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 / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

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This dissertation is an analysis of writings and illustrative material by Canadian travel writers Anna Jameson, Mina Hubbard, and Margaret Laurence, that attempts to reconcile the masculinist focus of postcolonial criticism and the charges of cultural imperialism levied against feminist criticism with the role postcolonial and feminist theories play in understanding women's travel narratives. I argue that Jameson's 1838 Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Hubbard's 1908 A Woman's Way through Unknown Labrador, and Laurence's 1963 The Prophet's Camel Bell provide maps of the political, cultural, and physical features of the areas through which the women travelled, and of their own social and cultural positions. Their mapping is also done through more graphic media---including Hubbard's cartographic work, Hubbard's and Laurence's photographs, and Jameson's unpublished sketches---which reflect and complicate the written negotiations of gender and imperialism in which the three women engage. / Because my aim is to reconcile theoretical contradictions, I examine in detail books that clearly dramatize colonialist or anti-imperialist approaches and considerations or exemplifications of issues of gender. Not surprisingly, the three writers draw very different maps of those subjects, as a function of their disparate geographical and historical contexts. This study reveals, however, that the maps themselves are drawn with similar tools, which include an anti-racist philosophy and an acute awareness of women's position in their own and the visited societies. Thus Jameson makes philosophical connections between mid-nineteenth-century feminist and anti-racist theoretical approaches; Hubbard provides insights into an early twentieth-century woman traveller's relationship to First Nations men who have both more and less power than she; and Laurence serves as a witness to and astute reporter on oppression of mid-twentieth century women by specific colonial and patriarchal forces.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century, the first-person overseas voyage narrative enjoyed an unprecedented degree of popularity in England. This thesis is concerned with texts written by travellers and the increasing perception that such information might be useful to those engaged in newly-developing scientific specialisms. It draws upon a wide range of texts including geographiae, physico-theological texts, first-person voyage narratives and imaginary voyage prose fictions. The main focus of the thesis is on the movement away from traditional encyclopaedic geographical textbooks whose treatment of non-European countries comprised an amalgam of unattributed information and a mass of traditional and erudite beliefs, towards a priontising of eyewitness accounts by named observers. Following an introductory survey of the production of an indigenous body of geographical literature in England, the first chapter traces the decline in popularity of traditional geographiae and the separation of regional description from general theories of the earth. The second chapter shows how in the Restoration period the concerted efforts of Fellows of the newly-established Royal Society resulted in a significant increase in the number of overseas travel narratives being published. The third chapter looks at the way in which the Royal Society's campaign developed from its initiation in 1666 to the close of the century, focusing on the response of travellers to the Society's requests for information. The fourth chapter considers the way in which earlier accounts were advertised as fulfilling contemporary expectations of this type of discourse. The fifth and sixth chapters concern fictitious voyage narratives. Imitative of a genre the value of which was increasingly seen as residing in its veracity, these fictions adapted in accordance with the changes being introduced to real voyage accounts whilst continuing to perpetuate the archaic myths and traditional beliefs which had been ehminated from factual geographical description. Appended to the thesis is a list of accounts of voyages and travels outside Europe, printed in the Philosophical Transactions (1665-1700). Also listed are reviews and abstracts of geographical texts, inquiries concerning specific locations and directions and instructions aimed at seamen, with brief biographical information about the authors to indicate the range of contributors to that journal.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2008. / Thesis directed by Joseph A. Buttigieg for the Department of English. "April 2008." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 364-389).

Univ., Diss.--Augsburg, 2003. / Literraturverz. S. 391 - 429.

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This dissertation examines the evolution of the early English travel narrative as it relates to the development and application of mercantilist economic practices, theories of aesthetic representation, and discourses of gender and narrative authority. I attempt to redress an imbalance in critical work on pre-colonialism and colonialism, which has tended to focus either on the Renaissance, as exemplified by the works of critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and John Gillies, or on the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as in the work of scholars such as Srinivas Aravamudan and Edward Said. This critical gap has left early travel narratives by Sir Francis Moore, Jonathan Harris, Penelope Aubin, and others largely neglected. These early writers, I argue, adapted the conventions of the travel narrative while relying on the authority of contemporary commercial practices. The early English travelers modified contemporary conventions of aesthetic representation by formulating their descriptions of non-European cultures in terms of the economic and political conventions and rivalries of the early eighteenth century. Early English travel literature, I demonstrate, functioned as a politically motivated medium that served both as a marker of authenticity, justifying the colonial and imperial ventures that would flourish in the nineteenth century, and as a forum for experimentation with English notions of gender and narrative authority.

The French have seen Louisiana in many different lights: as pictured in the accounts -- sometimes dry and matter-of-fact, sometimes brazenly mendacious -- of the early explorers; as an Eldorado which drew Parisian speculators to the bank-windows of the shrewd Scot, John Law; as a worthless stretch of marshy lands handed over to Spain, and then sold to the United States by Napoleon; as the gorgeous country of Meschacebé, peopled by Chateaubriand’s Indians, birds, bears, and fragrant trees; as the home of French colonial memories, and the refuge of a serene and picturesque culture sought by a few modern travelers in the United States who refuse to be content with visiting New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Hollywood. Louisiana of these French records is the subject of this dissertation. There is little to be added to the detailed, thorough, and well-documented histories of Louisiana which have already been written in French and English. Therefore, our chief purpose here was not geographical or historical but psychological and literary. It has been to discover how the French people knew or thought of the distant Empire given them in the New World by a few hardy explorers. What was their reaction to this fabulous new province across the Atlantic? Now and then some even of the first of the missionaries or travelers in this strange land who recorded their experiences were found to be sensitive to the “picturesque” of the magnificient landscapes, the rivers, mountains, and boundless prairies -- although this sense of the “picturesque” as is well known, was not greatly developed in the seventeenth century, and the word itself had not yet been borrowed by the French from the Italians. These accounts of the first explorers show that they were inclined to consider the practical aspects of life. The things which interested them were the fruit and grain that the country produced, the animals (the delicacy of their flesh and the warmth of their furs), the gold and precious stones -- or even baser minerals -- that they hoped to find in Louisiana, their Eldorado.