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While the genre of travel writing has been popular with authors and audiences over centuries, developments in new media, social media and public use genres have caused an adaptation of the genre in the digital space. This genre, as it exists, claims two antecedents: first, the traditional and literary version of the genre and second, the blogs that emerged and were popularized in the late twentieth century. In exploring the genre of digital travel writing, hundreds of internet publications were read, reviewed and cataloged. Of these, many began to demonstrate the criteria which would be considered prototypical for the genre. Any publication in the genre demonstrates, in various ways and to varying degrees, the following characteristics: frequent updates, multiple platform-use and multimedia inclusions, discursive constructions of identity, engagement with economies, and entanglements with the ethical concerns proper to both the genre and its situated ideology. In addition to stabilizing this vast archive of open source media as a perceptible genre, this dissertation hints at ways that the literate practices of these authors speaks to a nuanced appreciation of literacy and one that reverses the classical binary privileging reading over writing. Further, some suggestions are made for using open source and new media genres productively in writing classrooms. / English

This thesis aims to investigate the experience of travel and the representation of Italy in the works of British women writers of the nineteenth century. A close reading of literary texts by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot will help establish a connection between their journey to the Peninsula and their development as women and writers. The separation from their homeland and the confrontation with Italian culture were indeed pivotal for Shelley, Barrett Browning and Eliot in gaining a new perspective on their native land, breaking free from the rigid codes of behaviour expected from English ladies, and acquiring the authority and the confidence to write. It will be shown that in contrast to other Grand Tourists, Shelley, Barrett Browning and Eliot went beyond a mere description of Italian beauties and moved into the realm of social commentary. By avoiding stereotypical representations of the Peninsula and engaging in an authentic dialogue with the country and its inhabitants, they broadened the scope of travel narrative and explored matters of public importance to provide insight into national ideologies, while expanding the boundaries of the female sphere. The research will reveal that the experience of travel was not only essential in their journey to become professional writers, but it also increased their desire for the liberation of Italy as well as their own. / Questa tesi si propone di indagare l’esperienza di viaggio e la rappresentazione dell’Italia nelle opere delle scrittrici britanniche del XIX secolo. L’analisi di alcuni testi letterari di Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning e George Eliot aiuterà a stabilire una connessione tra il soggiorno nella Penisola ed il loro percorso individuale di emancipazione come donne e come artiste. Il distacco dalla madrepatria e il confronto con la cultura italiana furono infatti determinanti per Shelley, Barrett Browning ed Eliot per acquisire una nuova prospettiva sulla loro terra d’origine, per liberarsi dai rigidi codici di comportamento che contrassegnavano la vita delle donne in Gran Bretagna e per acquisire l’autorità necessaria per scrivere. Verrà dimostrato che, a differenza di altri viaggiatori del Grand Tour, Shelley, Barrett Browning ed Eliot andarono oltre la mera descrizione delle bellezze italiane, soffermandosi su temi di carattere sociale e politico. Evitando rappresentazioni stereotipate della Penisola e impegnandosi in un dialogo autentico con il Paese e i suoi abitanti, esse contribuirono ad espandere i confini della narrativa di viaggio fino ad esplorare questioni di importanza pubblica in linea con le emergenti ideologie nazionali e, allo stesso tempo, ad oltrepassare i confini della sfera femminile. La ricerca rivelerà che l’esperienza del viaggio non fu solo essenziale nel loro percorso per diventare scrittrici, ma contribuì ad accrescere il desiderio di liberazione per loro stesse e per l’Italia.

