This article was downloaded by: [University of Glasgow]On: 20 December 2014, At: 22:48Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Studies in Travel WritingPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rstw20

Book ReviewsGerald MacLean a , Patricia O'Neill b , JenniferHayward c , David Matless d , Syrine C. Hout e ,Alessandra Rizzo f , Paul Smethurst g & Jopi Nyman ha University of Yorkb Hamilton Collegec College of Woosterd University of Nottinghame American University of Beirutf University of Palermog University of Hong Kongh University of JoensuuPublished online: 11 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Gerald MacLean , Patricia O'Neill , Jennifer Hayward ,David Matless , Syrine C. Hout , Alessandra Rizzo , Paul Smethurst & JopiNyman (2007) Book Reviews, Studies in Travel Writing, 11:2, 189-210, DOI:10.1080/13645145.2007.9634828

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2007.9634828

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with

primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Studies in Travel Writing 11 (2007): 189–210© 2007 The White Horse Press

BookReviewsDaniel Carey, ed.Asian Travel in the RenaissanceOxford: Blackwell, 2004 ISBN 1-4051-1160-7 (PB) £20.99. x + 234pp.

Given the costs, difficulties and dangers, why would any sensible person from Western Europe travel to Southeast Asia in the early modern era? There was always trade, of course, and for the Dutch and English a major impulse was establishing profitable routes for bringing home the fabled luxuries of the East – silks and spices, porcelain and drugs – while cutting out Catholic intermediaries. Yet what is striking about several of the essays here is the weight their authors give to ideological aims. Religious belief seems to have been an overwhelming motive. What Joan-Pau Rubiés writes of the Spanish holds true for the Catholic nations generally: ‘it was religious idealism alone which kept the problematic Asian empire of Castile-New Spain … alive’ (p. 101). This ‘idealism’ often took shape as the competing ambitions of Jesuits, Augustinians, Dominicans,and Franciscans to convert the ‘pagans’ of Southeast Asia to their own brand of Christianity. Nevertheless, the persistence of missionary zeal is a timely reminder that secular causes often fail to explain all aspects of past, or present, behaviour.

The religious motive is amply borne out in the two opening essays by M. Antoni Üçerler and Nicolas Standaert. Both offer hagiographical accounts of the Jesuits who set out to spread what Standaert terms ‘a solid faith’ (p. 43). Üçerler introduces Alessandro Valignano, ‘a stubborn yet brilliant Italian nobleman and missionary’ (p. 41) who, in 1574, was appointed delegate to all the Jesuit missions from Mozambique to India, Macao and Japan. Supported by Spain, Valignano earned the hostility of the Portuguese Jesuits who claimed prerogative in the area, and this ‘clash between the Portuguese Jesuit leadership … and Valignano’ forms the central narrative focus of Üçerler’s chapter. Standaert traces attempts by the Jesuits to intro-duce ‘Renaissance’ ideas into China. Matteo Ricci was the first to translate works of mathematics, cartography and astronomy into Chinese. Ricci also ‘transposed Western Stoic philosophy into a Chinese Confucian setting in order to clear the way for Christianity’, hoping ‘to deploy the pagan moral philosophy of Confucianism as a preparation for the fullness of Christianity’ (pp. 51, 52). Following Ricci’s translations, Niccolò Longobardo sent his agent, Nicolas Trigault, back to Italy to collect key books. These efforts led

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews190

Book Reviews191

to a scheme, initiated by converts, to reform the calendar. But as Standaert admits, for the most part the Chinese recognised ‘Western learning as origi-nating in China’ and so were little influenced by the efforts of the Jesuits to replace their pagan emptiness with Christian plenitude.

If, despite the exertions of missionaries, Southeast Asia was little changed by visiting Europeans, intellectual life in Europe was increasingly engaging with knowledge derived from Asian encounters. Sven Trakulhun observes that very little was known of the history of Siam before the mid seventeenth century beyond fables of ‘the biblical land of Ophir from which King Solomon ordered his sailors to fetch gold’ (p. 69). Writing in the 1560s, the Portuguese historian, João de Barros relied entirely on ‘written sources and oral testimonies’, and merrily repeated tales of how men in Pegu and Siam wore bells implanted in their penises because this would somehow prevent them engaging in sodomy (p. 72). Jeremias Van Vliet, an agent of the Dutch East India Company, compiled an empirical history of Siam in 1640 that earned him a governorship. But for the next century, subsequent European histories of Siam believed that the Siamese were really Chinese who had wandered off and stagnated.

Next, John Villiers describes how, in 1606, Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola was commissioned to compose a history of the Spanish capture of Ternate, one of the Spice Islands in the Molucca Sea. Formerly held by the Portuguese, the governor of the Spanish Philippines was keen that this history would ‘demonstrate that the conquest was an act of enlightened statecraft and a blow struck against the heretical Dutch’ rather than infighting among Catholic nations (p. 125). Villiers provides a biographical account of Argensola – who never visited the island or region – before summarising his book and its sources. If this collection aims to introduce several Spanish, Italian and Portuguese writers to Anglophone readers, Villiers’ footnotes – and those by Üçerler and Standaert – suggest that the actual achievement is to have synthesised existing scholarship (much of it already in English) rather than adding anything new.

If Renaissance historians turned to Southeast Asia for different reasons, their field was not greatly transformed by the specificity of the Asian materials at hand. Joan-Pau Rubiés makes grander claims for the emergence of the disciplines of ethnography and ethnology from European encounters with Asian peoples. The first in this collection to conduct an argument, rather than offer a survey or overview, Rubiés examines Spanish writing about Asia to reinforce his claims in Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India Through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (2000). What interests Rubiés here, as

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews190

Book Reviews191

in his monograph, is how observation of other nations combined with at-tempts to account for ‘natural and historical diversity’ (p. 113). By teasing out the scientific methods and principles that underwrite the emergence of this ethnographic writing, Rubiés further seeks to describe the specific idioms that distinguish ‘the different colonial experiences and religious confessions of each European nation’, most especially the distinctions between the Portuguese and the Castilian imperial systems in Asia (p. 120). Along the way he explains how the dominance of writing by religious authorities was partly the result of the Spanish crown being far more invested in the New World than Asia, allowing the various competing religious orders to take a lead in categorising and describing ‘Spanish Asia’ (p. 99).

