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.

Beautiful, empowering and exhilarating: She Explores is a spirited celebration of female bravery and courage, and an inspirational companion for any woman who wants to travel the world on her own terms. Combining breathtaking travel photography with compelling personal narratives, She Explores shares the stories of 40 diverse women on unforgettable journeys in nature: women who live out of vans, trucks, and vintage trailers, hiking the wild, cooking meals over campfires, and sleeping under the stars. Women biking through the countryside, embarking on an unknown road trip, or backpacking through the outdoors with their young children in tow. Complementing the narratives are practical tips and advice for women planning their own trips, including preparing for a solo hike, must-haves for a road-trip kitchen, planning ahead for unknown territory, and telling your own story. A visually stunning and emotionally satisfying collection for any woman craving new landscapes and adventure. Gale Straub is the founder of She-Explores.com, a media platform for curious, creative women who love travel and outdoor adventure. For any woman who has ever been called outdoorsy... or who wants to be. Beautiful, empowering, and exhilarating, She Explores will inspire even the most outdoor-averse woman to connect with the landscape, take a leap of faith and find her community. Makes a wonderful birthday, graduation, or new going away gift for an adventurous woman. Great coffee table book to spark conversation about travel and exploration.

A classic of travel writing, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is Eric Newby's iconic account of his journey through one of the most remote and beautiful wildernesses on earth. It was 1956, and Eric Newby was earning an improbable living in the chaotic family business of London haute couture. Pining for adventure, Newby sent his friend Hugh Carless the now-famous cable - CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE? - setting in motion a legendary journey from Mayfair to Afghanistan, and the mountains of the Hindu Kush, north-east of Kabul. Inexperienced and ill prepared (their preparations involved nothing more than some tips from a Welsh waitress), the amateurish rogues embark on a month of adventure and hardship in one of the most beautiful wildernesses on earth - a journey that adventurers with more experience and sense may never have undertaken. With good humour, sharp wit and keen observation, the charming narrative style of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush would soon crystallise Newby's reputation as one of the greatest travel writers of all time. One of the greatest travel classics from one of Britain's best-loved travel writers, this edition includes new photographs, an epilogue from Newby's travelling companion, Hugh Carless, and a prologue from one of Newby's greatest proponents, Evelyn Waugh.

Often amusing, sometimes romantic or fraught with danger, these 30 short stories are about local people, spectacular places and the special wildlife the author sets out to find. The stories include seeking out Arabian Oryx on the searing plains of the Saudi desert; eiderdown collecting in Iceland, crouching in swirling clouds and darkness on a knife-edge ridge in the rugged Madeiran mountains and swimming with Grey Seals off the Pembroke coast. The author describes incredible encounters with spectacular animals from lumbering manatees and dangerous rhinos to unforgettable experiences such as being led by a honeyguide with a Kenyan Dorobo tribesman to the nest of wild bees and watching cranes tip-toeing their courtship dances. These hugely entertaining tales visit places as diverse as the Florida Everglades, England's New Forest, Iceland's offshore islands, the Empty Quarter of the Saudi Desert, the tiny remnants of Jordan's Azraq wetland and the impressive oak dehesas of Extremadura. Sit back and visit the world!

This collection will bring together a selection of works by travellers studying natural philosophy as well as natural history. The set will cover a wide geographical spread, including accounts from Australia, Asia, Africa and South America. The style of writing and subject matter are also diverse. Some offer more reflective writing, mingling scientific observation with romantic musing and high style, others have a more specific focus - such as Bates description of Mimicry in butterflies in Bali. The first volume includes a general introduction to the collection and each succeeding volume also includes a new introduction by the editor, which places each work in its historical and intellectual context.

