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.

Samuel Johnson and James Boswell spent the autumn of 1773 touring through the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland as far west as the islands of Skye, Raasay, Coll, Mull, Inchkenneth and Iona. Both kept detailed notes of their impressions, and later published separate accounts of their journey. These works contain some of the finest pieces of travel writing ever produced: they are also magnificent historical documents as well as portraits of two extraordinary men of letters. Together they paint a vivid picture of a society which was still almost unknown to the Europe of the Enlightenment. Entertaining, profound, and marvellously readable, they are a valuable chronicle of a lost age and a fascinating people. For the first time, Ronald Black's edition brings together Johnson's and Boswell's accounts of each of the six stages of the two men's journey - Lowlands, Skye, Coll, Mull and back to the mainland. Illustrated with prints by Thomas Rowlandson, it includes a critical introduction, translations of the Latin texts and brief notes.

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.

In mid to late March 1913, as the storm clouds of the Great War which was to claim his life gathered, Edward Thomas took a bicycle ride from Clapham to the Quantock Hills. The poet recorded his journey through his beloved South Country and his account was published as In Pursuit of Spring in 1914. Regarded as one of his most important prose works, it stands as an elegy for a world now lost. What is less well-known is that Thomas took with him a camera, and photographed much of what he saw, noting the locations on the back of the prints. These have been kept in archives for many years and will now be published for the very first time in the book. Thomas journeys through Guildford, Winchester, Salisbury, across the Plain, to the Bristol Channel, recording the poet's thoughts and feelings as winter ends.

Isaac Titsingh was head of the Japanese station of the Dutch East India Company 1780-94. He was a career merchant, but unusual in having a classical education and training as a physician. He could also read Chinese. In Japan, his impact was enormous. He became a friend and confidant of the shogun's father-in-law, the famously wise but wily Shimazu Shigehide, almost causing war between father and son-in-law. He also attempted the project of equipping Japan with an ocean-going fleet. However, he left Japan disappointed in the ability of the country to embrace change. After many years in India he settled in Paris, where he wrote down his experiences. It is one of the most exciting journals of the period and reveals the almost unknown world of eighteenth-century Japan, discussing politics, history, poetry and rituals. The Illustrations of Japan appeared posthumously in 1822 in English and French. This fully annotated edition makes the original English version available for the first time in 180 years.

Shortlisted for the NSW Translation Prize Discover a realm of travel writing undreamed of in the West - a richly literary tradition extending through a thousand years and more, whose individual works together weave a dense and beautiful brocade of repeated patterns and motifs, tones and textures. Here are asobi, the wandering performers who prefigured geisha; travelling monks who sleep on pillows of grass and listen to the autumnal insects; and a young girl who passionately longs to travel to the capital and read more stories. Taking in songs, dramas, tales, diaries and above all, poetry, this wonderful anthology roams over mountains and along perilous shores to show how profoundly travel inspired the Japanese imagination.

Red Sands, the follow-up to Caroline Eden's multi-award-winning Black Sea, is a reimagining of traditional travel writing using food as the jumping-off point to explore Central Asia. In a quest to better understand this vast heartland of Asia, Caroline navigates a course from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the sun-ripened orchards of the Fergana Valley. A book filled with human stories, forgotten histories and tales of adventure, Caroline is a reliable guide using food as her passport to enter lives, cities and landscapes rarely written about. Lit up by emblematic recipes, Red Sands is an utterly unique book, bringing in universal themes that relate to us all: hope, hunger, longing, love and the joys of eating well on the road.

This book revisits the trajectory of one section of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s famous pedestrian excursion from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. This S.O.E. officer walked into Hungary as a youth of 19 at Easter of 1934 and left Transylvania in August. “A cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene” as the New York Times obituary put it in 2011, this intrepid traveller published his experiences half a century later. Between the Woods and the Water covers the part of the epic journey on foot from the middle Danube to the Iron Gates. It has been a bestseller since it was first published in 1986. O’Sullivan reveals the identity of the interesting characters in the travelogue, interviewing several of their descendants and meticulously recreating Leigh Fermor’s time spent among the Hungarian nobility. Leigh Fermor’s recollections of his 1934 contacts are at once a proof of a lifelong attraction for the aristocracy, and a confirmation of his passionate love of history and understanding of the region. Rich with photos and other rare documents on places and persons both from the 1930s and today, the book offers a compelling social and political history of the period and the area. Described by Professor Norman Stone as “a major work of Hungarian social archaeology,” this book provides a portrait of Hungary and Transylvania on the brink of momentous change.

