Studies in Travel Writing最新文献

{"title":"“Paying the tribute of a song”: the poetry of albums and visitors’ books","authors":"S. Matthews","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2044515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2044515","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Victorian commentators identified visitors’ books with mass tourism and disparaged their contents as banal and absurd. However, a historicised approach shows that inscription conventions and commentators’ expectations were influenced by the print mediation of earlier practices centred on blank books, notably poetry composed for British country house albums. This article demonstrates how album poetry published in the late eighteenth century shaped later practice in, and reception of, visitors’ books. An artform which could elevate the album beyond recording fleeting encounters with places and persons, album poetry shows writers deploying literary strategies to construct a guest–host dynamic which navigates between the familiar and formal, and between hospitality and payment. Album poetry establishes a complimentary rhetoric and fantasy of hospitality and belonging that sets an unrealistic model for Victorian contributions to visitors’ books in public and commercial settings.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"256 - 274"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47482285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The visitors’ book in historical context: introduction","authors":"K. James, P. Vincent","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2092319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2092319","url":null,"abstract":"It is customary to begin introductions such as these with remarks underscoring the relative newness of research in the field. Thatmay be the case here, though the argument in favour of this collection is as much that it brings together scholars who have beenworking on discrete projects centred on a specific source set – one whose value has often primarily been understood in terms of the nominal information it yields about travel markets. Broadly speaking, the contributions in this issue explore the visitors’ books’ relationship to other texts, contemporaneous and historical, manuscript and print; their role in record-linkage; and their communicative functions amongst a range of users. All articles underscore that these sources have real research value; by asserting their value as forms of travel writing in particular, the authors argue in favour of materials that might otherwise be regarded with the same curiosity and dismissiveness that attended evaluations of the sources in the nineteenth century. Initial interest in the books for the systematic exploration of the geographic compass of the client market has given way, as this issue attests, to examinations of these sources as literary and cultural artefacts. The books tell us a great deal about technologies of transport, as several contributions to this issue underline, but also of the book itself as a technology – as an instrument for organising and communicating data, and not merely narrowly-defined nominal data. Perhaps themost obvious comment tomakeon these sources is that their survival is largely serendipitous: the articles that follow explore visitors’ books held in local museums, private establishments, libraries, county archives and other record repositories. Others were privately acquired and are held outside public archives and institutions. Perhaps more than anything this has nourished assessments of their ephemeral character – a stance which, until the embrace of ephemera as the basis for serious scholarly inquiry, left them to languish with the other “fragmentary documents of everyday life”, to borrowMaurice Rickard’s terminology (2000). Adding to their ambiguous status as James andNorthey note in this volume, and as all contributions here underline, is the diversity of material structures that the “visitors’ book” encompassed, to say nothing of related nomenclature, from French “livres d’or”, “registres des arrivées” and “livres des étrangers” to German “Fremdenbücher” and many other similar variations. Serving in places as an album, elsewhere as a register, often as both at once, the artefact is difficult to define, and its genealogies remain largely apocryphal. To understand the evolution of the visitors’ book’s value as an historical source, it is important to recognise how it was configured within meta-narratives that explicated","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"229 - 234"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48617094","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Rigi-Kulm visitors’ book: questions of authenticity and intertextuality","authors":"Jérémie Magnin","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2066604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2066604","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT When Murray’s first Swiss guidebook came out in 1838, its section dedicated to the Rigi-Kulm, one of the most popular sites of a Swiss tour at the time, summarised existing information about the summit and its inn, giving a detailed description of what tourists could expect. It noted that the Rigi-Kulm Inn was one of three places in Switzerland known for its visitors’ books, and included a poem, allegedly quoted from the inn album, which subsequently gained its own fame by circulating in print. This article attempts to understand the role of the visitors’ book by highlighting the intertextuality between the entries in the visitors’ books, the guidebooks and the travelogues, and by discussing how these prefiguring texts influenced British tourists in their quest for authenticity at the Rigi-Kulm.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"389 - 402"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44879351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Visitors’ books and registers in nineteenth-century Chamonix: ordering the sublime","authors":"P. Vincent","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2045076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2045076","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT A dense network of registers and albums existed in Chamonix, making it one of the most exemplary sites of nineteenth-century visitors’ book culture. A significant number of these books have survived, enabling us to better understand the functions they served, and how they fit into the wider history of Chamonix’s development. This was among other things a history of ordering, as the article shows in regard to the valley’s historiography and to the development of its infrastructure. Focusing on travelogues and on several visitors’ books and registers, the article examines how these books participated in these ordering processes.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"403 - 420"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45782382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Visitors’ books and travel narratives: the case of romantic Vesuvius, 1826–1828","authors":"Johnette Brewer","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2068295","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2068295","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article focuses on a surviving visitors’ book that covers the years 1826–1828, kept at the Hermitage on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. The article sets out both its value and limitations as a historical source, contrasting it with the more fully developed personal narrative typical of travel literature, and argues that its (and other visitors’ books) supposed limitations (their anecdotal and fragmentary character) may also be a strength. Such books express and capture an experience of travel that is collective and social, and reveal a body of travellers (not authors) that is both more numerous and varied than in single-author accounts. The article’s final remarks frame the relationship between this visitors’ book and travel literature as a collision between the literary forms of the anecdote and the narrative.