This essay explores Western perceptions of Central Asia across the ages, showing how the terror aroused by the conquests of the Mongol armies in the thirteenth century came to be mapped onto myths about these vast unknown regions as locations inhabited by monsters and deformed, alien human beings. Early travellers, some sent on diplomatic missions, sought to dispel the more excessive fantasies, but over the centuries Central Asia continued to be viewed as the most inhospitable region of the planet, a place where topographical features, climate and inhabitants stretched human endurance to the limit. The region became once again the site of troubled fantasising in the nineteenth century, as the British, from their base in India, and the Russians challenged one another for supremacy in what has come to be called The Great Game. The legacy of that conflict continues today with the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban being perceived as the latest in a long line of brutal beings. Yet at the same time another myth has persisted, fuelled by Romanticism, which sees the region through which the Silk Road passed as a contact zone between East and West. Central Asia is a region that has been endlessly translated in Western conscious and unconscious minds.

The essay focuses on the reconfiguration of waterscapes and their symbolic meaning within the arena of Anglo-American relations in two travelogues by Jonathan Raban: Old Glory (1981), a descent by boat along the Mississippi in search of the myths and dreams of his youth, and Passage to Juneau: a Sea and Its Meanings (1999), the chronicle of his sailing through the Inside Passage, a journey which becomes more and more intertwined with the exploration of his relationship with his past and with his dying father. Through these two travelogues, the essay explores the indistinct, shifting and liminal nature of waterscapes, be they "centres" (the Mississippi) or "borders" (the Pacific North-West), as powerful metaphors and settings for the overlapping realms of life and literature, Old and New World. The watery core of the country and its sea peripheries turn into dialectical spaces of encounter between different times and visions – a geographic and symbolic terrain where the questions posed by the author’s journeys are not confined to his own life, but call into question personal and national identities, the relation between art and life, and the meanings of belonging and displacement in contemporary English and American culture.

The essay considers the peculiarities of Iain Sinclair’s travel book London Orbital, which describes a walk along the 200-kilometre M25, the motorway which surrounds the London area. The first peculiarity is that the journey took place on foot and Sinclair reports a myriad of episodes that give us his taste for the minutiae of life. However, he never loses sight of the general view or the disquieting effect of the circularity of the route. Among the episodes included in the book, the article stresses a number of visits to mental hospitals, both in working order and defunct. Also mentioned is the transformation undergone by the former Puritan settlement of St. George’s Hill, which has been turned into an expensive residence for upper-class commuters, a gated community. Attention is also paid to residences inhabited by national heroes, such as Princess Elizabeth at Enfield Chase in the Renaissance and Sir Winston Churchill at Chartwell House. The final page records the peculiarity of the sound of the motorway which accompanies our travellers along pedestrian pathways.

This essay seeks to illustrate the complex workings of a successful book that is part travelogue, part literary research and part autobiography. The article is divided into three parts: the first, "Giving shape to the world (and to the self)" examines how Dyer views the world and his own self and shows the way in which Dyer’s travels and his view of them derive from his own interests and his own state of being as a man and as a writer; the second, "Shadow wrestling", concentrates on the literary legacy, in particular that of D. H. Lawrence, which inspires Dyer’s investigations and his life; the third, "The sheer rage of being", is a consideration of the animus that fuels Dyer’s narrative and often provides amusing, even comic incident. Dyer’s background and his approach to writing mean that he is more aware than most writers of how language and literature function. His skill in weaving together the various elements that constitute his subject matter – while contemporaneously often exposing the workings of his profession – makes this book a meta-narrative of research, travel and life.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was, according to Manfred Pfister, the first woman to have expressed written opinions about Italy in her 1718 letters. Her subsequent copious writings on Italy, however, were published late and were not to influence the vision of Italy in the eighteenth century. Montagu’s responses to Italy, where she sojourned three times, reflected the events which had led her to what she considered a hospitable and congenial country and were not, therefore, tied to fixed models dictated by an Addisonian classicism nor by a nationalistic and paternalistic consciousness. Memories of her Oriental experience during her first visit, the anxious expectation of an encounter with her beloved Francesco Algarotti during the second, and the status of an expatriate who had been a victim of various swindles during the third contributed to fashioning the writer’s textual self and the ever changing readings of the country she offered. Those multiple self-fashionings act both as a protective screen and as a lens through which to view Italy.

