A broad-based and accessible anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, ranging from the Americas to the Far East, from Ireland to Russia, and selected to represent the world-picture of 16th and 17th century readers in England. The editor provides a substantial introduction and headnotes to give students essential information and alert them to debates and discussions.

In the 1930s, the discourse of travel furthered widely divergent and conflicting ideologies--socialist, conservative, male chauvinist, and feminist--and the major travel writers of the time revealed as much in their texts. Evelyn Waugh was a declared conservative and fascist sympathizer; George Orwell was a dedicated socialist; Graham Greene wavered between his bourgeois instincts and his liberal left-wing sympathies; and Rebecca West maintained strong feminist and liberationist convictions.

Bernard Schweizer explores both the intentional political rhetoric and the more oblique, almost unconscious subtexts of Waugh, Orwell, Greene, and West in his groundbreaking study of travel writing's political dimension. Radicals on the Road demonstrates how historically and culturally conditioned forms of anxiety were compounded by the psychological dynamics of the uncanny, and how, in order to dispel such anxieties and to demarcate their ideological terrains, 1930s travelers resorted to dualistic discourses.

Yet any seemingly fixed dualism, particularly the opposition between the political left and the right, the dichotomy between home and abroad, or the rift between utopia and dystopia, was undermined by the rise of totalitarianism and by an increasing sense of global crisis--which was soon followed by political disillusionment. Therefore, argues Schweizer, traveling during the 1930s was more than just a means to engage the burning political questions of the day: traveling, and in turn travel writing, also registered the travelers' growing sense of futility and powerlessness in an especially turbulent world.

In the 1930s, the discourse of travel furthered widely divergent and conflicting ideologies--socialist, conservative, male chauvinist, and feminist--and the major travel writers of the time revealed as much in their texts. Evelyn Waugh was a declared conservative and fascist sympathizer; George Orwell was a dedicated socialist; Graham Greene wavered between his bourgeois instincts and his liberal left-wing sympathies; and Rebecca West maintained strong feminist and liberationist convictions.

Bernard Schweizer explores both the intentional political rhetoric and the more oblique, almost unconscious subtexts of Waugh, Orwell, Greene, and West in his groundbreaking study of travel writing's political dimension. Radicals on the Road demonstrates how historically and culturally conditioned forms of anxiety were compounded by the psychological dynamics of the uncanny, and how, in order to dispel such anxieties and to demarcate their ideological terrains, 1930s travelers resorted to dualistic discourses.

Yet any seemingly fixed dualism, particularly the opposition between the political left and the right, the dichotomy between home and abroad, or the rift between utopia and dystopia, was undermined by the rise of totalitarianism and by an increasing sense of global crisis--which was soon followed by political disillusionment. Therefore, argues Schweizer, traveling during the 1930s was more than just a means to engage the burning political questions of the day: traveling, and in turn travel writing, also registered the travelers' growing sense of futility and powerlessness in an especially turbulent world.

"One has to applaud the stylish confidence of the Blue Guide to Albania by Balkans expert James Pettifer. The guide provides a comprehensive account of the country's splendid archaeological sites and Ottoman heritage as well as less obvious points of interest" The Independent. NOTE that this is a print-on-demand edition, delivery may take approx. 3 weeks depending on the shipping address.

There is nothing quite like parrot pie for breakfast. First one must catch one's parrot, of course, and build the hearth to bake it, but that is all in a days work for the women you will meet in this riveting anthology, whose experiences in settling the wildernesses of the world challenged to the limits their spirit, resourcefulness, and even survival.

"The text describes the discovery of a very remarkable variant of the reported spoken work of Jesus Christ, which will be of interest to all Christians and scholars. To this day I recall my reaction upon first reading the concluding chapter of In the Shadow of Sinai', with its discussion of a remarkable variant of the reported spoken word of Jesus Christ. Brought up with a start, I read the marked passage again and quickly went to the Bible. Sure enough, the reading Matthew xii. 36 was different. But why? Surely those in charge of biblical exegesis would have known of the publication of the Gibson sister's text. And so began a small personal odyssey to bring to light, once again, this remarkable finding." -- Anthony Grahame, From the Foreword.