This research articulates a relationship between the physical community of Harlem, New York and the digital community comprising TripAdvisor, the world's largest travel related social media website. The purpose of this research is to identify forces of racial commodification in the tourism industry and analyze the role of digital technologies in this process. This research is important because tourism and digital technologies are active sites of racial formation and inequality, and TripAdvisor helps mediate the way they interact. This research employs a mixed-method qualitative approach to articulating the Harlem-TripAdvisor relationship: discourse analysis of online reviews of a prominent cultural tourism company in Harlem, ethnography of that company's tour experiences, and techniques designed to bridge methodological gaps between these two. I find that the Harlem-TripAdvisor relationship produces a three-layered discursive structure, with each successive layer less visible relative to each other. The first—and most visible layer—contains a discourse based in newly emerging conventions of online travel writing. The second layer contains a discourse reflecting touristic valuations of racial difference in capitalistic markets. The third—and least visible layer—contains a discourse reflecting histories and current patterns of racial oppression and inequality. Each of these layers are necessary to create a definition of race emphasizing its supposed benefits to economic growth at the same time it remains a hierarchical and exploitative social construction. / Doctor of Philosophy / This research articulates a relationship between the physical community of Harlem, New York and the digital community comprising TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel related social media website. The purpose of this research is to identify forces of racial commodification in the tourism industry and analyze the role of digital technologies in this process. This research is important because tourism and digital technologies are active sites of racial formation and inequality, and TripAdvisor helps mediate the way they interact. This research employs a mixed-method qualitative approach to articulating the Harlem-TripAdvisor relationship: discourse analysis of online reviews of a prominent cultural tourism company in Harlem, ethnography of that company’s tour experiences, and techniques designed to bridge methodological gaps between these two. I find that the Harlem-TripAdvisor relationship produces a three-layered discursive structure, with each successive layer less visible relative to each other. The first—and most visible layer— contains a discourse based in newly emerging conventions of online travel writing. The second layer contains a discourse reflecting touristic valuations of racial difference in capitalistic markets. The third—and least visible layer—contains a discourse reflecting histories and current patterns of racial oppression and inequality. Each of these layers are necessary to create a definition of race emphasizing its supposed benefits to economic growth at the same time it remains a hierarchical and exploitative social construction.

Travel narratives of the nineteenth century frequently became vehicles for colonialist discourse, strategically representing the Other(s) in order to justify their subjugation, and their land as a site of opportunity. W.W.H. Davis's travel narrative, El Gringo: New Mexico and Her People (1857) was no exception. This dissertation begins by arguing that we need to read El Gringo as a rhetorical text, that Davis's objective in portraying both the land and the people was to represent New Mexico as inherently "disponible," a term used by Mary Louise Pratt to indicate "available for capitalist improvement." Working from this assertion, I use the methodology of the Discourse-Historical Approach developed by Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak to explore the development of racialized constructions of New Mexican identity, their ideological relationship to "disponibility," and how these constructs have been reproduced intertextually through discourse. As accepted beliefs concerning the state, they continue to be recontextualized in new situations, notably to justify the disproportionate location of nuclear weapons-related industries, waste, and research activities within the state. Just as Davis and other earlier writers had used words such as "barren," "isolated," "unpopulated," and "wasteland," to rationalize the US presence, US government officials used these very terms a century later to argue that New Mexico was the location-of-choice for building and testing the first nuclear weapon. I argue that a direct discursive connection exists between the US colonization of New Mexico in 1846 and its nuclear colonization in 1942. As part of the ongoing legacy of colonialism, the language used to justify New Mexico's nuclear burden has marginalized the state's original inhabitants, diminishing their land rights and creating situations of environmental racism, such as the Church Rock incident on the Navajo Reservation. In some cases, Native Americans and Nuevomexicanos were "disappeared" from the discourse entirely, as with several Pueblo communities living adjacent to the site of the Manhattan Project. Dialectically, the nuclear colonization of New Mexico has transformed Manifest Destiny as well, reconfiguring its initial purpose to ensure US hegemony internally, to the ability of the US to maintain nuclear hegemony worldwide.

This study examines the value of travellers’ written records of their trips with specific reference to the journals of five French travellers who visited Scotland between 1780 and 1830. The thesis argues that they contain material which demonstrates the merit of journals as historical documents. The themes chosen for scrutiny, life in the rural areas, agriculture, industry, transport and towns, are examined and assessed across the journals and against the social, economic and literary scene in France and Scotland. Through the evidence presented in the journals, the thesis explores aspects of the tourist experience of the Enlightenment and post -Enlightenment periods. The viewpoint of knowledgeable French Anglophiles and their receptiveness to Scottish influences, grants a perspective of the position of France in the economic, social and power structure of Europe and the New World vis-à-vis Scotland. The thesis adopts a narrow, focussed analysis of the journals which is compared and contrasted to a broad brush approach adopted in other studies.