Chapters by Claudia Schnurmann and Robert Markley turn to questions of how Southeast Asia was represented in early writings by the Protestant Dutch and English nations, yet their objectives differ. Neither is concerned with travel except as a means of conducting trade. Schnurmann revisits the relative importance of the Dutch company trading in the Atlantic (WIC) and the better-known activities of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in order to argue that the former has been unfairly neglected. Yet the WIC successfully competed with the Iberian nations in South America, founded and established successful colonies, and engaged in profitable trade: during much of the seventeenth century ‘the WIC dominated the Atlantic slave trade’ (p. 167). Viewed contextually, both companies helped to place the early Dutch Republic ‘at the core of the early modern globalization process’ (p. 168).

Markley sets out to oppose the Eurocentrism that is fundamental to Schnurmann’s project of situating the Dutch Republic at the centre of global trade. Following economic historians such as Andre Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz who have demonstrated how, until 1800, ‘an integrated world economy was dominated by India and China’, Markley argues that English writers of the early period ‘did not automatically assume the cultural, economic, or even religious superiority of Christendom’ (pp. 169–70). At the core of this argument are rhetorical analyses of passages from Peter Heylyn’s Cosmographie (1652) that illustrate the various strategies Heylyn used to disguise a general sense of England’s global insignificance in contrast with the great civilisations of the East. For Heylyn, whatever promoted trade was good for England since it brought the nation into the sphere of civilisation: ‘national identities, and moral fitness become functions of what Southeast Asians have to offer English merchants’ (p. 183). We would be wrong, Markley insists, to imagine that the English and other Europeans who travelled into

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews192

Book Reviews193

Asian waters and territories in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did so with a sense of their own superiority. That came after 1800.

The final chapter, by Daniel Carey, the editor of this volume, provides a fascinating study of how ‘ipo’ – a poison associated with Makassar in the Moluccas – entered into European colonial and scientific discourses. Known since the fourteenth century, Makassar poison became something of an ob-session during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as Europeans began trading in the region. Carey examines the ‘substantial literature’ and reports on the ‘considerable efforts’ of numerous scientists of the time to find an antidote (p. 193). During the greater part of the sixteenth century, accounts of the poison by Portuguese travellers were largely fabulous exaggerations that belonged to a medieval tradition of treating all Eastern products as marvels or monstrosities. With the arrival of Dutch trading interests in the area during the early seventeenth century, the legendary dangers of ‘ibo’ took on new immediacy. Reasonably enough, the sultans of Makassar – a crucially important entrepot – saw little reason to curtail their own trading activities as requested by the VOC, and the use of poisoned arrows served them well in rebuffing Dutch hostilities. Meanwhile descriptions of the poison, and attempts to find an antidote, progressed hardly at all. Based on hearsay, the Dutch botanist Jacob de Bondt concluded that the only antidote was for the victim immediately to eat his own excrement, while later reports concluded that a survivor might still succumb to ‘ibo’ poisoning up to three years after being wounded if he had sex with a woman or ate a mushroom. The Royal Society in London commissioned experiments, but failed to discover an antidote.

The volume ends with an obituary notice recalling the contributions to scholarship of Charles Boxter (1904–2000), best known for his histories of The Dutch Seaborne Empire (1965) and The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (1969).

In summary, Asian Travel in the Renaissance provides some engaging studies of early modern European writing about Southeast Asia that would otherwise be difficult of access. Regarding travel writing, per se, there is nothing new. In the rivalries between the Jesuits and other Catholic mis-sionaries, in the contests between Spanish and Portuguese interests, and in the conflicts between Catholic and Protestant nations, it is hard not to see Western Europe – to paraphrase Edward Said – starting to act out its ‘desires, repressions, investments and projections’ on the stage of the East.

Gerald MacLean University of York

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews192

Book Reviews193

Brenda MoonMore Usefully Employed: Amelia B. Edwards, Writer, Traveller and Campaigner

for Ancient EgyptLondon: Egypt Exploration Society, 2006ISBN: 0-85698-169-9 $70.00. xv + 319 pages.

Brenda Moon’s recent biography of Amelia Blandford Edwards (1831–92) is the most complete and compelling biography so far of one of the most important women of letters in the nineteenth century. Biographical re-search, especially when it concerns lesser known figures from a previous age, is especially difficult in today’s production-oriented academy. However, Moon has taken the time not only to transcribe unpublished letters and notebook entries, but also to track down the diaries and correspondence of travel companions and acquaintances. Moon’s careful assemblage of primary materials, generous bibliography, including citations of Edwards’s early unsigned contributions to various popular journals, and an appendix summarising the plots of Edwards’s novels provide critics with essential materials for a reconsideration of Edwards’s role in Victorian culture. For students of Victorian travel literature, this biography supplies a broader context in which to understand Edwards’s attitudes toward the places and the people she encountered in her travels to the Dolomites and on the Nile. In More Usefully Employed Moon skilfully details Edwards’s transformation from novelist to founder of the Egypt Exploration Fund.

More Usefully Employed sheds new light on the circumstances of Edwards’s fateful trip up the Nile by comparing her travelogue with the diary of Jenny Lane. Lane was employed as the maid of Lucy Renshaw (Edwards’s companion on the adventure), and her account allows us to see events that Edwards leaves out and to contextualise Edwards’s sometimes dramatic rendering of events, such as the accidental shooting of an Egyptian child by one of the men travelling with Edwards, with another, more detailed, account. Additionally, Moon’s thorough knowledge of the archival material housed at the Egyptian Exploration Society offices and University College London allows her to describe Edwards’s private struggles to found and sustain the efforts of the Egypt Exploration Fund (now called the Egypt Exploration Society), which has supported scientific excavations of Egyptian sites for over one hundred years, and quite fittingly, is the publisher of Moon’s biography. Beautiful colour reproductions of Edwards’s watercolour paintings from her travels add to our appreciation of how Egypt’s landscape and monuments looked to travellers in the 1870s. What emerges is a complex portrait of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews194

Book Reviews195

the woman herself and of the conditions that women intellectuals faced in their determination not only to be independent, but to make substantial contributions to human knowledge.