In A Journey through the West, Thomas Rodney writes vividly about flea-infested taverns, bad roads, drunken crew members, squatters, Indians sodden berths, food from the wild and treacherous waters. His is one of the most detailed early-nineteenth-century travel accounts. Rodney, a Revolutionary War patriot and veteran, had been active in Delaware politics and had served in the Continental Congress. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson appointed him as a land commissioner and a territorial judge in the newly formed Mississippi Territory. To assume his duties, Rodney and a small party traveled overland from Delaware across the length of southern Pennsylvania to Wheeling, (West) Virginia. From there, they boarded their newly constructed boat on the Ohio River and rowed, sailed, and drifted along the borders of (West) Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky. Finally they left the clear rapids of the Ohio and entered the muddy yet majestic Mississippi. They traveled southwesterly into a vast, exotic wilderness valley. The western shore of the Mississippi was still owned by Spain, and foreign soldiers were spotted. Under pressure to meet Rodney's deadline for arrival in Mississippi Territory, the travelers were grateful for the Mississippi's fast current. Yet in the journey's last days they were faced with adventures and with near disaster when their boat struck a snag and partially sank. Rodney kept a precise journal and sent letters to President Jefferson documenting his trek from the settled East through the barely chartered paths of the western wilderness. He hobnobbed with Meriwether Lewis, enjoyed the hospitality of Harman Blennerhassett, and received a tour of Cincinnati from Arthur St. Clair. Dwight Smith and Ray Swick have compiled, edited and annotated Rodney's story to present it in complete form for the first time. A Journey through the West, is both a travel adventure and a colorful glimpse into the life of his day.

In this rich exploration of the era of the Grand Tour, contributors from the fields of history, art history, literary history and theory, science history, and anthropology investigate the experiences of travelers and their ways of understanding and representing their encounters with the foreign. From the beginning of the seventeenth century through the early decades of the nineteenth century, the practice of the Grand Tour supplied a crucial point of reference for travel and imaginative geography in general. At the same time, concepts of pleasure and enjoyment became entangled with visual and verbal representations of that which was foreign. With chapters by Ken Arnold, Rosemary Bechler, Richard Hamblyn, Roy Porter, E. S. Shaffer, Nicholas Thomas, Tzvetan Todorov, Richard Wrigley, and the editors, Transports discusses a range of original topics. These include narrative orderings of travel; the classification of exotic objects; pastoral and paradisal topography in the paintings of Claude Lorrain; Beckford's invocations of China as he travels through Italy; volcanoes in the discourses of travel and geology; the experience of Rome; crossing boundaries and exceeding limits in travel and in the sublime; liberty and license in New Zealand; foreigners' responses to the high-velocity culture of London; and Byron's sublime impulse beyond the established bounds of the Grand Tour. Published for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art

This work examines the travel account of a German baroque author who journeyed in search of silk from Northern Germany, through Muscovy, to the court of Shah Safi in Isfahan.

Adam Olearius introduced Persian literature, history, and arts to the German-speaking public; his frank appraisal of Persian customs foreshadows the enlightened spirit of the eighteenth century (influencing Montesquieu's "Persian Letters" as well as Goethe's "West-Eastern Divan") and prepares the way for German Romanticism's infatuation with Persian poetry.

Brancaforte focuses on the visual and discursive nexus uniting Olearius's text with the numerous engravings that supplement the book. The emphasis falls on contextualized readings of Olearius's decorative frontispieces and his new and improved map of Persia and the Caspian Sea, as expressions of early modern subjectivity.

In 1839 a journalist for the New Orleans Picayune, Matthew C. Field, joined a company of merchants and tourists headed west on the Santa Fe Trail. Leaving Independence, Missouri, early in July "with a few wagons and a carefree spirit," Field recorded his vivid impressions of travel westward on the Santa Fe Trail and, on the return trip, eastward along the Cimarron Route. Written in verse in his journal and in eighty-five articles later published in the Picayune, Field's observations offer the modern reader a unique glimpse of life in the settlements of Mexico and on the Santa Fe Trail.

Four journeys by early Americans Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, William Byrd II, and Dr. Alexander Hamilton recount the vivid physical and psychological challenges of colonial life. Essential primary texts in the study of early American cultural life, they are now conveniently collected in a single volume.

In 1899 a chartered yacht, the Casco, brought to Honolulu Robert Louis Stevenson and his family. The writer was then already at the height of his popularity in Europe and the United States. He spent the next six months and another, shorter period in 1893 in the Hawaiian Islands, participating in the life of the "royal crowd" and enjoying the best health of a lifetime plagued with illness. Travels in Hawaii brings together many of the diverse works from a romantic interlude in the career of this famous writer.

