Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Alberta, 2010. / Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on July 28, 2010). "A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosphy in English, Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta." Includes bibliographical references.

As a large-scale international cultural phenomenon, the Jerusalem pilgrimage must be approached comparatively. This project compares the pilgrimage accounts of two Germans and two Englishmen who travelled to Jerusalem in the second half of the long fifteenth century. The texts are those of William Wey, (written c.1470), Bernhard von Breydenbach (printed 1486), Arnold von Harff (written 1499) and the 'Pylgrymage of Sir Richard Guylforde', composed by his anonymous chaplain (printed 1511). Each chapter focuses on a pilgrim, and one of four thematic topics: genre, the religious other, curiosity and print. This project treats these works as literary texts which can be approached from the perspective of cultural history, rather than as historical sources. The project, therefore, is more a consideration of how the pilgrimage is represented than it is about the events of each pilgrimage, and so it looks at the pilgrimages created in writing. Pilgrimage writings tend to focus on Jerusalem's spiritual significance, rather than its worldly position. In this sense, textual representations of travel to Jerusalem represent something of a disconnect with travel to other physical destinations, and the conceptual space of pilgrimage will be of key significance to this thesis. This has implications for practice as well as writing, and therefore the thesis will address how the writers consider their journeys, as well as the idea of virtual pilgrimage. The thesis engages with questions of identity, and how it is presented, as well as the authors' relationship with their audiences. This necessitates analysing collective identity, as well as the different audiences for printed and manuscript texts. The most important research question, bringing together these issues, considers whether the authors' different geographical origins affect their self-presentation and understanding of pilgrimage. This leads to my central contention: that pilgrimage must be portrayed as a single, unified experience.

published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation argues that the richness and distinctiveness of modern Yiddish travel literature—with its emphasis on arriving rather than departing—reflects the complexity of such East European Jewish notions as home, homelessness, and wandering. It examines the ways in which the experience of travel affected the search for identity, home, and belonging by Yiddish writers from the first secularized and westernized generation of East European Jews. Yiddish travelogues written in the first four decades of the twentieth century show a curious trend with respect to the search for identity and the destinations that are their subject. These destinations fall into two categories: those with specific Jewish connotations and those without. For writers addressing the latter destination category, even though motivated by the search for a Jewish identity, locales beyond the Jewish map engender the greatest sense of empowerment. Even when their ostensible motivations and emphases are diametrically opposed, they arrive at the same conclusion, that Jews belong simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Peretz Hirschbein and Melech Ravitch are exemplary illustrations of this tendency: the former laments the countless roads on which Jews have traveled and many borders that separate them; he longs for universal brotherhood and closeness to nature, and as such rejects the diversity of the Jewish experience; the latter, on the contrary, celebrates diversity. How can we explain this trend? It is born of the contradictory set of ideological and artistic aims and interests of a generation that rejected the traditional beliefs and lifestyle of their parents, and that aimed to create a body of modern literature in Yiddish that would equal major European literatures, and that internalized a number of European cultural (primarily literary) tropes. Moreover, this literature was the product of a generation of writers who yearned for an organic connection to Jewish past, present, and future and at the same time saw problems with every existing ideology. The Introduction situates the study within the context of Jewish cultural and literary history and addresses questions of scope and methodology. Chapter 1 analyzes Yiddish travel writers’ fascination with exotic destinations lacking specifically Jewish connotations and its role in these writers’ struggles to define their cultural identity. Chapter 2 analyzes the work of Peretz Hirschbein and argues that his longing for universal brotherhood and closeness to nature reflected both a reluctance to celebrate the diversity of the Jewish experience and an impulse to embrace its global proportions. Chapter 3 focuses on the life and work of Melech Ravitch and contrasts his passion for diversity with the opposite approach of Peretz Hirschbein. Chapter 4 explores Yiddish writers’ travel to Mandate Palestine and to Soviet Russia and focuses on the parallels between travelogues about these two politically charged destinations. Chapter 5 examines the development of Yiddish travel literature after World War II, focusing both on works that describe travel back to Eastern Europe and are dominated by the themes of mourning and preservation, and on later works, filled with the urge to affirm a worldwide Jewish presence. The Conclusion recapitulates the dissertation’s main points and stresses the uniqueness of the Yiddish travelogue and its importance in Jewish studies and beyond.