Although many literary and historical scholars have made use of A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877) to interpret women’s and Victorians’ attitudes toward the East, Edwards’s novels have been out of print until recently. Their renewed availability has significantly enriched our knowledge of Edwards’s literary imagination and her background and preparation for what was to become her life’s work. Unlike most female novelists, Edwards never married, and after the death of her parents, as the friend and companion of an older woman, she was able to make a living sufficient to permit her more time on her writing and travelling than many other lady novelists of the period. Her bildungsroman, Barbara’s History (1864) established her literary reputation, but after the success of her first travelogue, Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys (1873) – the story of Amelia and her friend Lucy’s journey on side-saddle through the Dolomites – Edwards set fiction aside. Then in her early fifties, Edwards travelled for three months up the Nile in an Egyptian flat-bottomed sailboat. Fascinated by the ancient world of Egypt and horrified by the destruction that tomb robbers, treasure hunt-ers and graffiti prone tourists were wreaking on the ruins, Edwards wrote A Thousand Miles up the Nile in hopes that it would provoke interest in preserving the sites for scientific investigation before it was too late.

The journey and the book resulted in far more than a successful pub-lication. Edwards’s ability to combine expertise with storytelling and keen observation with vivid description popularised interest in Egyptology and garnered financial support for her brainchild, an organisation that would fund archaeological work and educate the public through exhibitions of artefacts and well-written accounts of their significance. Moon’s carefully researched work makes clear what a debt Egyptology and archaeology owe to this single gifted and determined individual. Indeed, the core of Moon’s story of Edwards’s ‘more usefully employed life’ recounts Edwards’s work first as co-Secretary of the Fund and later as the sole Secretary, in charge of coordinating publications and a network of regional organisers, as well as a lecturer in England and the United States. The personal side of Edwards’s life may remain in relative obscurity, but Moon presents all the evidence available for our understanding of the character and intelligence of this remarkable public figure.

Patricia O’NeillHamilton College

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews194

Book Reviews195

Eduarda Mansilla de Garcia, ed. J.P. Spicer-EscalanteRecuerdos de ViajeBuenos Aires: Stockcero, 2006ISBN 978-987-1136-57-5 (PB) $22.80. xxxi + 122pp.

Beginning with Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes in 1992 and continuing through recent work by Nigel Leask, Robert Aguirre, Nancy Leys Stepan and others, scholarship exploring constructions of Latin America in the Anglo imagination has made valuable contributions to our understanding of national identities in the Americas. Due in part to the difficulties of ac-cess to subaltern voices, however, critics generally emphasise perspectives of the centre rather than the periphery. Juan Pablo Spicer-Escalante’s new edition of Eduarda Mansilla de Garcia’s Recuerdos de Viaje adds a well-edited and significant primary text to disrupt the dominant discourse: Mansilla, an Argentinean woman writer, constructs North America through Latina eyes.

In Argentina in the years following independence from Spain, journeys from the periphery to the centre became de rigueur for the elite, serving to strengthen cultural affiliations with Europe while simultaneously testing national values in the process of formation. Aspiring politicians returned home to publish accounts of their travels, and these texts helped to forge a new national identity. Women were, unsurprisingly, virtually excluded from this tradition; texts mapping women’s journeys scarcely existed. Not until 1880 did Mansilla’s Recuerdos de Viaje become the first travel narrative to be published by an Argentinean woman.

Mansilla, from a prominent family, accompanied her diplomat husband to Washington, D.C. in 1860, but did not publish her account until 1882 (a gap that explains her eulogistic portrait of Abraham Lincoln as well as her retrospective overview of a nation split by civil war). In addition to assessing diplomatic life in Washington, Mansilla also describes the New York area, Boston, Philadelphia, and southern Canada. Stylistically, she conveys authority, lively detail and strong opinions, so her book makes for entertaining as well as enlightening reading.

In some ways, Mansilla departs intriguingly from the European tradition of women’s travel writing already well established by the time she wrote. For instance, unlike most European women travellers to the Americas, she does not engage in traditional rhetoric of the New World as a sublime wilderness. At the same time, she both conforms to accepted practice in systematically assessing U.S. women’s dress, decorum and domestic life – topics considered

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews196

Book Reviews197

obligatory in the female travel tradition – and contributes to an alternate feminist tradition that began with eighteenth-century iconoclasts like Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Wollstonecraft and continued through unusually independent women like Maria Graham, Frances Calderón de La Barca, Mary Seacole, Marianne North and Mary Kingsley in the nineteenth century: she refuses to confine herself to ‘traditionally feminine’ topics, instead tackling political issues without apology. As early as chapter IV she launches an inquisition of North American political history, justifying her ‘unfeminine’ examination only briefly and laconically – ‘no es posible hablar de los Estados Unidos, sin penetrar un tanto en su vida política’ (p. 26) – and analysing topics ranging from slavery, treatment of indigenous peoples and the Constitution to the emancipation of women.

Mansilla’s discussion of Native Americans and her treatment of the ‘woman question’ hold particular interest for contemporary researchers. While she shows little sympathy for either slaves or the abolitionist move-ment, interestingly she speaks eloquently about the sufferings of Native Americans: ‘dolorosa es la historia … de los Estados Unidos, en contacto con esas tribus salvajes … muerte, traicion y rapiña, han sido las armas con las cuales los han combatido, promesas y engaños, hé ahí su política con los hijos del desierto’ (p. 33). Spicer-Escalante speculates that Mansilla may have scripted this condemnation of North American genocide to reinforce her brother Lucio Victorio Mansilla’s plea, conveyed in his Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (1870), to include the indigenous peoples of Argentina in the consolidation of the nation (p. xxii).

Mansilla repeatedly returns to questions of female autonomy, assessing North American women’s personal and professional lives in detail. So unusual does the relative independence of ‘la mujer Yankee’ strike Mansilla that she resorts to an English phrase to capture it: ‘self reliance (confianza en sí mismo)’ (p.70). However, she stops short of approving emancipation, instead highlighting women’s strong ‘psychological and indirect’ influence on public life and concluding, ‘que ganarían las Americanas con emanciparse? Más bien perderían, y bien lo saben’ (p.72; citing her support of gender and race hierarchies, critic Mónica Szurmuk concludes that Mansilla was, ultimately, a reactionary [Women in Argentina: Early Travel Narratives, 2000]). In her interrogation of key cultural questions, Mansilla implicitly contrasts North American with Argentinean values in order to shape national identity in her rapidly changing country, ironically dubbed ‘una República de nada’ (p.57).