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"350 - 373"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46507114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Visitors visiting books: visitors’ books at the Library of Innerpeffray","authors":"Isla H. Macfarlane","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2057387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2057387","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT\u0000 The Library of Innerpeffray, in rural Perthshire, is the oldest free public lending library in Scotland and contains unique manuscript records which are invaluable resources for the fields of library and tourism history. This article argues that two key developments contributed to Innerpeffray’s transformation from a lending library into a reference library and visitor attraction: the impact of one of the library’s patrons, Robert Hay Drummond, and the growth of tourism in mid-nineteenth-century Perthshire, within the wider development of Scottish tourism. Two sources are explored for the first time: annual reports sent to the Governors of Innerpeffray between 1891–1904 by the then-Keeper of Books, Mrs Christian Birnie; and the first volume of the library’s visitors’ books, which contains visitor details from 1859-97. The article presents some preliminary findings about inscribed locations, gender, and repeat visitors to emphasise the value of visitors’ books which primarily contain visitor details without additional commentary.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"315 - 333"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47329538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Scorchers”, “wheelmen”, and “road lice”: visitors’ books and cycling culture in late-Victorian Britain","authors":"Alan Mcnee","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2045966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2045966","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The last two decades of the nineteenth century were a boom period for cycling, not only in Britain but also on Continental Europe and in the United States. Cycling was cheap, accessible and democratic, and the proliferation of cycling clubs made it a sociable sport for all classes and genders. Part of this social aspect of cycling involved weekend stops at popular country pubs and inns, some of which became semi-official headquarters for various clubs. This article examines the visitors’ books of three such pubs in the south of England and suggests that inscriptions in them provide an insight into the values and attitudes of recreational cyclists. It uses Benedict Anderson’s notion of the “imagined community” as a template for understanding how a diverse group of individuals visiting the same location at different times could forge a thriving virtual subculture via visitors’ books and guest books.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"298 - 314"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45579266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Theorising comment books as historical sources: towards a performative and interpretive framework","authors":"Chaim Noy","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2086581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2086581","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article theorises historical comment books and related travel-writing sources. It offers a conceptual framework for reading disparate sources produced by travellers and tourists during and as part of travel and visitation. An interdisciplinary framework is promoted, conjoining travel and tourism studies, medium theory, communication sensibilities, and anthropology of writing. By attuning to the practices, materialities, and mobilities that comment books generate and embody, this study details six analytical hypotheses. These hypotheses address the indexical value of comment books as on-site media, their institutional nature, the heterogeneous literacies, narratives, and chronotopes performed in and through them, and the texts’ addressivities. The article seeks to illuminate the richness, complexity, and significance of these sources, and of the travel practices they stimulate. More than records or capsules of historical voices and discourses, as travel-writing artefacts comment books are stimulating to “think with” about the historical, sociocultural, and political processes they index.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"235 - 255"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47792521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"British travellers in early nineteenth-century registers and guest books","authors":"M. Heafford","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2084009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2084009","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The experience of travellers has usually been explored through their own journals, diaries and letters. Here, focusing on British travellers on the Continent in the early nineteenth century, a different approach is adopted: using registers, and other similar sources, in which individuals are named, allows us to list large numbers of travellers at various points of their journey. The resulting data enables us to build up an objective picture of the whole travelling cohort, to estimate overall numbers generally, and to assess the relative popularity of particular destinations. Combining details about individuals may enable us to get beyond a name to an identification, and perceive patterns in individual itineraries. Knowing the location of named travellers on a particular day may reveal the identities of their travelling companions, enable a name to be attributed to an anonymous travel journal, and confirm or refute biographical information derived from other sources.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"374 - 388"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45251044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“The Devil may take Snowdon”, or: inscribing touristic disappointment in Victorian visitors’ books","authors":"Rita Singer","doi":"10.1080/13645145.2022.2063102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2022.2063102","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Historically, tourism in Wales was invigorated by the reinvention of mountain scenery during the Romantic period when travellers gained new perspectives of the terrain from higher ground. It is also during this period that inns and guesthouses began keeping visitors’ books in which guests evaluated their surroundings and their hosts’ good services. The participatory nature of these albums encouraged inscribers not only to provide factual reviews, but also to compose occasional poetry, humorous vignettes of a day’s travel or satirical character sketches of fellow travellers and locals. The Snowdon visitors’ books evidence travellers’ expectations and experiences of ascending the highest mountain in Wales. In the study of nineteenth-century travel writing, messages particularly by non-professional writers reveal how the quality of professional tour guides, commercial infrastructure, the weather and the food sold in the huts shaped the overall experience of Snowdon as a touristic highlight or disappointment.","PeriodicalId":35037,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Travel Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"334 - 349"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45269341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}