This dissertation describes my recovery of the life and writing of a relatively unknown late nineteenth-century Canadian woman writer. In the fall of 1888, Lily Lewis, a young journalist from Montreal, embarked upon a journey around the world in the company of another young woman, Sara Jeannette Duncan. Duncan has since been increasingly recognized for both her journalism and her fiction and Lewis has been almost entirely forgotten. I have recovered some of Lewis's work subsequent to the tour with Duncan, identified some earlier work not previously attributed to her, and become acquainted with a surviving relative, and in my dissertation I examine Lily Lewis [Rood]'s life and texts from the theoretical perspective of life writing. I find Marlene Kadar's theory of "life writing as critical practice" as she explains it in her introductory chapter to Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice especially enabling for this project. The process of recovering early writers, Kadar insists, must includean exploration of precisely how they became lost, and must not exclude the contexts of the reader and critic. To explicate fully my own critical contexts, I summarize theories of life writing by several Canadian scholars, including Kadar. I include, as well, outlines of some pertinent work on travel writing, and a brief overview of the new historicist critical 'milieu ' in which my study situates itself. In an attempt to understand the "forgetting" (Kadar 10) that has almost effaced Lily Lewis from Canadian literary history, I examine circumstances today, in Lewis's time, and in the time between that have contributed to her erasure. In an attempt to reclaim for Lily Lewis a place among Canadian women writers of her time, I read and analyse her work contextually and intertextually in conjunction with writing by several of her contemporaries, notably Duncan, and, to a lesser extent, the Canadian journalist, travel writier, and novelist, Alice Jones. I focus upon evidence that supports my contention that a contributor to the Toronto paper The Week, previously known only as "L. L.," was Lily Lewis. I look at Lily Lewis Rood's complex involvement in cultural and literary stereotypes, and I discuss her participation in discourses about the New Woman in both Canadian and international contexts. I hope with this work to contribute to our knowledge of Canada's literary past and also, by encouraging a careful examination of our current critical values and practices, to contribute to Canadian literary scholarship and to the theorizing of life writing.

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George Heriot's, Travels Through The Canadas, Containing a Description of the Picturesque Scenery on some of the Rivers and Lakes; with an account of the Productions, Commerce, and Inhabitants of those Provinces to which is Subjoined a Comparative View of the Manners and Customs of Several of the Indian Nations of North and South America, was first published in London in 1805. Presenting the Canadas in a documentary and picturesque mode, Heriot's Travels since its publication has been valued as an important source of data and information. It has thus participated in and formed part of the received notions concerning Canada and its peoples in the 19th century. My thesis explores how Heriot's Travels constructs and represents Upper and Lower Canada and the diverse inhabitants of these regions. I argue that the text and its illustrations far from providing an objective description, in fact give form to contemporaneous perceptions and values and to aesthetic criteria that had colonialist implications. In particular the thesis examines how the visual material within the publication functions to reinforce or contradict the text's agenda. My contention is that Heriot's aims are much broader than those to which he admitted. For his readers the representation of Canada was tied to prospects of vast expansionist possibilities for British capital, technology, commodities and systems of knowledge. The unacknowledged aims of the book, as elaborated in my thesis were: to confirm the superiority of British rule in comparison to the earlier French administration in Canada; to define the British by a comparison to others, thus marking out existing inhabitants, specifically the French Canadians and First Nations peoples, as simple, indolent and inferior; to tame and commodity Canada through the use of the picturesque, thus ordering and civilizing the landscape for a British audience and would-be immigrants; and, finally, to reinforce Britain's economic claims in British North America. As in other travel writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Heriot employs in his representation of Canada the discursive languages of science, taxonomy, technology and ethnology. The picturesque descriptions in text and image work in conjunction with these and serve to demonstrate the role of art and aesthetics in maintaining an established order, and in asserting its classificatory regimes and exclusions. iii

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2002. / Adviser: Sonia Hofkosh. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 291-310). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [272]-284).

Written for the Dept. of Italian Studies. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2020/03/30). Includes bibliographical references.