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.

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.

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, import-export business, jobs, and power. Many of the works collected here become the basis for numerous works of popular and serious literature by Arnold, Dickens, Thackeray, Haggard, Conrad, Kipling and many others.

The Romantic Period saw the advance of the massive British imperial expansion that was to make it dominant for most of the 19th century. There was a corresponding expansion in travel writings, which, highly popular in their own time, seemed to bring exotic realms within the grasp of the reading public and were a source for ethnographic and cultural information about other societies.

This second set in The Collected Writings of Daniel Defoe brings together some of his best-loved and most ambitious works, together with others which reveal the extraordinary range of his intellectual interests Three volumes are devoted to major historical writings by Defoe. His Memoirs of the Church of Scotland and History of the Union of Great Britain are included here.

Isabella Bird's account of her journeys in Korea in 1898 represents one of the very rare accounts of that country in the latter part of the nineteenth century. At that time Korea was virtually a forbidden land and had only been open to foreigners for about ten years. It was and had been under Chinese influence for centuries. The trip was very difficult but so fascinating that, true to character, Isabella adored it. She undertook many arduous jouneys by land and river, observed the breathtakingly beautiful countryside, visited the Buddhist monasteries and had many audiences with the Korean king and his soon to be assassinated queen. While Isabella was on her journey the Japanese invaded Korea and she had to leave hastily, ending up in China, penniless.

In 1869, Hayyim Habshush, a Yemeni Jew, accompanied the European orientalist Joseph Halévy on his archaeological tour of Yemen. Twenty years later, Habshush wrote A Vision of Yemen, a memoir of their travels, that provides a vivid account of daily life, religion, and politics. More than a simple travelogue, it is a work of trickster-tales, thick anthropological descriptions, and reflections on Jewish–Muslim relations. At its heart lies the fractious and intimate relationship between the Yemeni coppersmith and the "enlightened" European scholar and the collision between the cultures each represents. The book thus offers a powerful indigenous response to European Orientalism. This edition is the first English translation of Habshush's writings from the original Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew and includes an accessible historical introduction to the work. The translation maintains Habshush's gripping style and rich portrayal of the diverse communities and cultures of Yemen, offering a potent mixture of artful storytelling and cultural criticism, suffused with humor and empathy. Habshush writes about the daily lives of men and women, rich and poor, Jewish and Muslim, during a turbulent period of war and both Ottoman and European imperialist encroachment. With this translation, Alan Verskin recovers the lost voice of a man passionately committed to his land and people.

This collection of Daniel Defoe's travel and historical writings brings together some of his best-loved and most ambitious works, together with others which reveal the extraordinary range of his intellectual interests. His Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, which came out between 1724 and 1726, drew on Defoe's own travels throughout England and Scotland - often as a political agent and spy.

'German military figures had a certain terrifying glamour,' wrote Patrick Leigh Fermor, recalling views about Germany during the First World War. When, he asked, had the bristling general replaced the 'philosophers and composers and bandsmen and peasants and students drinking and singing in harmony?' The enchanted forest, symbol of Romantic idealism and traditional folktales, had given way to other images of Germany and Germans. By following Leigh Fermor, and over eighty other British and North American literary visitors to Germany, this original anthology shows how different generations of English-speakers have depicted this country. Starting in the sixteenth century with some of the earliest travel accounts in English, Brian Melican presents a wide range of writing about, or set in, Germany. Letters from Johnsonians such as Boswell and Garrick and the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth; the journals of Herman Melville and Henry James; ante bellum fiction by authors such as D. H. Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford: all of this and more reveals an oft-forgotten richness in encounters with Germany before the horrors of the twentieth century. Work by Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender and wartime reporters through the 1940s exposes the country's darkest moments, while sometimes surprising takes on the conflict emerge from authors inside Germany with unique perspectives such as Christabel Bielenberg and Michael Howard. Post-war writing ranges from the spy fiction of Len Deighton to the writers who dissected post-Nazi Germany. The diversity of writing about Germany today encompasses light-hearted accounts and more searching passages taken from an eclectic selection of authors. Recorded and imagined images of Germany have changed dramatically across the centuries. Yet views on many of its features especially its cities and rivers, customs and cuisine have often remained constant. This anthology, with extensive introductions and annotations, offers a range of opinions, both typical and atypical of their time, and invites readers to venture beyond the usual discussion about this country at the very heart of Europe.