However many times it has been done, the act of casting off the warps and letting go one's last hold of the shore at the start of a voyage has about it something solemn and irrevocable, like marriage, for better or for worse. Mostly Mischief's ordinary title belies four more extraordinary voyages made by H.W. 'Bill' Tilman covering almost 25,000 miles in both Arctic and Antarctic waters. The first sees the pilot cutter Mischief retracing the steps of Elizabethan explorer John Davis to the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage. Tilman and a companion land on the north coast and make the hazardous crossing of Bylot Island while the remainder of the crew make the eventful passage to the southern shore to recover the climbing party. Back in England, Tilman refuses to accept the condemnation of Mischief's surveyor, undertaking costly repairs before heading back to sea for a first encounter with the East Greenland ice. Between June 1964 and September 1965, Tilman is at sea almost without a break. Two eventful voyages to East Greenland in Mischief provide the entertaining bookends to his account of the five-month voyage in the Southern Ocean as skipper of the schooner Patanela. Tilman had been hand-picked by the expedition leader as the navigator best able to land a team of Australian and New Zealand climbers and scientists on Heard Island, a tiny volcanic speck in the Furious Fifties devoid of safe anchorages and capped by an unclimbed glaciated peak. In a separate account of this successful voyage, Colin Putt describes the expedition as unique - the first ascent of a mountain to start below sea level.

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.

The first of its kind: an exploration of one of the most mysterious countries in the world, as told by one of the first outsiders to access the country in its entirety

For almost fifty years Burma was ruled by a paranoid military dictatorship and isolated from the outside world. A historic 2015 election swept an Aung San Suu Kyi-led civilian government to power and was supposed to usher in a new golden era of democracy and progress, but Burma remains unstable and undeveloped, a little-understood country.

Nothing is straightforward in this captivating land that is home to a combustible mix of races, religions and resources. A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma reveals a country where temples take priority over infrastructure, fortune tellers thrive and golf courses are carved out of war zones. Setting out from Yangon, the old capital, David Eimer travels throughout this enigmatic nation, from the tropical south to the Burmese Himalayas in the far north, via the Buddhist-centric heartland and the jungles and mountains where rebel armies fight for autonomy in the longest-running civil wars in recent history. The story of modern Burma is told through the voices of the people Eimer encounters along the way: former political exiles, the squatters in Yangon's shanty towns, radical monks, Rohingya refugees, princesses and warlords, and the ethnic minorities clustered along the country's frontiers.

In his vivid and revelatory account of life, history, culture and politics, David Eimer chronicles the awakening of a country as it returns to the global fold and explores a fractured nation, closed to foreigners for decades. Authoritative and ground-breaking, A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma is set to be a modern classic of travel writing.

In 1897, two sisters embark from Pennsylvania in search of soul-broadening experiences in the Indian Southwest, newly opened to intrepid travellers. Their letters and photographs are the heart of this brilliantly reassembled grand tour.

Berlin is much more than the former capital of Nazi Germany--it is often described today as innovative, fast-paced, avant-garde, rough, exciting, and even sexy. At the political and geographical centre of the Second World War and the Cold War, the city had already been at the cultural heart of Europe for hundreds of years--and continues to set architectural, musical, literary and fashion trends in the twenty-first century. Berlin has been shaped by politicians such as Frederick the Great, dictators like Adolf Hitler and architects such as Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Hans Scharoun, and it boasts icons including the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag. Yet no one individual put a decisive stamp on the city, which had to reinvent itself again and again because of its turbulent history. The staid baroque capital of Prussia was succeeded by the up-and-coming capital of newly united Germany; village homes replaced by tenement housing in the nineteenth century; the hierarchical orderliness of the early twentieth century followed by the unconventional statements of modernism. After the destruction of the Second World War, the Berlin Wall cut the city in half and created the brooding image of the Cold War frontier, and since the dramatic collapse of the Wall the latest version of a unified Berlin has arisen as new Germany's capital. Even today, the various communities that now make up the city have their own distinctive identities. Norbert Schurer's cultural guide explores the juxtaposition of Berlin's past and present in history, architecture, literature, art, entertainment and religion and offers an insider account that provides contexts to make sense of Berlin's dazzling variety.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Translating Italy in the Eighteenth Century offers a historical analysis of the role played by translation in that complex redefinition of women's writing that was taking place in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. It investigates the ways in which women writers managed to appropriate images of Italy and adapt them to their own purposes in a period which covers the 'moral turn' in women's writing in the 1740s and foreshadows the Romantic interest in Italy at the end of the century. A brief survey of translations produced by women in the period 1730-1799 provides an overview of the genres favoured by women translators, such as the moral novel, sentimental play and a type of conduct literature of a distinctively 'proto-feminist' character. Elizabeth Carter's translation of Francesco Algarotti's II Newtonianesimo per le Dame (1739) is one of the best examples of the latter kind of texts. A close reading of the English translation indicates a 'proto-feminist' exploitation of the myth of Italian women's cultural prestige. Another genre increasingly accessible to women, namely travel writing, confirms this female interest in Italy. Female travellers who visited Italy in the second half of the century, such as Hester Piozzi, observed the state of women's education through the lenses provided by Carter. Piozzi's image of Italy, a paradoxical mixture of imagination and realistic observation, became a powerful symbolic source, which enabled the fictional image of a modern, relatively egalitarian British society to take shape.

