4 results
91 - Traveller/Travellee
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- By Paul Smethurst, University of Hong Kong where he taught travel writing, theory and contemporary fiction.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 268-270
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Summary
The word ‘traveller’ has been in continuous use in English since the fifteenth century to refer to a person who goes from place to place, undertakes a journey or is a passenger. The French derivation from ‘travail’ suggests hardship and suffering, a fitting denotation for saints and pilgrims who travelled in the Middle Ages (see pilgrimage). From the late fifteenth century onwards, the term refers more widely to voyagers, scientific travellers and collectors, those travelling for leisure, forced to travel for various reasons or travelling habitually as a way of life or in search of employment like commercial travellers and journeymen. In Britain, it has specific application to so-called New Age travellers and to Gypsies, who have for centuries lived on the margins of society and can claim ‘traveller ethnicity’ (Belton 2005).
‘Travellers’ have often been regarded with suspicion. Gypsies and others who choose an itinerant lifestyle have been met with widespread prejudice, even when travelling under the aegis of religious orders. Indeed, the development of the English novel owes much to travellers’ stories and the figure of the ‘travel liar’ (Adams 1962). Yet in the eighteenth century, when young English aristocrats were sent to Europe for their ‘education’, it was these ‘blockheads’ who were subjected to gulling and cheating by unscrupulous innkeepers and antiquarians (Smollett 1979 [1765]). Taking a more elevated view of himself as a traveller, Laurence Sterne (2003 [1768]) reduced the ‘whole circle of travellers’ to:
Idle Travellers
Inquisitive Travellers
Lying Travellers
Proud Travellers
Vain Travellers
Splenetic Travellers
To these are appended the ‘Travellers of Necessity’, a heading which includes the ‘delinquent’, the ‘felonious’ and the ‘unfortunate’. Distancing himself from these, he labelled himself ‘Sentimental Traveller’ (10–11).
Sterne's Yorick epitomized and parodied the traveller for whom travel was more of a performance than an education. Yet the idea that the traveller should focus on contact with people, rather than gather information and document sights, marked a significant shift in the traveller's mode and sensibility. The ability to record feelings and impressions as well as facts is crucial here as Sterne self-consciously turns the labour implied in ‘travail’ to that of writing. An ‘intense bond’ between travel and writing would find further intensity in the Romantic era (Butor 2001 [1972], 69).
1 - Abroad
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- By Paul Smethurst, University of Hong Kong where he taught travel writing, theory and contemporary fiction.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 1-3
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Summary
The word ‘abroad’ is first recorded in English in the fourteenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which states that it was originally used as an adverb to mean spread over a wide area, widely scattered, widely known or at large. Its connections with travel and travel writing are more pronounced in later denotations of outdoors, elsewhere or away from one's home. From the sixteenth century onwards, as Britain and its neighbours engaged in voyages of exploration and the boundaries of nation states became more defined, the term would gain more specific reference to being overseas, or out of one's country. The modern sense of ‘abroad’ as a noun that refers to the world beyond one's own country, and thereby opposite to ‘home’ in a patriotic sense, is more commonly found after the nineteenth century. Then it begins to have connotations of the foreign, especially for British travellers, often with negative associations. As a generic site of otherness, ‘abroad’ is also used to describe a desirable, exotic site.
Mark Twain's travel book The Innocents Abroad (1869) uses ‘abroad’ in the earlier sense of being at large, in general circulation or spread out, and not as Robinson Crusoe uses it in resolving ‘not to think of going abroad any more, but to settle at home’ (Defoe 2001 [1719], 7). Although, once on his island, Crusoe uses the word in the more local sense, of ‘going abroad with my gun and my dog’, meaning outside the quasi-home of his fortified hut (Defoe 2001 [1719], 58). The wider sense of ‘abroad’ in opposition to home and in association with foreign places had particular resonance during the colonial era, when the political and economic life of European nations was increasingly dependent on people and goods either going ‘abroad’ or coming from ‘abroad’, and thousands of diplomats and colonial administrators were also posted ‘abroad’ (Macaulay 1979 [1849]).
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘abroad’ referred to a generic place for adventures, enterprise and fame (Defoe 2001 [1719], 1), and in English writing it was often a collective term to describe colonial territories overseas as a distant and shadowy topos.
67 - Politics
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- By Paul Smethurst, University of Hong Kong where he taught travel writing, theory and contemporary fiction.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 196-198
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Summary
Although Raymond Williams omits ‘politics’ from his Keywords (1976), it was always for him a key element in the production and criticism of cultural texts. In travel writing studies, the most obvious form of politics is ‘geopolitics’, defined as the power relations between states and the geographical factors affecting these. A word not coined until the twentieth century, ‘geopolitics’ covers the influences and ideologies operating through four centuries of European expansion from Columbus onwards. While their provenance may be dubious, Columbus's Journal and Letter to the King and Queen of Spain strike indubitable political stances, revealing Spain's geographical ambitions and the internal politics of the Spanish Court. Similarly, Sir Walter Raleigh's Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596), though unsuccessful in its intent of promoting Raleigh's next voyage and in furthering his political career, was instrumental in seeding the political vision of an English empire overseas (Lorimer 2006).
The involvement of travel writing in imperial practices, such as furthering trade and expansion, as well as its role in articulating a political consciousness of empire, is well known, and this continues to be a theoretical touchstone in many studies (Clark 1999; Smethurst and Kuehn 2009; Miller and Reill 1996; Spurr 1993). The politics of empire can be expressed indirectly when travel writing appears to normalize the asymmetrical relations by which Europe held sway over its colonies. Furthermore, an imperial mindset can shape the form as well as the content of travel writing, as can be seen in the structure and order underlying both scientific and romantic travel writing in the eighteenth century (Smethurst 2013).
Travellers are sometimes motivated by the desire to explore changing political landscapes and alternative ideologies. Helen Maria Williams (1798), who wrote in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and Agnes Smedley (1934), who recorded first-hand the rise of Chinese communism, would fall into this category, alongside more radical ‘game-changers’ like Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (1996). Travel writing that contemplated political change was especially prevalent in the 1930s as writers anticipated the maelstrom of World War II (Fleming 1936; Auden and Isherwood 1939). This form marks a decisive turn towards political journalism, which for Paul Fussell signals the demise of narratives of travel, to be replaced by more selfconscious writing about contemporary issues.
Small Intestine Permeability in Schizophrenia
- M. Timothy Lambert, Ingvar Bjarnason, James B. Connelly, Timothy J. Crow, Eve C. Johnstone, Timothy J. Peters, Paul Robert Smethurst
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- Journal:
- The British Journal of Psychiatry / Volume 155 / Issue 5 / November 1989
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 January 2018, pp. 619-622
- Print publication:
- November 1989
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Gastrointestinal permeability was assessed by means of absorption of 51Cr-labelled EDTA in 24 patients with schizophrenia (12 in relapse and 12 in remission). The results were compared with those for patients with coeliac disease and those for normal controls. Significant differences between the schizophrenic patients and the normal controls were not established. The results for the schizophrenic patients in remission were no different from those for the patients in relapse, and there was no evidence from the study of an effect on gastrointestinal permeability of either anticholinergic or antidepressant medication. It is concluded that schizophrenia is, at least in the majority of cases, unrelated to coeliac disease.