In this new edition, J.P. Spicer-Escalante provides an extensive system of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews196

Book Reviews197

useful footnotes as well as a critical introduction situating Mansilla’s work within the larger context of nineteenth-century Argentinean literature. While he opens with a fairly conventional summary of masculine bias and exclusion of women’s voices in early travel literature, Spicer-Escalante de-velops an astute and original analysis of the specific function of the travel genre in nineteenth-century Argentina. Arguing that European travellers in the Latin American contact zone contributed to ‘the definition and continual re-definition of the continent as not only a geographic, but also an important cultural and social space’ (p.10), he assesses the rise of the ‘exploratrice sociale’ (with a nod to Mary Louise Pratt), whose female gaze provided a crucial counter-discourse to European male travel writing about Latin America. Later in the nineteenth century, books published by Latin American travellers reflected the gaze back on the centre as writers reinvented Europe and North America in order to define themselves in connection as well as by contrast (pp.11–12).1 Positioning Mansilla in the context of other Latin American women authors of roughly the same period, including Maria de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Aurelia Castillo de Gonzalez, Spicer-Escalante insightfully notes that beneath Mansilla’s overt discussion of the relative freedom of the American woman lies, ‘en las sombras’, an implicit critique of the separate spheres dividing Argentinean women from professional success (p.xxi).

With his thoughtful editorial apparatus, Spicer-Escalante provides insight into the production and consumption context of Mansilla’s Recuerdos de Viaje. This edition makes fascinating reading for both scholars and students and would be pedagogically effective in courses on a wide range of topics, including travel, Latin American women’s writing, Argentinean history and nationalism; it is essential reading for scholars in nineteenth-century women’s travel in Latin America. Mansilla’s narrative gives voice to a perspective too rarely heard – that of a Latin American woman traveller – while engaging ongoing debates about national identities in the Americas.

Jennifer Hayward College of Wooster

1 Elsewhere, in an essay on the Argentinean novelist and traveller Ricardo Güiraldes, Spicer-Escalante argues that ‘Latin American writers, at least partially in response to external representations of their geocultural space, have continually re-conceived the continent from a domestic perspective through travel writing via what could be called a sort of textual intrageografía’ (J.P. Spicer-Escalante, ‘Ricardo Güiraldes’s Américas: Reappropriation and Reacculturation in Xaimaca [1923]’, Studies in Travel Writing 7 [2003], 9–28 [p. 11]).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews198

Book Reviews199

Robert Burden and Stephan Kohl, eds.Landscape and EnglishnessAmsterdam: Rodopi, 2006ISBN 90-420-2102-0 (PB) €54.00. 266pp.

It is a little strange to review a book whose title mirrors one of your own. In 1998 I published a monograph on twentieth-century landscape and culture entitled Landscape and Englishness (Reaktion Books), and Robert Burden discusses, indeed praises, that work among other studies of landscape and national identity in the introduction to the volume under review. However complimentary the acknowledgement, though, the straight borrowing of a title remains surprising. Let us hope that it counts as good publicity.

This Landscape and Englishness book is an edited collection, with thirteen chapters. The editors each contribute an essay, and Burden provides an introduction, with ten further contributors drawn from a variety of British and German universities. The volume is the first in a projected series on ‘Spatial Practices’, with Burden and Kohl as series editors, and the series presented as part of ‘the topographical turn in cultural studies’, taking up ‘the lessons of the new cultural geography’ to connect work in cultural stud-ies, literature, history and geography (p. 7). Travel writing of various kinds features in a number of the essays, whether in discussion of William Cobbett, H.V. Morton or D.H. Lawrence. While the predominant emphasis is on the written word, one of the more interesting pieces, by Merle Tonnies, addresses the photography of Martin Parr, concentrating on his images of beach and seaside. Tonnies only briefly notes Parr’s Boring Postcards collection, which might have been discussed alongside his own seaside imagery.

Most of the chapters offer useful theoretically-informed studies of particu-lar authors, genres or themes, though I found the opening two essays which pursue more abstract theoretical schemes less successful. This is not because abstract theory is not useful, but because the particular variants discussed by Chris Thurgar-Dawson (choropoetics, reciprocal spatial realities and holistic spatial semantics) and Christoph Schubert (images of the vertical axis, or ‘UP and DOWN’, in landscape description) do not seem to give great purchase on the material under discussion, especially in the latter case. Models from cognitive linguistics sit uneasily on descriptions of landscape. Other essays are far more successful in illuminating travel and writing as cultural practice. The editors’ individual contributions work well, Kohl discussing the contrasting meanings of rural England in modernist novels and interwar guidebooks, and Burden considering D.H. Lawrence’s Twilight

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews198

Book Reviews199

in Italy as a critique of modernity projecting back and forth between Italy and England, and across to other sites in Lawrence’s life and work, such as New Mexico. Burden successfully demonstrates ‘landscape in travel writing as an object of cultural knowledge’ (p. 152). In perhaps the outstanding essay in the volume, Bernhard Klein discusses J.A. Froude’s bestselling 1886 travelogue Oceana, or England and Her Colonies, setting this grand imperial vision within wider historical and conceptual issues concerning the writing of sea rather than land, and exploring tensions between imperial possession, international law and sensibilities concerning oceanic immensity and free-dom. Klein highlights tensions between the global surveillance of imperial cartographic form, and the embodied meanderings of the travelogue, as Froude’s mapless Oceana ‘replaces the fixed viewpoint of the map with the shifting horizons of the wanderer’ (p. 119).

As ever it is impossible in a short review to discuss all contributions in detail; other essays discuss Cobbett (Pordzik), the English novel (Parrinder), Stonehenge in fiction (Mergenthal), Morton and Priestley (Knights), land-scape, literature and nostalgia (Berberich), and postcolonial fiction (Helyer). This collection on Landscape and Englishness provides a range of interesting material on a variety of authors, time periods and genres, and makes for an encouraging start to a new book series.

David MatlessUniversity of Nottingham

Marius Kociejowski, ed.Syria: Through Writers’ EyesLondon: Eland, 2006.ISBN 0-907871-84-4 (PB) £12.99. x + 251pp.

