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National and cultural identity
 26 other titles

Legenda: Oxford, 2011
£45.00 ($89.50 US)  Hardback  256pp
ISBN: 978-1-907975-07-3

Across time the Mediterranean has been a zone of variable intensities, alliances and tensions: it is where the continents of Europe, Africa and Asia meet, it is where North faces South in an asymmetrical relationship. Its histories—of Greece and Rome, of Christianity and Islam, of modernity and tradition—have evolved through exploration, trade, pilgrimage, imperial expansion, imaginings, vacation and migration. Travellers to this compelling region have recorded their journeys and their encounters with the Other in a variety of modes that have also revealed as much about themselves. Written by leading scholars in the field, this collection analyzes the notion of travel writing as a genre, while tracing significant examples of Mediterranean travel writing that return us to Ancient Greece, to Medieval pilgrimages, to Venetians’ diplomatic missions, to an Egyptian’s account of Paris in the nineteenth century, to French artistic journeys in North Africa and to contemporary narratives of privileged resettlement, death, and dislocation.

Patrick Crowley teaches French and Francophone literature at University College Cork. Noreen Humble teaches Classics at the University of Calgary. Silvia Ross teaches Italian Literature at University College Cork.

With the contributions:

Patrick Crowley, Noreen Humble, Silvia Ross — Introduction: The Mediterranean Turn
Noreen Humble — Xenophon’s Anabasis: Self and Other in Fourth-Century Greece
Maria Pretzler — Pausanias’s Description of Greece: Back to the Roots of Greek Culture
Suha Kudsieh — The Inception of Oriental Doxology: European Pilgrimages to the Holy Land, before and during the Crusades
Daria Perocco — Renaissance Travellers in the Mediterranean and their Perception of the Other
Zweder Von Martels — The Fleeting Concept of the Other in the Turkish Letters of Augerius Busbequius (1520/1–1591)
Nathalie Hester — Writing the Mediterranean in Italian Baroque Travel Literature: Pietro Della Valle’s Viaggi
Roxanne L. Euben — ‘Extracting Gold’ from Paris: A Nineteenth-Century Egyptian Journey in Search of Knowledge
Susan Bassnett — Encounters with Self and Others: Some English Women Travellers to Italy in the Nineteenth Century
Patrick Crowley — Eugène Fromentin: Travel, Algeria, and the Pursuit of Aesthetic Form
Charles Forsdick — ‘Already familiar and yet fantastically new’: Jacques Lacarrière and the Mediterranean
Silvia Ross — The Mediterranean Diet: Consuming the Italian Other’s Culture in Travel Writing by Frances Mayes and Gary Paul Nabhan
Martín Veiga — Deciphering the Past, Interpreting the Present: Self and Identity in Mediterráneos by Rafael Chirbes
Derek Duncan — Grave Unquiet: The Mediterranean and its Dead