Alexis de Tocqueville visited Ireland in the company of his good friend Gustave de Beaumont in July and August of 1835. At the time of his visit, Tocqueville had just acquired an international reputation with the publication of the first two volumes of his celebrated Democracy in America. His profound interest in the great transition from aristocracy to democracy then taking place in the western world including Ireland was given special point in his observations. Of equal interest to Tocqueville were the problem of poverty, the pace of religion in civil society, and the intriguing ambivalence of the Irish peasant toward the law. The notes on conversations, letters to family, and vivid descriptions Tocqueville wrote on his visit to Ireland bring the problems of pre- and early-famine Ireland into sharp focus. Tocqueville was welcome everywhere, in the mansions of the Protestant bishops and in the simple homes of priests whom he accompanied on their rounds through their parishes. His visits to the poorhouse, the university, the sites of the Assizes and the Office of the Clerk of the Crown of Ireland are among the recorded visits and impressions of his journey. He noted the conditions of the towns and countryside, saw that people starved amid plenty and was told repeatedly that in Ireland the aristocracy made the problems and the poor sustained each other. He recorded conversations in their entirety. He made clear notes on what he saw and heard, often noting his own reactions. The diary and the letters that he wrote to his family about his visit to Ireland provide a rare insight into one of the seminal minds of the nineteenth century. This edition of his journal is perhaps the first serious scholarly effort to place Tocqueville's journey to Ireland in its proper intellectual, geographical, and historical context. The forty-seven episodes, with the exception of three, have been arranged in chronological order according to their occurrence. This volume includes a map of Irish roads originally produced in the atlas accompanying the ""Second Report of the Railway Commissioners, Ireland, 1838.

In 1865, Lord Dufferin, a young Anglo-Irish peer, commissioned the schooner Foam and sailed to the Arctic. The lively style and humour of his account of the voyage won instant success and the book became an Victorian bestseller.

'A book more interesting in its subject, or more satisfactory in its execution, is seldom issued from the press. The country of which it treats, and the circumstances under which it was produced, equal each other in singularity.' So writes the translator of this work, first published in English in 1802, and here republished in facsimile, complete with maps and original engravings, in two volumes. Baron Dominique Vivant Denon (1747-1825) French illustrator and government official, accompanied Napoleon on his Egyptian campagin in 1798. His journal combines an extraordinary account of military endeavour, with a survey of the country and its people as seen through the eyes of a keen and sensitive observer. The resultant work, enhanced with numerous illustrations by the author, holds a unique place in both European and Arabic historical studies. The author later became director general of French museums, and was the first administrator to organise collections in the Louvre. The republication of his work will be widely welcomed.

A hybrid of history and biography, Maurice Collis's The Land of the Great Image concerns a little-known Portuguese friar abroad in early seventeenth-century Asia. The book chronicles the great diplomatic coup of Friar Manrique's career, opening the kingdom of Arakan, now Burma (land of the "great image" of the Buddha) to the Church and to Portuguese trade, Dispatched from Goa, capital of the now almost forgotten Portuguese empire in Asia, Manrique made his way across and around the Bay of Bengal, surviving shipwreck, tigers, and pirates, to reach the court of King Thiri-thu-dhamma. And all along Manrique's way the author waits at every turn with another curiosity, another historical tidbit for the reader to relish. Collis notes how trials of the Inquisition were run (which too had set up shop in Goa); the luxury enjoyed by Europeans in the East; what was served for dinner at court; how elephant warfare was waged; and what went into a potion magically brewed to bring glory to King Thiri-thu-dhamina (the hearts of 2,000 white doves, 4,000 white cows, and 6,000 of his subjects).

A sequel to The Cyclades, a compilation of late-19th-century travel writings (with an archaeological/ethnographical bias) centred on the Greek Dodecanese islands (including Rhodes, Nissiros, Tilos, Karpathos, Patmos, and Astypalea). The authors are the British explorer J. Theodore Bent (1852-1897), devotedly supported by his wife Mabel Virginia Anna (1847-1929). Theodore met Mabel shortly after coming down from Oxford in 1875 and they married two years later. They were of independent character and means and spent the too few years until Theodore's early death on a breathless sequence of annual travels to the Eastern Mediterranean, Africa, and Southern Arabia. Theodore's publications are referenced still by archaeologists and scholars working on sites or regions such as 'Great Zimbabwe', Aksum, the Wadi Hadramaut, the Cilician littoral, and, of course, the Greek islands. Bent's first successful monograph was based on two winters spent in the Cycladic isles (1882/3 and 1883/4). From the start the couple kept notebooks from which all Theodore's later lectures and literature sprang. His The Cyclades, or Life Among the Insular Greeks was published in 1885 and has been rarely out of print since. It remains one of the most delightful accounts in English of the region, and few serious travellers and tourists to these islands fail to discover it. In the year The Cyclades was published the Bents moved a little east and explored the islands now commonly referred to as the Greek Dodecanese. Unforeseen circumstances obliged the explorers to curtail their activities before Theodore's writings on the area could be edited into a monograph to complement his earlier bestseller. Theodore's Dodecanesian output was channelled instead into a wide range of articles, while Mabel completed three volumes of her personal Chronicles on their daily travels and travails. Bent never presented his Dodecanese researches to the public in a compendium, the way he had, so brilliantly, for the Cyclades. Now, 130 years later, his The Dodecanese can appear for the first time: a collection of reminiscences and studies on these sunny, blue-surrounded, and delightful islands.