Combining his long-term interests in both poetry and travel writing, Marius Kociejowski (British-Canadian of Polish origin) has contributed a timely, expertly edited, and aesthetically appealing volume on ‘one of the best-kept secrets of the Mediterranean’ (blurb): Syria, as it has been experienced and rendered into various forms of literature by selected Western and Near Eastern voyagers spanning roughly the last six centuries. Refreshing in principle, albeit somewhat disappointing in execution, is Kociejowski’s decision to reproduce forty-two extracts from several Western (American, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Swiss, in addition to English) texts alongside excerpts from merely eight works by early Arab and Persian

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews200

Book Reviews201

travellers/poets: Al-Mutanabbi, Ibn Battutah, Nasir-i-Khursrau, Ibn Juhayr, Ibn al Fakih, Istakhri, Mukaddasi and Idrisi. Since the first two names are quite familiar to Western readers, it might have been wiser, even from a marketability viewpoint, to devote more than a total of eight pages to Muslim/Eastern perspectives on this modern-day Arab nation. Nonetheless, at a time when Syria has been politically maligned for a few years now by some European but particularly by American foreign policy makers, such a wide-ranging collection of writings produced over half a millennium cannot but testify to a sustained and genuine cultural, spiritual, and even personal interest in this historic country.

As Kociejowski explains in his preface, which follows a map of Syria, the volume’s structure ‘is based on the most likely itinerary of a traveller going to Syria for the first time’ (p. 1). Therefore, the contents, i.e. the excerpts inspired by location, are placed under the seven milestones – designated by Roman numerals – of what would be a typically circular (and counter-clockwise) journey: Damascus, The Syrian Desert, Palmyra, Aleppo, Saint Simeon and the Dead Cities, The Fertile Crescent and The Haroun. The eighth part, titled ‘Travellers, Old and New’, features two contemporary (2006) texts in which Gerald MacLean and Philippa Scott respectively reflect on and pay homage to seventeenth-century British traveller/clergyman William Biddulph and journalist Robert Tewdwr Moss. Each part is preceded by a mini-introduction by the editor, in which he provides relevant historical, geographical, political and biographical information. This ‘background’ ma-terial is especially useful as the extracts within each part are not presented in a chronological order.

On the second page of his preface Kociejowski hastens to avoid the common charges of Orientalism which, he believes, ‘are so often levelled at anyone writing from a foreign perspective’ by stressing that those who make such accusations ‘are paid to do so’, possibly hinting at politicised broadcasting media, but exempting academicians and even a few artists, who ‘within a very short historical period [arguably during the impressionist art period] sought not the Orient of reality but the Orient inside themselves’. Stereotypical images and ‘pernicious’ words on paper, he explains, result either from these Western travellers’ ‘blighted innocence’ – more accurately ignorance about their cultural Other(s) – or from an inherent negativism, even towards their own countries, in which case they would be equally accused of Occidentalism, much like Arabs refusing and/or being unable ‘to step outside their own culture’ (p. 2).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews200

Book Reviews201

Therefore the texts, carefully chosen to ensure ethnographic value as well as literary quality, reflect, in varying degrees, both the history of this region and the travellers’ own ‘imaginative responses, which bespeak a truth beyond brute facts’ (p. 2). This higher truth is certainly enhanced by the ten attractive linocuts by Mungo McCosh, featuring mosques, castles, churches, ancient theatres, souks and Bedouins. A plate titled ‘Musicians of Aleppo’ and a few musical notes are reproduced as parts of two original texts. Among the thirty or so Western travellers are only eight women; next to the legendary Freya Stark, Isabel Burton, Lady Hester Stanhope and Gertrude Bell stands the younger generation of Laurence Deonna, Brigid Keenan, Sarah Maguire and Philippa Scott. The male travellers include the famous Richard Pococke, Alphonse de Lamartine, C.M. Doughty, Colin Thubron and William Dalrymple, to name but a few. On five occasions, there are two excerpts from the same work or from different ones by the same writer; these are Constantin François de Chasseboeuf Volney, T.E. Lawrence, Robin Fedden and Jacques Réda. A short poem by the editor himself and an extract from his The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool: A Syrian Journey (2004) are also included.

Two experts on Syria have contributed an introduction and an epilogue to this anthology: they are, respectively, Ross Burns, Australian historian, archaeologist, and former Ambassador to Syria, and Peter Clark, British former Cultural Attaché, writer, translator, and tourism consultant. Like Burns, I hope this collection will help erase some readers’ ‘preconceptions fed by the mass media’ (p. 5). Clark’s forty-year-old friendship with a Syrian family displays genuine affection among citizens of Western and Arab na-tions. These two testimonies, alongside this eclectic body of writings, showcase Syria as an evocative, complex and beautiful place to (re)visit. This tome is a significant addition to region-based travel literature and an urgent reminder nowadays of the necessity of cross-cultural dialogue and mutual respect.

Syrine C. HoutAmerican University of Beirut

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews202

Book Reviews203

Paola Daniela SmeccaRepresentational Tactics in Travel Writing and Translation. A Focus on SicilyLingua e Letteratura, Carocci, 2005ISBN 88-430-3430-8, €18.00. 179pp.

Among the various issues which contemporary critical theory casts light on, travel and translation are viewed as dynamic and metaphorically inter-related phenomena. Loredana Polezzi has recently argued that both travel and translation can be seen as ‘metaphors of mobility and flux linked to globalised “postmodern” society’ (2006).2 These concepts, regarded as in-terpretative instruments of the Sicilian ‘physical’ space, are also crucial to Paola Daniela Smecca’s interesting scholarly monograph Representational Tactics in Travel Writing and Translation.

In the era of globalisation, where prefixes such as ‘cross-’, ‘inter-’, ‘trans-’, and terms such as mutuality, transition and migration occupy a fundamental role within the socio-cultural dynamics of identity formation and percep-tion of Otherness, Smecca’s book is an invaluable contribution to the wide range of contemporary studies that investigate themes concerning travel and travel writing as forms of intercultural communication and metaphorical translation processes. Travel and translation – mechanisms of encounter with other cultures – are potential means of increasing one’s own cultural and linguistic awareness of both the Other and ourselves.

