winter/spring 2018

Between the Individual and the Collective: The Poetics of Romantic Croatian Travel Literature Using Antun Nemčić Gostovinski and Stanko Vraz as Case Studies

Krystyna Pieniążek-Marković

a b s t r a c t

As was the case elsewhere in Europe, Croatian travel literature began to flourish in the Romantic period.[1] This being said, if we compare the situation in Croatia to its counterparts in Western Europe or even Poland and Slovakia, where “Dark Romanticism”[2] and the uncanny[3] were the dominating motifs, then the Croatian case is somewhat distinct.

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Scent of the Dragon: On the Poetics of the Senses in Travel Writing on China

Recent decades have witnessed a surge of interest in travel writing among scholars, shaped in large part by postcolonial discourse. Travel sketches have proven to be a particularly useful reservoir of material for scholars seeking to map out the ramifications of European expansion, as they both depict Europeans’ activities and shed light on the ideologies and motives that loomed behind the colonial project. (...)

Three Variations on the Road to the Far East: On Strategies for Generating Cultural Difference in Polish Travel Writing from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

As a branch of writing, travel literature poses a range of hurdles to any attempts at theoretical, methodological, genealogical or poetic classification. In a canonical reference book for philologists in Poland, Dictionary of Literary Terms (Słownik terminów literackich), Janusz Sławiński defers to the broadest possible definition for the genre, arguing that travel literature operates between two poles: that which is “fully factual” sits on one end of the spectrum, while on the other, we find contrived travel tales both realistic and fantastical. (...)

A Vertical Schema of Experience: Travel Writing from the Himalayas (Jerzy Kukuczka, Adam Bielecki)

One could argue that any exploration of the experience of travel, the sense of the world captured in transit and the intellectual tools used to conceptualize the traversed (absorbed, consumed, etc.) space (geographically, physically and culturally) must be foregrounded by first identifying the basic obstacles to articulating the nuances of travel and its literary and textual counterparts. (...)