This thesis investigates the way the national identity of Sardinia was perceived in travel literature – and more particularly the way writing about travel experiences contributed to shape identity, both of the visited place and of its inhabitants. The thesis draws from different sources (travelogues, belles lettres, history books); the work reflects therefore a rather eclectic panorama. For obvious reasons the research field has been circumscribed in time and space, but , but aims at drawing general conclusions, i.e. assessing whether national identities are the result of an endogenous process, or rather are influenced by exogenous elaborations. As regards geographical delimitation we restricted our inquiry to the island of Sardinia for two main reasons: i) it is isolated not only geographically but also culturally and has never been a conventional destination along the Grand Tour routes; ii) up to the first half of the twentieth century the island had a reputation for being an “unknown” or “forgotten” land. As regards time, the choice was to concentrate on modern times, that is approximately between the second half of the 18th and the first half of the 20th century. Thereafter, the coming of the post-industrial society, mass tourism, faster means of transport, the standardizing effect of globalization changed the idea of travelling, leading some to argue that the birth of post-modern tourism implied the end of travel, or at least a totally new attitude towards travel, that has been defined post-modern. When D.H. Lawrence wrote that Sardinia had “no history, no date, no race, no offering” he was drawing from a consolidated image of the island as an unknown land rather than on its millenary history. The Nobel laureate Grazia Deledda challenged this idea in the first quarter of the 20th century by countering the codes elaborated in the island – namely the language code, the common law and the rustic life and passions – to the civilized way of life of industrialized European societies. The thesis concludes that the making of the identity of Sardinia was the result of the interaction between these two views.

This thesis is an investigation of representations of Mexico in twentieth century American and British literature. Drawing on various conceptions of biopolitics and biopower (from Foucault, Agamben and other theorists), I argue that the development of American pleasure tourism post-World War II has definitively transformed the biopolitical climate of Mexico for hosts and guests. Exploring the consolidation in Mexico of various forms of American pleasure tourism (my first chapter); cultures of vice and narco-tourism (my second chapter); and the erotic mixtures of sex and health that mark the beach resort (my third chapter), I posit an uncanny and perverse homology between the biopolitics of American tourists and Mexican labourers and qualify the neocolonial armature that links them together. Writers (from Jack Kerouac to Tennessee Williams) and intellectuals (from ethnobotanist R. Gordon Wasson to second-wave feminist Maryse Holder) have uniquely written contemporary “spaces of exception” in Mexico, have “founded” places where the normalizing discourses, performances of apparatuses of social control (in the U.S.) are made to have little consonance. I contrast the kinds of “lawlessness” and liminality white bodies at leisure and brown bodies at labour encounter and compel in their bare flesh, and investigate the various aesthetic discourses that underwrite the sovereignty and mobility of these bodies in late capitalism.

Tato práce zkoumá orientální krajiny ve francouzském cestopise 19. století. Autorka vnímá cestopis jako svébytný literární žánr a hlásí se k topologické a tematologické kritice, motiv krajiny v literárním textu definuje v souladu se školou A. Rogera jako gesto umělého a cíleného výběru submotivů. 19. století znamenalo ve francouzské próze obrodu a uměleckou emancipaci cestopisného žánru, přičemž cesty do Orientu se historicky i kulturně staly pilířem tohoto procesu. S vývojem cestopisu v daném období jsou spjaty významné modifikace identity mluvčích, kteří v textu prezentují krajinu. První část práce analyzuje tento proces, díky němuž se extratextuální entita autora člení na historicko-biografickou identitu autora- turisty a autora-umělce, jenž s sebou nese předchozí intelektuální zkušenost a prekonstituované obrazy Orientu. Intratextuální entita vypravěče se pak rozdvojuje na cestovatele a vypravěče, přičemž první mluvčí zprostředkovává "zážitky z cest", vytváří autenticitu cestopisu, zatímco vypravěč je nadstavbovým mluvčím, jenž na základě vjemů cestovatele interpretuje krajinu, dodává jí intertextuální kontext a modifikuje časové linie cesty zapojením paměti. Studie jednotlivých cestopisných textů ve druhé části práce ukazuje, jak se v průběhu 19. století motiv orientální krajiny sémanticky i...

The last two decades of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of numerous French travel compilations and descriptive texts studying the customs and ways of life of the peasants, an ethnographical interest that developed even further during the First French Republic. In this study, I identify and study a specific genre that I call republican ethnography. The republican ethnography was part of the Enlightenment’s search for a science of society and to the quest of finding the roots of the Republic. Studying travel literature and administrative reports from two French regions, Bretagne and Auvergne, this study examines the character and the meaning of the republican ethnographical projects. The republican travellers and administrators in Bretagne and Auvergne drew on a complex array of knowledge traditions, using categories from climate theory and medical thinking as well as the vocabulary of the travel literature. The study shows that the republican ethnography worked as way of establishing difference, where the French peasant was described as rude and “savage”, as well as similarity, since the travellers and administrators set out to find the unifying principles on which the Republic could be based.