Smecca’s work is hatched from an interdisciplinary perspective that embraces diverse current research areas, ranging from translation and cul-tural studies to travel writing and comparative literature studies, and from intercultural communication studies to anthropology and ethnography. It is, first of all, a fascinating study of travel writing and, in particular, about the stereotyped representation of Sicily from the point of view of French and English travellers who wrote about Sicily in a period stretching from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. An intercultural flavour characterises this Sicilian scholar’s survey of Sicily in travel writing.

In her book she considers highly significant, and makes central, the stereotyped representation of the Other, the Sicilian and his/her habits, from imaginative French and English viewpoints. The foreign depiction of Sicily and Sicilians is in stark contrast to Smecca’s examination of ‘Sicilian self-representation’, to use Susan Bassnett’s expression (p. 8). Travel writing

2 The Translator, Special Issue, ‘Translation, Travel, Migration’ (L. Polezzi, guest editor), vol. 12. no. 2 (2006).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews202

Book Reviews203

about Sicily is described in terms of ‘domestication’ versus ‘foreignisation’ (concepts introduced in translation studies by Lawrence Venuti3). In a word, travel becomes a form of translation, as the traveller/writer transforms himself/herself into a sort of translator manipulating a geographical and social space, in order to provide a constructed image of that lieu for a target audience (the traveller searches for specific stereotypes that the target reader expects to find in the travel book). Such a stereotyped vision of Sicily and its inhabitants in French and English travel accounts is, as Bassnett points out in her preface to the book, a result of the literary taste for the ‘exotic’, the ‘sublime’ and the ‘picturesque’.

Representation Tactics in Travel Writing is thus not only a volume charac-terised by the representation of Sicily in European travel writing, but also a focus on issues regarding translation, cultural identity, cultural translation and postcolonial studies. The key-word in the book is ‘representation’, a term that appears in all the six chapters that form Smecca’s monograph. In the first three chapters, Smecca applies the notion of representation to the terms ‘culture’, ‘society’ and ‘travel’ with her attempt to reinforce the interdisciplinary connection involving culture and translation, culture and social identity, and travel writing as cultural and social representation. The fourth and fifth chapters are devoted to representations of Sicily and Sicilians. The last chapter, where the concepts of representation and translation are interrelated, is a fusion, and an interconnection, between travellers and translators; in the opinion of Smecca, ‘travellers are already in a sense the translators and interpreters of cultures’ (p. 150).

In the first chapter Smecca analyses the conception of the term ‘meaning’ from a semiotic perspective, in which she discusses, on the one hand, the position of translation through the examples of Jakobson and Steiner, and, on the other hand, the idea of ‘culture’ from an anthropological viewpoint, weighing up the ideas of Clifford and Geertz.

In the second chapter, Smecca devotes her analysis to the representation of ‘difference’ in translation and ethnography. Moving from a survey of the ‘ethnographical representations of societies’ (p. 40), she stresses the idea of ‘ethnography as cultural translation’ (p. 42) and, lastly, she compares the several procedures of representation both in an ethnographic context and in travel writing.

3 See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1994) and Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation. Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews204

Book Reviews205

In the third chapter, Smecca introduces travel writing as a literary genre (by emphasising the difference between travel writing and guidebooks, travellers and tourists) and also casts light on the ‘self-therapeutic’ and ‘freeing’ (p. 72) role of travel experiences as mechanisms of ‘self-discovery’ and expressions of ‘self-identity’ and ‘self-knowledge’ (p. 73).

In the fourth chapter, which constitutes the core of Smecca’s work, the author aims to show that the images of Sicily in French and English travel writing were filtered through assumptions, stereotypes and prejudices which still today reshape the real characteristics of the island and its people.

In the fifth chapter, the cultural power of stereotyping places and people is clearly central to any representation of Sicily. Smecca compares trav-elogues with guidebooks, she examines diaries, letters and autobiographies by English travellers in Sicily and, in particular, she gives examples drawn from the Lonely Planet, The Rough Guide and Let’s Go publications. She notices that ‘the overall impression is that these guidebooks tend to repeat age-old stereotypes and to adopt an essentialist perspective’ in ‘a sequence of fixed images’, Sicily is described – in the Lonely Planet, for instance – as ‘“the very essence of Italy”, a mixture of “history and passion, beauty and destruction”’, which implies both beauty and magnificence but also the ‘fierce and passionate character of its inhabitants, which accounts for sud-den bursts of violence and a wild gesticulation; the picturesque landscape, represented by its volcano and its “stunning” beaches; the inevitable sense of decay after the ancient grandeur’ (p. 127).

In the sixth and final chapter, Smecca continues on the subjects of translation, translation and culture (translation as cultural mediation), ethnography and Venuti’s concepts of domestication, foreignisation and resistance through a comparative analysis which deals with Brydone’s late-eighteenth century travel book, A Tour through Sicily and Malta, and its translations into French and Italian, by Démeunier (1775) and Pignatorre (1901), respectively. Brydone’s translations into two different languages pro-vide the reader with practices of domestication and foreignisation. Whereas the French version is a French-oriented text, ‘with innumerable alterations and interpolations which conspicuously modified the text’s content and the author’s viewpoint’ (p. 160), the Italian translation, though faithful to the foreign characteristics, also ‘strictly follows the English syntactical structure’ by reducing the comprehension at a target level, neglecting, as Smecca puts it, ‘the impact on Italian readers’ (p. 166).

In conclusion, this monograph – centred upon a survey of British and French representations of Sicily in travel writing – is a very stimulating

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews204

Book Reviews205

attempt to link up contemporary topics such as travel and translation as expression of movement, alteration and displacement, with travel writing as a dynamic and distorted instrument for representing the Other.

Alessandra RizzoUniversity of Palermo

Klaus Stierstorfer, ed.Return to Postmodernism: Theory-Travel Writing-Autobiography (Festschrift in

Honour of Ihab Hassan)Heidelberg, Universitätsverlag 2005ISBN 3-8253-5122-X, €66.00. 414pp.