The article examines the Egyptian travelogues of Amelia Edwards, projecting them on to the backdrop of Victorian knowledge-processing apparatus, in which archaeology, with its racist assumptions, played a crucial role in delineating the evolutionary paradigms to be applied to Mediterranean civilisations. The first professional female Egyptologist in England, Edwards was also engaged in the campaign for women’s right to vote. However, her discourse on archaeology and Egyptology, aligned as it is with the dominant male colonial perspective and the normalising regimes of power, such as the patriarchal nation-state itself, is not free from racist implications or gender and class ambiguities. Edwards’s travelogues represent a conflicting intersection of dominant discourses, especially the colonial discourse, the discourse of archaeological Egyptology, and the discourse of liberal, middle-class feminism. Edwards’s Egyptian archaeological writings are thus examined as an ideologically multilayered genre, highlighting both their specific imperial complicity and their gender and class ambiguities.

The article reads the Indian travelogues of Eliza Fay, Maria Graham, and Fanny Parks along the trajectory of a discourse of sympathy that the writers employ as a via media between sentimental participation in and detached appreciation of cultural difference. Thanks to intellectually engaging and ethically nuanced approaches, these narratives offer examples of a new sensibility in action in the community of Anglo-Indians undergoing the transition from colonising subjects to imperial agents. Despite the markedly nineteenth-century tone of their rhetoric, Fay’s, Graham’s, and Parks endorsement of colonial sympathy draws extensively on its most sophisticated and authoritative eighteenth-century British apologists, namely Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and William Jones. Their composite outlook on the Indian question throws an interesting light on the complex and, as yet partly uncharted, cultural revolution that accompanied the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain. The paper intends to show how sympathy accommodates a double-edged discourse, caught between imperial gaze and anti-conquest rhetoric.

This article will investigate the dynamic and conflicting relationship between homeland, belonging and exile in the texts of the Italian-Canadian writer Mary Melfi. The theoretical insights and suggestions developed within the field of Diaspora studies and their contiguity with other discourses, such as feminist and multicultural theories, will provide a conceptual framework for an examination of Melfi’s diasporic poetics. I will argue that Melfi’s exploration of the technologies of subject construction, such as heteronormativity as well as the Canadian multicultural apparatus, intersects with contemporary feminist critiques of mainstream liberal conceptualisations of “universal citizenship”. Her attempts at deconstructing the normative vision of citizenship as the “passive holding of rights” (Richter 2006: 40) leads her to question the “happiness duty” (Ahmed 2010) migrants have to perform in order to comply with claims of national belonging.

This study looks at travel as a search for identity, where the act of movement represents the ideal sum of motion and emotion. Taking as its starting point recent critical studies on travel writing, postcolonial and translation studies, and migration theories, the analysis aims to cast light on Leila Aboulela’s novel Lyrics Alley, investigating the relationship between travel and migration as dynamic concepts which are dependent upon the mechanism of cultural translation. The article scrutinises the theoretical and practical modalities which make Aboulela’s text a site of intersection between fluctuating territories. Lyrics Alley testifies to the way in which the experiences of travelling and translating act as contemporary metaphors for Muslim subjects, and also surveys the procedures by which Sudan, Egypt and Britain become non-permanent geographical spaces. Migrant characters who traverse Sudanese alleyways, Egyptian metropolitan streets and British routes act as translators as well as travellers, whose journeys towards in-between places lead them to cross boundaries, entering new territories and creating new subjectivities.

Traditionally travel literature focuses on the semantic aspects of space representation, without questioning the specificity of the relation of space and signs, and of space and language. In this essay, I connect my reading of some Filipino travel writing to philosophical and theoretical issues regarding space, not in the frame of exotic travelogues, but in order to address and valorise the complex traits of the narrative gaze recurring in many Filipino accounts and in their innovative rhetoric of space. I will refer mostly to a tradition discussed by Edna Zapanta-Manlapaz in her Filipino Women Writers in English. Their Story: 1905-2002 (2003). The authors mentioned are acknowledged protagonists of the literary scene in the Philippines, such as Luisa Aguilar Igloria, Edith Tiempo, Kerima Polotan Tuvera, Susan Evangelista, and Christina Pantoja-Hidalgo. The blindness of stereotyping (in) travel writing deprives it of its epistemological impact as a complex world-conceptualisation. Against this blindness, the hermeneutical practice at work here is interested in travel writing as discursive formations and qua an epistemological and cognitive component of culture.