The Romantic Period saw the advance of the massive British imperial expansion that was to make it dominant for most of the 19th century. There was a corresponding expansion in travel writings, which, highly popular in their own time, seemed to bring exotic realms within the grasp of the reading public and were a source for ethnographic and cultural information about other societies.

The Duke of Pirajno arrived in North Africa in 1924. For the next eighteen years his experiences as a doctor in Libya, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somaliland, provided him with opportunities and experiences rarely given to a European. He brings us stories of noble chieftains and celebrated courtesans, of Berber princes and Tuareg entertainers, of giant elephants, and a lioness who fell in love with the author.

INTRODUCED BY CAROLINE EDEN, award-winning author of Black Sea, Red Sands and Samarkand 'Medieval pomp, splendour, and picturesqueness... a life that one can hardly even realize.' In 1912, Ella R. Christie - a veteran Scottish traveller who had made expeditions to Kashmir, Tibet, Malaya, Borneo, China, Korea and Japan - steamed across the Caspian Sea to explore Central Asia. Her travels through the Russian Empire took her to the Silk Road cities of Tashkent and Samarkand, and she became the first British woman to visit the Khanate of Khiva. Eschewing the cloak and dagger intrigues of a previous generation of Great Game spies, Christie was a meticulous observer of the everyday - whether meeting khans, dining with generals or vividly chronicling market life - shortly before war and revolution swept that world away.

In 1912, a young D.H. Lawrence left England for the first time and travelled to northern Italy. He spent nearly a year on the shores of Lake Garda, lodged in elegantly decaying houses set amid lemon groves and surrounded by the fading life of traditional Italy. This is a travel book unlike any other, where landscapes and people are backdrops to Lawrence's deeper wanderings - into philosophy, opinion, life, nature, religion and the fate of man. With sensuous descriptions of late harvests, darkening days and fragile ancient traditions, Twilight in Italy is suffused with nostalgia and premonition. For, looming over the idyll of rural Italy hover dark spectres: the arrival of the industrial age and the brewing storm of World War I, upheavals that would change the face of Europe forever.

In 1866, worn out by fighting in the American Civil War, the writer Samuel Hazard arrived in Cuba to begin work on a guidebook to the island. Over a period of several months, as his health recovered, he travelled throughout what was then still a Spanish colony, observing and recording daily life. The result is one of the most complete and evocative portrayals of colonial Cuban life, written in the decade when the first concerted struggle for independence was already under way. Hazard's sympathies were clearly with the pro-independence "patriots", but his main aim was to produce a complete overview of the island's sights and customs, aimed at visitors. He is informative on hotels, restaurants, and transport and sightseeing, but is also intrigued by the people he meets and the idiosyncrasies of Cuban social life. Illustrated with hundreds of the author's own sketches, "Cuba with Pen and Pencil" takes the reader through the historic fortresses and mansions of Havana, the tropical city of Santiago de Cuba and the plantations and mountains of the island's countryside. With a keen and often quirky eye for detail, Hazard explores the sugar industry - still largely powered by slave labour - and Cuba's other economic activities. He describes the island's flora and fauna, its varied topography, and its varied social life, ranging from upper-class balls to slave compounds. First published in 1871 and now reissued with an introduction by acclaimed historian Richard Gott, "Cuba with Pen and Pencil" is a unique portrait of an island and a society on the eve of fundamental and historic change.