The occasion for this surprising selection of thirty essays, travel writing, poems, garden designs and recipes is a celebration of the career of Ihab Hassan. The volume is organised under the headings of: 1) ‘(Re)Turn to Postmodernism’; 2) ‘Readings in Postmodernism’; and 3) ‘Autobiography and Travel Writing’; and is designed as a ‘festschrift’ tracing the career of Hassan. A homage in form as well as content, this volume mirrors the organisation of Hassan’s collection of essays, Rumors of Change (1995). An original and idiosyncratic critic, Hassan’s cultural hybridity, like that of Edward Said with whom he is sometimes compared (both were born in a colonised Middle East, moved to the US for their education, and stayed on), is a prominent feature in his intellectual outlook. Being in transit, and in an odd space between coloniser and colonised, surely influenced Hassan’s critical position, and perhaps even mobilised it. But only in later years did he turn to travel writing as such, and even here, the dominant form is memoir rather than travelogue: Out of Egypt (1986), Between the Eagle and the Sun (1996) and Coming to the Antipodes (2006).

Some contributions engage with Hassan’s work, but most derive from his several grand themes and interests – especially postmodernism which he explored in The Literature of Silence (1967), The Dismemberment of Orpheus (1971) and The Postmodern Turn (1987). However, the title of this ‘rambling’ selection of thirty essays (rambling in the positive sense of wandering over an extensive discursive terrain) is somewhat misleading. Hassan left postmodernism behind in the 1990s (I heard him say as much at a conference in London – ‘Whither Postmodernism’ (1993) organised by Charles Jencks). Since when, he has embarked on more spiritual and esoteric quests (Hassan, ‘Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust’ in

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews206

Book Reviews207

Beyond Postmodernism also edited by Klaus Stierstorfer). The contributors here are also in the main turning from rather than to postmodernism, and this is hardly a theme that allows the volume to cohere except perhaps in a negative sense. The lack of appetite among them for a return to post-modernism is evident in the coy claim by Christopher Butler (author of OUP’s Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction to Postmodernism) that he knows not what postmodernism is or was, nor what a postmodernist might be. Presumably a second edition of his guide would be even shorter. Butler’s essay, which opens the section ‘(Re)Turn to Postmodernism: Theory’ instead considers Hassan as a hedonist and liberal humanist. Other essays in this section claim Hassan as art critic (Marsh) or regard him in the context of a return to post-postmodern mimesis via Lukács and Auerbach (Tandt). There are two essays on aesthetics (Grabes and Hoffman) and a short piece on Derrida (Ahrens). One essay that tries to extend the theoretical discourse on postmodernism is Göbel’s comparison of it with postcolonialism (both borrow from poststructuralism, but have little historical connection). Two essays continue the theme of postcolonialism: ‘StarAboriginality’ (Ian North) and ‘multilocality’ in Indian women’s writing (Malashri Lal). Significantly, these two essays underline specific cultural contexts, running counter to postmodernism’s multi-culturalism.

As an eclectic and serendipitous collection of essays loosely connected to Hassan and postmodernism (and homing in on Hassan’s own studied loose-ness) the book as whole works, but what strikes me is that as an indication of where contemporary theory is heading, this section suggests not so much a journey into new real world contexts, but rather that theory is chasing its tail in complex discursive spaces of its own making.

The second section, ‘Readings in Postmodernism’, contains essays of liter-ary criticism (old-fashioned close reading) read through selected postmodern themes. Three of the essays are on contemporary British fiction: postmodern parody in the novels of David Lodge, B.S. Johnson and others (Nünning and Nünning); an eleven point analysis of Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory following Hassan’s schematic definition of postmodernist literature into the somewhat empty space of ‘is it or isn’t it postmodern(ist)?’ (Borgmeier); and a close reading of Kureishi’s novella ‘The Body’ suggests an extreme example of postmodern self-fashioning (Volkmann). Hans Bertens’ essay on Brakman’s Bentheim stands out as a reading of theory through practice (most do the reverse), asserting that while postmodernism is anti-interpre-tive in sum, it produces localised, unreconciled meanings along the way. Bentheim, then, is not postmodern. This section also contains essays on

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews206

Book Reviews207

John Updike (Iwamoto), W.B.Yeats (Komesu), and Conrad Aiken’s ‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow’ (Cioffi). Although it raises very pertinent issues on multiculturalism, Jerzy Durczak’s essay on ‘browning’ in the USA seems rather out of place here.

Further out of place, but perhaps of more interest to readers of this journal, is Hiroko Washizu’s essay on Poe’s The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Steering clear of any interpretation of the novel itself, this essay explores the verifiability of the historical voyage literature which sloshes around Poe’s fiction. It provides a short history of Antarctic exploration and draws attention to the unreliability of historical sources in Poe’s fiction (Biscoe, Morrell and Weddell et al.), and to Poe’s (deliberate?) carelessness and selectiveness in the ‘facts’ he incorporates. The essay hints at a post-modern blurring of fact/fiction and the doubling of indeterminacy suggested by the knowing dependence in a fiction of ‘facts’ already discredited as ‘lies’ in Poe’s own time.

To the final section, ‘Autobiography and Travel Writing’, where there are two essays on travel writing per se. One on the travel writings of Rabindranath Tagore (Kaiser Hay) and one on William Golding’s An Egyptian Journal (Frédéric Regard). Curious but welcome inclusions, both are off the beaten track and seem to have little to do with Hassan or postmodernism. Tagore spoke up against colonialism and nationalism, and sometimes adopted a self-conscious narrative position – does this make him postmodern? On more solid ground, Hay claims Tagore’s travel journals, written between 1881 and 1932, are important texts in the Bengali literature of the ‘Oriental Renaissance’. They cover trips to Britain (he was a student at UCL), Japan, the Soviet Union, Argentina, Java and Persia. As well as Tagore’s travel writing, Hay’s essay also provides a brief history of travel memoirs from pre-British India. Regard’s essay on Golding’s Egyptian Journal (1984) provides a fascinating account of the trope of disappointment in Golding’s journey as the promise of a glimpse of ancient Egypt recedes in the daily muddle and squalor of the contemporary. Conscious of this trip turning from much-publicised and anticipated meeting of famous writer with ancient history towards touristic nightmare, Golding’s post-tourist tactic is to eschew the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings for a village called Gourna, home of medieval tomb robbers, now producing ‘alabaster replicas of pharaonic objects’ (p. 380).