'I have given my whole life to the mountains. Born at the foot of the Alps, I have been a ski champion, a professional guide, an amateur of the greatest climbs in the Alps and a member of eight expeditions to the Andes and the Himalaya. If the word has any meaning at all, I am a mountaineer.' So Lionel Terray begins Conquistadors of the Useless - not with arrogance, but with typical commitment. One of the most colourful characters of the mountaineering world, his writing is true to his uncompromising and jubilant love for the mountains. Terray was one of the greatest alpinists of his time, and his autobiography is one of the finest and most important mountaineering books ever written. Climbing with legends Gaston Rebuffat, Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal, Terray made first ascents in the Alps, Alaska, the Andes and the Himalaya. He was at the centre of global mountaineering at a time when Europe was emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and he came out a hero. Conquistadors of the Useless tells of his wartime escapades, of life as an Alpine mountain guide, and of his climbs - including the second ascent of the Eiger North Face and his involvement in the first ever ascent of an 8,000-metre peak, Annapurna. His tales capture the energy of French post-war optimism, a time when France needed to reassert herself and when climbing triumphs were more valued than at any other time in history. Terray's death, in the Vercors, robbed mountaineering of one of its most passionate and far-sighted figures. His energy, so obvious in Conquistadors of the Useless, will inspire for generations to come. A mountaineering classic.

Translating Travel examines the relationship between travel writing and translation, asking what happens when books travel beyond the narrow confines of one genre, one literary system and one culture. The volume takes as its starting point the marginal position of contemporary Italian travel writing in the Italian literary system, and proposes a comparative reading of originals and translations designed to highlight the varying reception of texts in different cultures. Two main themes in the book are the affinity between the representations produced by travel and the practices of translation, and the complex links between travel writing and genres such as ethnography, journalism, autobiography and fiction. Individual chapters are devoted to Italian travellers' accounts of Tibet and their English translations; the hybridization of journalism and travel writing in the works of Oriana Fallaci; Italo Calvino's sublimation of travel writing in the stylized fiction of Le cittA invisibili; and the complex network of literary references which marked the reception of Claudio Magris's Danubio in different cultures.

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.

On 4 May 4 1919, Charlie Cook set off for a year of adventure in the Minnesota-Ontario Boundary Waters. Soon abandoned by his comfort-loving companion, the restless World War I veteran spent an enlightening year learning -- often the hard way -- how to paddle and sail on windy lakes, hunt and fish for food, bake 'rough delicacies' in a reflector oven, and build winter-proof shelters. His how-to descriptions of trapping beaver, mink, and other game are unsurpassed in their detail. For anyone who loves the Boundary Waters or wonders what this rugged region was like not so long ago, Cook's story reveals a world still ruled by nature but on the brink of change. Cook embarked on his 1919-20 adventure at a time of transition in north-eastern Minnesota's Boundary Waters. Today's readers will find his descriptions of its colourful inhabitants, wild terrain, and abundant animal life evocative of a long-ago era, but they may also note the signs of development that appear on his horizon almost daily.

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul's profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by internationally acclaimed author Paul Theroux. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker. An Area of Darkness also abounds with Naipaul's strikingly original responses to India's paralyzing caste system, its acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. This may be the most elegant and passionate book ever written about the subcontinent.

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.

'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.