This study explores the development of a discourse of global civility in English travel writing in the period 1636-1863. It argues that global civility is at the heart of cross-cultural exchanges in both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and that its evolution can best be traced by comparing accounts by travellers to the already familiar Ottoman Empire with writings of those who ventured into the largely unknown worlds of the South Pacific. In analysing these accounts, this study examines how their contexts were informed by Enlightenment philosophy, global interconnections and even-handed exchanges across cultural divides. In so doing, it demonstrates that intercultural encounters from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries were much more complex and multi-layered than one-sided Eurocentric histories often suggest. The first case study analyses the inception of global civility in Henry Blount’s Voyage into the Levant (1636). In his account, Blount frequently admires Ottoman imperial achievements at the same time as he represents the powerful Islamic empire as a model that lends itself to emulation for the emerging global reach of the English nation. The next chapter explores the practice of global civility in George Keate’s Account of the Pelew Islands (1788), which tells a story of shipwreck, salvage and return. Captain Wilson and his men lost their vessel off the Palau archipelago, established mutually improving relations with the natives and after their return familiarised English readers with the Palauan world in contemporary idioms of sentiment and sensibility. Chapter four examines comparable instances of civility by discussing Henry Abbott’s A Trip…Across the Grand Desart of Arabia (1789). Abbott is convinced that the desert Arabs are civil subjects in their own right and frequently challenges both received wisdom and deeply entrenched stereotypes by describing Arabic cultural practices in great detail. The fifth chapter follows the famous pickpocket George Barrington and the housewife Mary Ann Parker, respectively, to the newly established penal colonies in Australia in the first half of the 1790s. Their accounts present a new turn on global civility by virtue of registering the presence of convicts, natives and slaves in increasingly ambivalent terms, thus illustrating how inclusive discourses start to crack under the pressures of trafficking in human lives. The next chapter explores similar discursive fractures in Charles Colville Frankland’s Travels to and from Constantinople (1829). Frankland is at once sensitive to life in the Islamic world and aggressively biased when some of its practices and traditions seem to be incommensurate with his English identity. The final case study establishes the ways in which representational ambivalences give way to a discourse of colonialism in the course of the nineteenth century by analysing F. E. Maning’s (fictional) autobiography Old New Zealand (1863). After spending his early life in the Antipodes among the Maori, Maning changes sides after the death of his native wife and becomes judge of the Native Land Court. This transition, as well as Maning’s mocking representation of the Maori, mirrors the ease with which colonisers manage their subject peoples in the age of empire and at the same time marks the evaporation of global civility’s inclusiveness. By tracing the development of global civility from its inception over its emphatic practice to its decline, the present study emphasises the improvisational complexities of cross-cultural encounters. The spaces in which they are transacted – both the sea and the beach on the one hand; and the desert on the other – encourage mutuality and reciprocity because European travellers needed local knowledge in order to be able to brave, cross or map them. The locals, in turn, acted as hosts, guides or interpreters, facilitating commercial and cultural traffic in areas whose social fabrics, environmental conditions and intertwined histories often differed decisively from the familiar realms of Europe in the long eighteenth century.

The theses analyses ways of literary representations of perception of space in Czech 15th century travel narratives. With special regard to the genre classification of the travel narratives, this study covers a part of travellers' mentalities in the Late Middle Ages. The concept of perception of space represents the ways of viewing the surrounding world. It helps to understand how travellers confronted social stereotypes with their own experiences. The thesis highlights how relations between natural foundations of the Earth and human thought are construed and shows that both bear the same importance for the shaping of the narration.