Alfred Hornung’s essay contrasts Hassan’s autobiography Out of Egypt (1986), with Edward Said’s Out of Place (2000), and Danuta Fjellestad constructs Hassan as ‘travelling intellectual’. Fjellestad ponders the neces-sity for intellectuals (especially American) to travel as the cognitive means

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews208

Book Reviews209

for ‘extended reflection on America as a place’ (p. 356). Hassan’s interests in translation (linguistic, cultural and ontological) are certainly informed by travel, but destination here is not location, it is dislocation of self and home. Europe and Australia are therefore strategic locations where Hassan might imagine translated versions of America.

Travel and autobiography both involve the undoing and rewriting of the self (or selves), quest and displacement. As Hassan says, postmodernism ought to have an affinity with both as an epistemological basis for transgressing margins and boundaries and ‘decenterment’, and the problematisation of ori-gins; travel and autobiography are postmodernism’s ontological equivalents. In ‘The Postmodern Self and Questing Spirit’, Yuan Yuan tries to pin down Hassan’s unruly and expansive theories, but mostly the essay is interrogative or reminiscent of ‘Star Trek’. In describing Hassan’s ‘self-creative journey’ he suggests it might be: ‘A travel not toward a specific locale, closure or telos, but toward an infinite open space; not toward a unique self-revelation, but for self-transcendence: quest itself is a mission and a destiny, to eternity and infinity’ (p. 337). ‘To boldly go’ indeed.

The inclusion of Charles Jencks’s ‘Nature Talking with Nature’ is a delight. Jencks, a more grounded commentator on postmodernism (in architecture) than Hassan, writes about architecture and nature, and designs gardens which in their landforms, water features and installations, mirror the underlying forms of nature and the cosmos (DNA, Black Holes, strange attractors etc.) rather than imposing fashionable aesthetic models derived from culturally endorsed aesthetics, as in the picturesque and minimalism.

Paul SmethurstUniversity of Hong Kong

Jon VolkmerEating Europe: A Meta-Nonfiction Love StoryWest Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press, 2006.ISBN1-932559-70-1 (HB) $34.00/£20.00; 1-932559-69-8 (PB) $18.00/

£11.00. xii + 245pp.

Jon Volkmer’s travel book could be described by saying that it tells the story of how its narrator Jon, a college English professor enjoying a summer’s research grant, travels through Europe with his partner Janet in the summer of 2000. Together they explore, in a leisuredly manner, various cities and touristic sites in western Europe, eat and drink, and finally spend a week

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews208

Book Reviews209

(free of charge) in a French villa owned by Jon’s college. During the summer Jon’s most serious problem seems be that he needs to remember to obtain a proper receipt from each restaurant they visit to show expenses for his grant. His research project is called ‘Old Colonials vs. New Economies: Blurring Boundaries in the Post-Modern Post-Nation State Euro-Transitional Era’ (p. 3). (And it should be added that Jon is a travel writer: ‘All my travel expenses are research.’ [p. 5; emphasis original]).

Yet to emphasise such a mode of travel is to describe only one level of the journey. In fact, the journeying of the happy and witty couple, Jon and Janet – whom the author would ‘want […] to be Nick and Nora Charles’ (p. 176; emphasis original), known from The Thin Man series – is framed in more serious narratives of estrangement, personal doubt and US politics. Such multi-layeredness is also reflected in the book’s narrative structure. The flow of the narrative is repeatedly interrupted by what is referred to as ‘Narratus Interruptus’ (p. 88): instances of this include authorial comments, hypothetical discussions between the characters and other narratives includ-ing mini-essays, letters to the editor and emails to the author. The book also contains a story of its predecessor, a photocopied pre-version of the book secretly placed by its author on bookstore shelves in greater Philadelphia. This shows the way in which the book tries to live up to its post-modernist subtitle: the journey through Europe is a means of exploring and commenting on issues of love, life and narrative. In so doing, this meta-non-fiction love story reflects on its own constitution by using (or incorporating or eating) other literary and popular cultural narratives. As the text’s intertextual refer-ences range from Aristotle to Dante and Montaigne to Patrick Leigh Fermor, their presence in this text constructs and reconstructs the love story. Read in tandem with the text’s constant questioning of the notion of character and its insistence on unreliable narrators, it combines a conventional mapping of foreign spaces with a critique of the conventional epistemology of travel writing emphasising its documentary character. In Volkmer’s postmodernist narration, travel writing is a way of mapping the spaces of self.

As indicated in the subtitle, the idea of the love story plays a central role in Volkmer’s book. What emerges is a sense of narrative performance of romance, rather than a belief in the boy-meets-girl mode of romance. The narrator knows the literary and cultural conventions, as is evident when in his prediction of what will happen when he takes his wife out for a dinner in a restaurant listed in the Michelin Guide (‘Le Clos de la Violette: $236.28’ [p. 186]): ‘Today she’d have Rejuvenating Woman-Time, and tonight I would wow and woo her with the Big Ticket Dinner. In the meantime, the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Book Reviews210

Rodney King Impulse prevails, and I hope the tribulations of yesterday will recede and we can all Just Get Along. Sometimes my thinking comes in Three Word Phrases’ (p. 187). Yet the limits of this performance are also present. As a love story the book is a peculiar one, dominated by the two lovers’ increasing estrangement (‘I want her like this, happy and pretty and teasing’ [p. 136]) and a sense of melancholia (if not death as in the Love Story). The book gradually reveals that the author has returned to France three years later, alone, disillusioned because of the transformed political climate unfavourable to French-American relations. Reflecting on the state of his marriage, the narrator first talks about his failed first marriage and then reveals the current predicament: ‘How long my second marriage will last, I do not know. In my heart, it is forever. Or, to be more precise, until death do us part. And yet I am apart from her, and not dead. While Bagdad burns, I am in Chapet […]’ (p. 143). By locating its narrative of love in global politics, the book suggests that the personal is heavily affected and transformed by the social and the political. As the rift between the narrator and Janet is linked with their differing responses to US politics, activist vs. cynical, the narrator’s return to France is a way of seeking connections by undermining the xenophobic trends in contemporary American culture. In so doing, the writing of the narrative is his way of understanding the construction and transformation of his characters, the author of a travel book and his wife, to travel to them.

Jopi NymanUniversity of Joensuu

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 2

2:48

20

Dec

embe

r 20

14