There are two parallel discourses on humanism nowadays. One conceives of humanism as a worldview and a philosophical position. The other takes it to be a cultural phenomenon typical of the European Renaissance. The critics interested in considering humanism conceptually, as a rule, are not Renaissance scholars. Operating from either a postmodern or a postcolonial perspective, they often speak of humanism as the backbone of Western thought or the mainstay of European modernity and, in any case, as a bankrupt ideology of the West. Conversely, the Renaissance scholars are more concerned with the task of making sense of the idea of humanism in its original historical context than with considering it in relation to its other, later developments and remain, for the most part, unwilling to address the broader questions posed by humanism. This dissertation purports to bring the philosophical and the historical discourses on humanism together. I focus specifically on Renaissance humanism and ground my reflection firmly in textual analyses of late XV and XVI century sources. More concretely, I put forward a reading of two groups of texts. The first group includes three works exploring the arch-theme of the Renaissance, dignitas hominis, from the perspective of a relational concept of identity formation. These are: Pico della Mirandola's Oratio (1486), Bovelles's De sapiente (1511) and Vives's Fabula de homine (1518). The second group of texts contains three works which fall into the category of Renaissance Americanist literature: Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios (1542), Galeotto Cei's Viaggio e relazione delle Indie (written after 1553) and Jean de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578). The bridge between these two bodies of texts is the idea, found in Pico, Bovelles and Vives, that arriving at a sense of self always involves a detour through otherness, as experienced in one's community, Nature and God. The encounter narratives, in illustrating the impact of America on the Renaissance European traveler, bring to life what philosophers theorized in the peace and quiet of their studies - the essential indefiniteness of the self unless inhabited by meanings drawn from without. / 2016-09-29

This thesis explores the transmission and reception of Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels, a twelfth-century Hebrew travel narrative. Scholarship of the Book of Travels is fragmentary, descriptive and largely focused on what the narrative can tell scholars about the twelfth-century Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. This study presents a methodological shift away from an intra-textual examination of the text by seeking to answer how the text has been transmitted, how successive copiers and printers have changed the text, and how readers interpreted and used the text between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. It begins with an outline of the extant manuscripts through a codicological examination and textual comparison. Based on a close reading of the manuscripts, it illustrates how the Book of Travels has survived in four separate textual witnesses. This study, however, highlights the centrality of the Jerusalem manuscript, which carried the transmission of the Book of Travels from manuscript into print. Whilst scholars have argued that the text has been edited and redacted, this thesis offers a more nuanced argument for scribal intervention as copyists, and later printers, altered the text through error and deliberate omissions and additions. Consequently, there is no single transmission of the Book of Travels. Although the core of the text remained unchanged, readers would have encountered different texts through the lens of copyists and printers. The second half of the thesis addresses the medieval and early modern reception of the Book of Travels. It argues that the narrative was used in a variety of contexts, from polemics, to biblical geography and history by medieval Jewish scholars. The early modern reception, discussed more broadly, indicates that the printed Hebrew editions of 1543 and 1556 were read by an Sephardic audience for the purposes of connecting to their Iberian heritage, with an additional layer of interpretation which linked the text to the hope for redemption and the coming of the Messiah. As the text becomes introduced to Christian readers in both Hebrew and Latin, the Book of Travels was initially understood and used in a similar manner. The 1583 Hebrew edition and first Latin translation of 1575 also applied the text to history and biblical geography. This study thus illuminates the continuity in the way in which the Book of Travels was understood – as an eye-witness and authoritative source which found contemporary resonance with later readers. The second Latin translation of 1633 represents an evolution in the way in which the Book of Travels was interpreted, as the text was now engaged polemically to attack the Jews. This study also investigates the censorship of the Book of Travels. It analyses not just the text which has been excised through self-censorship, and the prohibition and expurgations proscribed by both the Italian and Spanish Inquisitions, but also how this impacted the transmission and reception of the narrative. It is shown that whilst Inquisitorial censorship was seemingly systematic, it was unevenly applied and did not impact on the Book of Travels’ transmission. This thesis is ultimately a pioneering study of the afterlives of a Hebrew travel narrative which enjoyed a rich manuscript and printed tradition. In attracting both Jewish and Christian readers alike, the Book of Travels endured and continued to find relevance amongst audiences. As a result of its versatility the Book of Travels achieved a prominent position within the Jewish and Christian worlds crossing cultural and religious divides between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries.

