenges the debate that has focused on Mansfield's happiness or dissatisfaction throughout her last year in New Zealand to reveal a young writer closely observing aspects of a country hitherto beyond her experience and forming a complex critique of her colonial homeland. This is a new, more accurate transcription of the notebook, which can be read either as standalone text, or in tandem with commentary and textual notes. It's an introductory essay drawing on important new developments in New Zealand literary criticism, advances in historiography of the period and legal history, notably Judith Binney's Te Urewera: Encircled Lands (2009), Richard Boast's Buying the Land, Selling the Land (2008) and the Waitangi Tribunal Reports. It offers a route map, revised itinerary and authoritative annotation for the text, all based on fresh archival research of primary history material. It offers previously unpublished photographs from a Beauchamp family photograph album in the Alexander Turnbull Library and in the Ebbett Papers held at the Hawke's Bay Museum.
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 social, political and imperialist discourses in the nineteenth century. |
You may like...
|