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187 books match the query 'Essays & Travelogues' and 17 start with a
A Bibliography of East European Travel Writing on Europe
Wendy Bracewell
Central European University Press, 2008
The bibliography volume of the three-volume East Looks West: East European Travel Writing in Europe collates travel writing published in book form by east Europeans travelling in Europe from ca. 1550 to 2000. It is intended as a fundamental research tool, collecting together travel writings within each national/linguistic tradition, and enabling comparative analysis of such material. It fills an important gap in the existing reference literature, both in western and east European languages, and will be of use to those working in the growing fields of comparative travel writing, regional and national identities, and postcolonialism.
These texts exist in surprisingly large numbers, and include writings of high literary quality as well as of historical interest, but they have been relatively little studied as a genre. Much of this material is rare and difficult to find, even in national libraries. As a result, there are few bibliographical surveys of the literature of east European travel and self-representation, and none that are region-wide or comparative in scope.
This is the third volume of a three-part set of East Looks West.
Vol. 1. Orientations. An Anthology of East European Travel Writing on Europe.
Vol. 2. Undern Eastern Eyes. A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe.
A Born Writer
Juanita Harrison and Her Beautiful WorldCathryn Halverson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2025
Despite the challenges she faced as an average southern Black woman of her time, Juanita Harrison transcended expectations, earning a unique place in African American and literary history. Over the course of more than four decades, she traveled constantly, first throughout the US and then throughout the world. To fund her trips, she took on short-term jobs as housekeeper, cook, and nurse, never committing to any one household. Always on the move, she made it a rule to travel alone, and she had a penchant for “passing,” not as white but as local. Her wanderlust was less aspirational and upwardly mobile than dedicated to the pursuit of leisure, freedom, and experience. “It’s my life to see and enjoy,” she declared.
In 1936, she published My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, a travelogue that charts her life between 1927 and 1935. A compilation of letters she sent to friends, employers, and patrons during her travels, the book was an immediate success, running through nine printings within ten months and becoming a bestseller for that year. The illustrious Atlantic Monthly published excerpts, the book was reviewed in newspapers and magazines nationwide, and it attracted a remarkably diverse readership, sparking the enthusiasm of Black working-class library patrons, white women’s book clubs, Japanese American journalists, Harlem Renaissance luminaries, and many others. It came back into print in 1996, ensuring her legacy would endure.
A Born Writer is the first biography of this fascinating woman who found a uniquely rewarding way to live and work that many would envy today. Combining micro histories, literary criticism, and biography—and despite limited archival records—Cathryn Halverson skillfully traces Harrison from her birth in the bitterly divided South to her death in Hawai’i, tracking her varied experiences along the way in New York, Havana, Paris, Madrid, Cairo, Mumbai, Kobe, Buenos Aires, and many other places. The resulting portrait shows a woman who transcended all kinds of borders—political, social, and cultural—to experience a freedom rarely available to women, and especially women of color, in the early-to-mid twentieth century, an achievement that continues to resonate.
A Canyon Voyage
The Narrative of the Second Powell Expedition down the Green-Colorado River from Wyoming, and the Explorations on Land, in the Years 1871 and 1872Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
University of Arizona Press, 1980
"One of the seminal books on western history . . . The author was only 17 when he began the expedition, and he honestly hero-worshipped Powell all his life. Yet this bright, sharp account is so detailed and truthful that the reader can see through his enthusiasm to discover Powell's mean spirit and sometimes reckless nature. It's also a great river-running book." —Deseret News
"It was decidedly worth writing, this detailed record: a more absorbing, and at times stirring, story of adventure has not seen the light in a long time, and the author's unadorned, yet vivid, style enables the reader to share all the emotions of the explorers:" —The Nation
"In these later years (1909) when amateur travel in the west is frequent, a detailed record of this kind will be of value to seekers after adventure." —Science
A Ghost in Trieste
Joseph Cary
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Here is the crossroads of East and West. A port held in turn by the Romans, the Venetians, the Austrians, the Germans, the Slavs, and finally the Italians, Trieste is the capital of nowhere, fertile source of a unique literary florescence before the First World War. At times an exile home and an exiled city. "I cannot claim to have walked across it all,:" wrote Saba, the poet of Trieste in 1910 of the city Cary crosses and recrosses, seeking the poetry of the place that inspired its literary giants. Trieste's cultural and historical riches, its geographical splendor of hills and sea and mysterious presence unfold in a series of stories, monologues and literary juxtapositions that reveal the city's charms as well as its seductive hold on the writer's imagination. Throughout, literary and immediate impressions alike are elaborated in paintings and maps, and in handsome line drawings by Nicholas Read.
This "clownish and adolescent Parsifal," this Trieste of the "prickly grace," this place "impaled in my heart like a permanent point," this symbol of the Adriatic, this "city made of books" — here the book remakes the city. The Trieste of allusions magically becomes a city of palpable allure, of warmth and trying contradictions and gritty beauty. Part travel diary, part guide book, part literary history, A Ghost in Trieste is a brilliant introduction to an extraordinary time and place. In Joseph Cary, Trieste has found a new poet, and readers, a remarkably captivating companion and guide.
