Exploring Victorian Travel Literature

Download or read book Exploring Victorian Travel Literature written by Jessica Howell and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination. It analyses foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot across non-fictional and fictional travel narratives, speeches, private journals and medical advice tracts. Well-known authors such as Joseph Conrad are placed in dialogue with minority writers such as Mary Seacole and Africanus Horton in order to understand their different approaches to representing white illness abroad. The project also considers postcolonial texts such as Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock to demonstrate that authors continue to 'write back' to the legacy of colonialism by using images of illness from climate.