Essa dissertação analisa alguns aspectos da narrativa de viagem Life in Brazil: or, a journal of a visit to the land of the cocoa and the palm, escrita pelo inglês radicado no Estados Unidos Thomas Ewbank (1792-1870), com base em sua viagem ao Rio de Janeiro em 1846. Impresso nos Estados Unidos e na Inglaterra em 1856, e no Brasil, somente em 1973, o livro e os textos publicados em revistas importantes do período alcançaram um público amplo. O relato mostra-se impregnado das concepções de mundo relacionadas ao campo da Etnologia, no qual se discutis a \"origem do home\" e o \"lugar de determinadas raças em seus respectivos ambientes geográficos\". Nesta pesquisa, demonstro e discuto a influência dessas concepções na escrita do relato, implicando em construções de imagens e representações de um Brasil que estaria condenado a um desenvolvimento lento e sempre inferior em relação ao da Euorpa e dos Estados Unidos / This research examines some aspects of the travel narrative: Life in Brazil: or, a journal of a visit to the land of the cocoa and the palm, written by the Englishman settled in United States Thomas Ewbank (1792-1870), since a journey to Rio de Janeiro in 1846. Printed in the United States and England in 1856 and in Brazil only in 1973, the book and the texts published in leading magazines of the period, reached a widw audience. The report shows up steeped in the world concepts related to the field of Ethnology, which discussed the \"Origin of Man\" and \"place of certain breeds in their respective geografic environments\". In this research, demonstrate and discuss the influence of theses concepts in writing the report, resulting in construction of images and representations of a Brazil that would be condemned to a slow development and always lower compared to Europe and the United States.

No fim do século XVIII, ocorreu a Viagem Filosófica ao Rio Negro (Região Amazônica, Brasil) do naturalista Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira. Realizada entre 1783 e 1792 foi a primeira expedição científica patrocinada pelo Império Português, naquele vasto território, a qual produziu um enorme volume documental, com registros de grande riqueza e diversidade, na área da agricultura, botânica,etnologia, economia, zoologia e antropologia. No presente estudo, realizou-se uma releitura analítica da obra de Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, ou seja, a Viagem Filosófica ao Rio Negro, enaltecendo contextos históricos que a antecederam, bem como comparando-a com obras de viajantes, como Gabriel Soares de Sousa (1587) e André João Antonil (1711).As obras desses três autores parecem ter um papel social e econômico em comum, podendo-se dizer que seus textos têm uma razão política. Todos eles parecem ser influenciados ou motivados pelo mercantilismo. A expedição realizada por Ferreira recebeu influências da modernidade e do iluminismo, bem como das peculiaridades da reforma pombalina de Portugal.A Viagem Filosófica ao Rio Negro de Alexandre Ferreira da Silva é uma obra de grande importância no mundo colonial português, sendo um verdadeiro tratado de história natural, agropecuária e economia do Brasil, mas que ainda é pouco divulgado nos circuitos acadêmicos. O trabalho de um homem, servidor fiel de Sua Majestade que, com poucos recursos e uma equipe reduzida, fez o primeiro grande levantamento socioeconômico e ambiental da Amazônia brasileira. / In the late XVIII century was the Viagem Filosófica ao Rio Negro (Amazon Region, Brazil) of the naturalist Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira. Conducted between 1783 and 1792 was the first scientific expedition sponsored by the Portuguese Empire, that vast territory, which produced a huge volume documentary with records of great wealth and diversity, in agriculture, botany, anthropology, economics, zoology and anthropology. In the present study, there was na analytical rereading the work of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, the Viagem Filosófica ao Rio Negro, highlighting historical contexts and comparing it to traveler works as Gabriel Soares de Sousa (1587) and André João Antonil (1711). The works of these three authors seem to have a social and economic role in common and could be said that his texts have a political reason. They all seem to be influenced or motivated by mercantilism. The expedition carried out by Ferreira received influences of modernity and the Enlightenment as well as the peculiarities of Pombal reform Portugal. The Viagem Filosófica ao Rio Negro of Alexandre Ferreira da Silva is a great work of importance in the Portuguese colonial world and is a true treatise of natural history, agriculture and Brazil\'s economy, but that is still not well known in academic circles. The work of one man, faithful servant of His Majesty that, with few resources and a reduced staff, made the first major socioeconomic and environmental survey of the Brazilian Amazon.