Travel : Essays & Travelogues

A selection of the travel and fictional texts which transported eighteenth-century readers to the exciting and exotic territories of Mughal India, Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Persia and Confucian China. The anthology illustrates the enduring influence of oriental narrative in the formation of the novel in early modern Europe. - ;Fables of the East is the first anthology to provide textual examples of representations of oriental cultures in the early modern period drawn from a variety of genres: travel writing, histories, and fiction. Organized according to genre in order to illustrate the diverse shapes the oriental tale adopted in the period, the extracts cover the popular sequence of oriental tales, the pseudo-oriental tale, travels and history, and letter fictions. Authors represented range fromthe familiar - Joseph Addison, Horace Walpole, Montesquieu, Oliver Goldsmith - to authors of great popularity in their own time who have since faded in reputation such as James Ridley, Alexander Dow, and Eliza Haywood. The selection has been devised to call attention to the diversity in the ways that different oriental cultures are represented to English readers. Readers of this anthology will be able to identify a contrast between the luxury, excess, and sexuality associated with Islamic Turkey, Persia, and Mughal India and the wisdom, restraint, and authority invested in Brahmin India and Confucian China. Fables of the East redraws the cultural map we have inherited of the eighteenth century,demonstrating contemporary interest in gentile and 'idolatrous' religions, in Confucianism and Buddhism especially, and that the construction of the Orient in the western imagination was not exclusively one of an Islamic Near and Middle East. Ros Ballster's introduction addresses the importance of the idea of 'fable' to traditions of narrative and representations of the East. Each text is accompanied by explanatory head and footnotes, also provided is a glossary of or more...

Price: $50.50

An author whose fiction has been praised by Mary Gaitskill ("Passionate, intelligent, and piercingly beautiful...an altogether striking debut") and Darcy Steinke ("Nani Power...shows that sensuality pervades all of life and is too powerful to be contained in the bedroom alone"), Nani Power turns her incredible storytelling talents to memoir, crafting a sublime work of nonfiction centered around a life of travel, eclectic dining, and dealing with her decidedly eccentric Southern bohemian family. more...

Price: $23.00

In one of the most intrepid travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent traveling through Burma, using as a compass the life and work of George Orwell, whom many of Burma’s underground teahouse intellectuals call simply “the Prophet.” In stirring prose, she provides a powerful reckoning with one of the world’s least free countries. Finding George Orwell in Burma is a brave and revelatory reconnaissance of modern Burma, one of the world’s grimmest and most shuttered police states, where the term “Orwellian” aptly describes the life endured by the country’s people. BACKCOVER: “A truer picture of authoritarianism than anyone has written since, perhaps, Orwell himself.”. —Mother Jones. “Mournful, meditative, appealingly idiosyncratic . . . an exercise in literary detection but also a political travelogue.”. —The New York Times. “Combining literary criticism with solid field reporting, [Larkin] captures the country at its best and, more often, its worst.”. —San Francisco Chronicle. “[A] sobering, journalistic memoir . . . A disquieting profile of a country and its people.”. —Newsweek more...

Price: $15.00

Three months on a dinghy on East Africa's longest and most remote river, avoiding belligerent elephants and rhinos, and jail in Uganda are just some of the travel experiences had by the indefatigable Christopher Portway. more...

Price: $14.99

This guide to the best-selling novel gives you fresh insight into the Da Vinci Code phenomenon. Following the path of the novel's characters, Fodor's Guide to The Da Vinci Code delves into the locations, people, historic events, and symbols involved in the story. more...

Price: $14.95