This book is described as being 'in a genre all its own'. Truly it is. Simeon the cat has two ambitions. the first is to become famous, which is why he writes this book, and the second is to meet the White Rabbit. While pursuing these goals, he takes time to air his views on Oxford, Mr Bean, the internet, on how the British do not value words, and on a while host of other things. He guides us through Oxford's history, landmarks and legends, and provides an entertaining and original introduction to the city. Over-confident in his ability to reason, he enjoys talking with academics and students. All use their real names in the story - Profs of Physics and Medieval German, and postgraduate students. He creates havoc in Blackwell's, discovers an unpublished poem. by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and lays plans to take the grin off the face of the Cheshire Cat. Does he really meet the White Rabbit? It seems he does! Oxford is unique in so many ways. It is the only city in the world where one is in and out of stories all the time. Morse, Mr Bean, Bridgehead, Dickens, Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter. There is no book that does the job of this one in linking story to reality. It's laugh-out-loud funny, in a dry, sixth-form-humour way. You'll love it!

"No city preserves the memory and signature of so many men. The past and the dead have here as it were, a corporate life..." Edward Thomas is now best known for the poetry he wrote between 1914 and his untimely death at Arras in 1917. But during his lifetime his reputation was based on the extraordinary body of travel writing, reviews, and critical books he produced against intense deadline pressures in order to feed his growing family. His travel books, most notably Oxford and The South Country have had an enduring appeal for all lovers the English countryside. Through these and his later poems, Thomas has come to be regarded as the quintessential English writer. And yet he was Welsh, observing and loving England as a semi-outsider. Oxford, published three years after he completed his degree, was Thomas's first major commission. In it, he gives an evocative account of Oxford's architecture, history, and customs, drawing on personal memories of undergraduate life at Lincoln College. His prose was written to accompany the paintings of Fulleylove, who shared his interest in juxtaposing Oxford's grandeur with the ordinary details of domestic life. Between them, the artist and the writer catch the beauty of this "city within the heart" at a pivotal moment in pre-war history, and give it to us as though it could last forever in that form. In a Critical Introduction, Lucy Newlyn examines the importance of Oxford as a historical record. But she also argues that it is a piece of vivid experimental prose, in which much of Thomas's later greatness is anticipated. Her analysis of his prose style shows how Thomas tries out the voices of the past, defining his own particular brand of Modernism by creating a kind of "bricolage" through allusion and imitation. Running steadily beneath the text's elaborate ventriloquism is the quiet ruminative voice of the authentic Thomas, edging ever closer to the simple speech rhythms of his lyric poems. This is the first critical edition of Oxford, giving long overdue credit to the book as an early masterpiece in the Thomas oeuvre.

"The spread of the towns, the disforesting of the hills, and other causes are conspiring to destroy many of the conditions which made the Riviera of former days so happy a resort for the lovers of Nature. But there will always be much to observe and much to study in so favoured a region." Quirky, erudite and eminently readable, the fifty-four essays comprising Riviera Nature Notes give an astonishingly clear picture of plant and animal life in the South of France at the turn of the twentieth century--not to mention a fascinating insight into the social mores of the time. A hundred years later the book is as fresh, topical and inviting as when it was first published. Preferring to remain anonymous as a naturalist, not only out of modesty but to guard the integrity of his liturgical writings, its clergyman author speaks of olives and pines, myrtles and figs, mosquitoes and rare butterflies--to name but a few of his subjects--with such passion and verve as to bring the land from the Ligurian coastline to the Maritime Alps vividly alive. Published first at the expense of Sir Thomas Hanbury, master of the famed gardens at La Mortola, Italy and benefactor of the Royal Horticultural Society's sixty-acre estate at Wisley, a second edition incorporated photographs taken by the temperamental and extravagant heiress Ellen Wilmot, in many ways a greater figure in the plant world than her close contemporary Gertrude Jekyll. Our anonymous author moved in the best horticultural and botanical circles, wore his learning lightly, and unusually for the time, spoke to the common man and the general reader on equal terms. With an engaging, sometimes acerbic, always entertaining and informative voice speaking effortlessly across the years, he will once again garner admirers among nature lovers, gardeners and travellers alike.