The Grand Tour is known to scholars as a significant period of travel in which members of English society could immerse themselves in the foreign, while also adhering to established social customs. Scholarship previously regarded the Grand Tour as an intellectual journey for aristocratic Englishmen; however, an incorporation of women into this narrative has introduced many new and important themes that merit further study. Women’s increasing participation in the Grand Tour, which gained in popularity in the eighteenth century, reveals many unique aspects of British society in the period. The integration of women into the Tour is also an indication of increased mobility for an emerging class of Britons who sought amusement and distinction abroad. Cultural identity played an active role in not only shaping the traveler’s experience but also in dictating how travelers represented themselves on their journey. Traveler’s served as cultural intermediaries that represented their country while abroad and transported aspects of the foreign societies they encountered home with them. While cultural identity certainly shaped perceptions of travelers, this work endeavors to bring into focus additional points of analysis and emphasize emerging areas of study. The appropriation of foreign objects and the significance of their integration into domestic life and social practices, the pursuit of amusement and that pursuit’s influence on the Tour experience, and the essential role played by the body as another category of experience in travel are all areas of interest and focus in this additional interpretation of the Grand Tour.

Vnímání zemských hranic a jejich role v členění geografického prostoru: irsko-britská a česko-německá hranice v letech 1750-1850 Abstrakt Martina Power Tato práce analyzuje vnímání zemských hranic a prostoru za pomoci srovnání německých cestopisů Čechách a britských cestopisů o Irsku publikovaných mezi lety 1750 až 1850. Obě země mají multietnický a multikulturní charakter, historicky a geograficky definované zemské hranice a jsou ve sledovaném období součástí větších nadnárodních politických celků. Význam a vnímání těchto politických příslušností je zkoumán především s ohledem na sílící integrační tendence vycházející z centra těchto celků. Zohledněno není pouze vnímání hranic politických, ale také vnímání hranic geografických, či "přirozených" (moře a hory) a hranic kulturních. U reprezentací Čech a Irska je předpokládáno, že významné místo mezi kulturními hranicemi budou zaujímat hranice konfesionální, jazykové, etnické, hranice mezi různými typy aglomerací (města a venkov), mezi různými krajinnými typy (hory a nížina) a kvalitativní hranice mezi chudobou a prosperitou. Ačkoli se přítomnost kulturní hranice do jisté míry odráží také do fyzické podoby prostoru, je její konstrukce produktem mysli a vnímání jedince, cestovatele, který se v prostoru pohybuje. Při využití cestopisů k rozkrytí významů, které...

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This thesis analyses a growing metropolitan British fascination with northern Scandinavia and Scotland towards the end of the eighteenth century. These two northern regions underwent a dramatic transformation, from being places people avoided to being realms writers considered worthy of visiting, observing and narrating. This thesis examines the importance of the primitivist discourse of northern noble savagery in that transformation. While encounters with the ‘noble savage’ were largely associated with the extra-European world, the fascination with the north was in observing Europe’s very own native examples of the breed. The Highlanders and Islanders of Scotland and the northern Scandinavians, the Sami people in particular, were often romanticised in this context. Despite the Sami being celebrated in British fiction and natural-history works at the time, there has been, in contrast with Scandinavia’s ‘Vikings’, little scholarly attention given to them in a British context. The origin and function of the northern-noble-savage discourse is anchorerd in naturalhistory texts. This study emphasises the importance of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), who travelled in Lapland in 1732, in constructing idealised depictions of the Sami. Linnaeus also provided a model of domestic exploration in which naturalists produced inventories of regions and their inhabitants previously relatively unmapped by the state. Although the image of the northern savage often bore little resemblance to reality, it had real application and effect. Such imagery allowed allegedly backward regions to be incorporated into the national narrative, and through this the national community sought to benefit from these peripheries and their communities. The thesis also studies the consequences of actual encounters between metropolitan observers and the local populations of these northern regions. The travelogues of the celebrated natural historian and traveller Edward Daniel Clarke (1769-1822), who sojourned in Scotland and Scandinavia in 1797-1799, is the focus of the investigation. In a comparative analysis of his Scottish and Scandinavian accounts, this study presents Clarke as an ambivalent primitivist who both praised and condemned the Highlanders and Sami. Clarke was, for example, critical of what he regarded as the superstitious beliefs of both peoples. His narrative on the Highlanders was, however, far more positive than that on the Sami because of Clarke's adherence to racial classifications, which paradoxically Linnaeus had instigated, which demoted the Sami to mere savages. After Clarke’s death in 1822, attitudes towards the Highlanders and Sami continued to diverge against a backdrop of increased racialisation in British thought. While the Highlander became firmly integrated into a British narrative, the Sami was displaced by growing interest in a Scandinavian invader of Britain, the Viking, whose image went on to provide a robust challenge to the romanticisation of the Celtic Highlander in the century that followed. Meanwhile, the optimism over the Highlands’ economic prospects that had permeated the Linnaean project of exploration in Scotland was now gone. Whereas the idealised gaze of the eighteenth-century explorer had surveyed Highland history in order to chart a course to the future, the focus of the nineteenth-century tourist tended to be firmly on the past.