'If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.' William Godwin, the author's future husband, was not alone in admiring Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Wollstonecraft's most popular book during her lifetime. Not easy to categorize, it is both an arresting travel book and a moving exploration of her personal and political selves. Wollstonecraft set out for Scandinavia just two weeks after her first suicide attempt, on a mission from the lover whose affections she doubted, to recover his silver on a ship that had gone missing. With her baby daughter and a nursemaid, she travelled across the dramatic landscape and wrote sublime descriptions of the natural world, and the events and people she encountered. What emerges most vividly is Wollstonecraft's courage and ability to look beyond her own suffering to the turmoil around her in revolutionary Europe, and a better future. This edition includes further material on the silver ship, Wollstonecraft's personal letters to Imlay during her trip, an extract from Godwin's memoir, and a selection of contemporary reviews. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'Oh! Monsieur is Persian? That's most extraordinary! How can someone be Persian?' Two Persian travellers, Usbek and Rica, arrive in Paris just before the death of Louis XIV and in time to witness the hedonism and financial crash of the Regency. In their letters home they report on visits to the theatre and scientific societies, and observe the manners and flirtations of polite society, the structures of power and the hypocrisy of religion. Irony and bitter satire mark their comparison of East and West and their quest for understanding. Unsettling news from Persia concerning the female world of the harem intrudes on their new identities and provides a suspenseful plot of erotic jealousy and passion. This pioneering epistolary novel and work of travel-writing opened the world of the West to its oriental visitors and the Orient to its Western readers. This is the first English translation based on the original text, revealing this lively work as Montesquieu first intended. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The superb classic memoir from a dazzlingly eccentric and endlessly fascinating author and feminist icon - a woman very much ahead of her time - including her time spent on the glorious island of Skiathos 'A happy, hilarious book' Daily Express Nancy Spain was one of the most celebrated - and notorious - writers and broadcasters of the 50s and 60s. Witty, controversial and brilliant, she lived openly as a lesbian (sharing a household with her two lovers and their various children) and was frequently litigated against for her newspaper columns - Evelyn Waugh successfully sued her for libel... twice. Nancy Spain had a deep love of the Mediterranean. So it was no surprise when, in the 1960s, she decided to build a place of her own on the Greek island of Skiathos. With an impractical nature surpassed only by her passion for the project, and despite many obstacles, she gloriously succeeded. This classic memoir is infused with all Spain's chaotic brilliance, zest for life and single-minded pursuit of a life worth living. Perfect for fans of A PLACE IN THE SUN and ESCAPE TO THE COUNTRY 'Full of fun, and that zest of intelligence that never left her' Sunday Times

Maugham spent the winter months of 1919-20 travelling 1500 miles up the Yangtze river. Always more interested in people than places he gave full rein to a sensitive and philosophical nature: ON A CHINESE SCREEN is the refined accumulation of the countless scraps of paper on which he had taken notes.

A series of acute and finely crafted sketches of Westerners who are culturally out of their depth in the immensity of the Chinese civilisation. Within the narrow confines of their colonial milieu, missionaries, consuls, army officers and company managers are all gently ridiculed as they persist obliviously with the life they know

Goethe’s account of his passage through Italy from 1786 to 1788 is a great travel chronicle as well as a candid self-portrait of a genius in the grip of spiritual crisis.

In 1719, Jean-Francois-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, son of a Paris lawyer, set sail for Louisiana with a commission as a lieutenant after a year in Quebec. During his peregrinations over the next eighteen years, Dumont came to challenge corrupt officials, found himself in jail, eked out a living as a colonial subsistence farmer, survived life-threatening storms and epidemics, encountered pirates, witnessed the 1719 battle for Pensacola, described the 1729 Natchez Uprising, and gave account of the 1739-1740 French expedition against the Chickasaw. Dumont's adventures, as recorded in his 1747 memoir conserved at the Newberry Library, underscore the complexity of the expanding French Atlantic world, offering a singular perspective on early colonialism in Louisiana. His life story also provides detailed descriptions and illustrations of the peoples and environment of the lower Mississippi Valley. This English translation of the unabridged memoir features a new introduction, maps, and a biographical dictionary to enhance the text. Dumont emerges here as an important colonial voice and brings to vivid life the French Atlantic.