A Journey into Russia
Jens Mühling
Haus Publishing, 2014
Unveiling a portion of the world whose contradictions, attractions, and absurdities are still largely unknown to people outside its borders, A Journey into Russia is a much-needed glimpse into one of today’s most significant regions.
A Journey through the West
Thomas Rodney’s 1803 Journal from Delaware to the Mississippi TerritoryThomas Rodney
Ohio University Press, 1997
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.
A Matter of Rats
A Short Biography of PatnaAmitava Kumar
Duke University Press, 2014
Kumar's ruminations on one of the world's oldest cities, the capital of India's poorest province, are also a meditation on how to write about place. His memory is partial. All he has going for him is his attentiveness. He carefully observes everything that surrounds him in Patna: rats and poets, artists and politicians, a girl's picture in a historian's study, and a sheet of paper on his mother's desk. The result is this unique book, as cutting as it is honest.
Adventures in Africa
Gianni Celati
University of Chicago Press, 2000
In 1997 the celebrated Italian novelist and essayist Gianni Celati accompanied his friend, filmmaker Jean Talon, on a journey to West Africa which took them from Mali to Senegal and Mauritania. The two had been hoping to research a documentary about Dogon priests, but frustrated by red tape, their voyage became instead a touristic adventure. The vulnerable, prickly, insightful Celati kept notebooks of the journey, now translated by Adria Bernardi as Adventures in Africa. Celati is the privileged traveler, overwhelmed by customs he doesn't understand, always at the mercy of others who are trying to sell him something he doesn't want to buy, and aware of himself as the Tourist who is always a little disoriented and at the center of the continual misadventures that are at the heart of travel.
Celati's book is both a travelogue in the European tradition and a trenchant meditation on what it means to be a tourist. Celati learns to surrender to the chaos of West Africa and in the process produces a work of touching and comic descriptions, in the lucid and ironic prose that is his hallmark. Hailed as one of the best travelogues on Africa ever written and awarded the first Zerilli-Marimó prize, Adventures in Africa is a modest yet profound account of the utter discombobulation of travel.
All Abroad
A Memoir of Travel and ObsessionGeoffrey Weill
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
All Abroad is the memoir of a man hungry for the logistics of travel: getting there, staying there, and feeling at home on any continent. Woven into his entertaining anecdotes is an informative account of a lost era in travel. As a witness to compelling and monumental changes in the industry, Weill offers a unique view into how our vacations have been shaped deeply by human trends, tragedies, and technologies. While some long for the grandeur of tourism from decades ago, Weill insists that travel—the conveyances and hotels that await journey’s end—remains as glamorous as ever.
All the Roads Are Open
The Afghan JourneyAnnemarie Schwarzenbach
Seagull Books, 2011
Along The Ganges
Ilija Trojanow
Haus Publishing, 2014
An African American in South Africa
The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche 28 September 1937–1 January 1938Ralph Bunche
Ohio University Press, 2001
Ralph Bunche, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, traveled to South Africa for three months in 1937. His notes, which have been skillfully compiled and annotated by historian Robert R. Edgar, provide unique insights on a segregated society.
An Italian Journey
Jean Giono
Northwestern University Press, 1998
And the Monkey Learned Nothing
Dispatches from a Life in TransitTom Lutz
University of Iowa Press, 2016
Are We There Yet?
Virtual Travel and Victorian RealismAlison Byerly
University of Michigan Press, 2012
Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realismconnects the Victorian fascination with "virtual travel" with the rise of realism in nineteenth-century fiction and twenty-first-century experiments in virtual reality. Even as the expansion of river and railway networks in the nineteenth century made travel easier than ever before, staying at home and fantasizing about travel turned into a favorite pastime. New ways of representing place—360-degree panoramas, foldout river maps, exhaustive railway guides—offered themselves as substitutes for actual travel. Thinking of these representations as a form of "virtual travel" reveals a surprising continuity between the Victorian fascination with imaginative dislocation and twenty-first -century efforts to use digital technology to expand the physical boundaries of the self.
At The Beach
Jean-Didier Urbain
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
At the Glacier’s Edge
A Natural History of Long Island from the Narrows to Montauk PointBetsy McCully
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Combining science writing, environmental history, and first-hand accounts from a longtime resident, At the Glacier’s Edge offers a unique narrative natural history of Long Island. Betsy McCully tells the story of how the island was formed at the end of the last ice age, how its habitats evolved, and how humans in the last few hundred years have radically altered and degraded its landscape. Yet as she personally recounts the habitat losses and species declines she has witnessed over the past few decades, she describes the vital efforts that environmental activists are making to restore and reclaim this land—from replanting salt marshes, to preserving remaining grasslands and forests, to cleaning up the waters. At the Glacier’s Edge provides an in-depth look at the flora, fauna and geology that make Long Island so special.