An insightful and illuminating collection of essays on the political and cultural dynamics of travel literature in the nineteenth century.

Long popular with a general readership, travel writing has, in the past three decades or so, become firmly established as an object of serious and multi-disciplinary academic inquiry. Few of the scholarly and popular publications that have focused on the nineteenth century have regarded the century as a whole. This broad volume examines the cultural and social aspects of travel writing on Africa, Asia, America, the Balkans and Australasia. An additional key feature of the volume will be its inclusion of different types of traveller. Several types of travellers and travel texts are considered in the collection. The volume includes studies of explorers, missionaries, artists and writers, Romantics and socialists, colonialists and indigenes. It covers, therefore, a range of travels, travellers, and travellers' texts, and aims to establish some of the contexts in which travel took place. This volume is as much about departure points as it is about destinations, revealing the prejudices and precepts of the nineteenth-century traveller.

List of Illustrations; Notes on Contributors; Acknowledgements; Part One: Introduction: 1. Introduction: Filling the Blank Spaces; Part Two: The Balkans, The Congo and the Middle East: 2. The Balkans in the Nineteenth-Century British Travel Writing; 3. Touring in Extremis: travel and Adventure in the Congo; 4. Politics, Aesthetics and Quest in British Travel Writing on the Middle East; Part Three: India: 5. Imperial Player: Richard Burton in Sindh; 6. Early Indian Travel Guides to Britain; 7. A Princess's Pilgrimage: Nawab Sikandar Begam's Account of Haij; Part Four: America: A Yankee in Yucatan: John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Cities of America; 9. George Lewis and the American Churches; 10.  Strategies of Travel: Charles Dickens and William Wells Brown; Part Five: Australasia: 11. Missionary Positions: Romantic European Polynesias from Cook to Stevenson; 12. Writing the Southern Cross: Religious Travel Writing in Nineteenth-Century Australasia; 13. A Young Writer's Journey into the New Zealand Interior: Katherine Mansfield's  The Urewera Notebook; Further Reading; Index

Long popular with a general readership, travel writing has, in the past three decades or so, become firmly established as an object of serious and multi-disciplinary academic inquiry. Few of the scholarly and popular publications that have focused on the nineteenth century have regarded the century as a whole. This broad volume examines the cultural and social aspects of travel writing on Africa, Asia, America, the Balkans and Australasia. An additional key feature of the volume will be its inclusion of different types of traveller. Several types of travellers and travel texts are considered in the collection. The volume includes studies of explorers, missionaries, artists and writers, Romantics and socialists, colonialists and indigenes. It covers, therefore, a range of travels, travellers, and travellers' texts, and aims to establish some of the contexts in which travel took place. This volume is as much about departure points as it is about destinations, revealing the prejudices and precepts of the nineteenth-century traveller.