“…it brings together a marvellous mix of critical and imaginative writing…”
Wasafiri, 2001, pp.57-28.
This fifth volume of ASNEL Papers covers a wide range of theoretical and thematic approaches to the topics of travelling, migration, and dislocation. All migrants are travellers, but not all travellers are migrants. Migration and the figure of the migrant have become key concepts in recent post-colonial studies. However, migration is not such a new or exceptional phenomenon. From the eighteenth century onward there have been migrations from Europe to what are now called ‘post-colonial’ countries, and this prepared the ground for movement back to the old but also to the new centres of Europe and elsewhere. Travel and travel experience, on the other hand, have been part of the cultural codes not only of the West and not only of imperialism. The essays in this volume look at both kinds of movement, at their intersections, and at their (dis)locating effects. They cover a wide range of topics, from early seventeenth-century travel reports, through nineteenth-century women’s travel writing, to such contemporary writers as Michael Ondaatje and Janette Turner Hospital.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Stan DRAGLAND: This Little Piggy; YEG – YYT (Edmonton – St. John’s, Reading Sujata Bhatt)
Peter STUMMER: On First Reading Robyn Davidson’s First Journey
Kenneth PARKER: To Travel … Hopefully?/!
Graham HUGGAN: Counter-Travel Writing and Post-Coloniality
Pauline MELVILLE: The Ventriloquist’s Tale : Prologue
Susanne STROBEL: Floating into Heaven or Hell? The river journey in Mary Kingley’s Travels in West Africa and Joseph Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness
Dieter RIEMENSCHNEIDER: One Hundred Years of Darkness. “I am no longer of Monrovia, having relocated into the Heart of the
Country”: Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1993) writing back to Heart of Darkness (1902)
Indira GHOSE: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Anxiety of Empire
Nicola RENGER: Cartography, Historiography, and Identity in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient
Lindy STIEBEL: Imagining Empire’s Margins. Land in Rider Haggard’s African romances
Anja I. MÜLLER: Closure and Transgression in Janette Turner Hospital’s Oyster
Ulrike STAMM: The Role of Nature in Two Women’s Travel Accounts Appropriation and escape
Peter H. MARSDEN: When Does an Immigrant Cease to be an Immigrant? Or: How do you define a New Zealand poet? The case of
Peter Bland
Ulrike ERICHSEN: A “True-True” Voice? The problem of authenticity
Uwe ZAGRETZKI: Sea, Land, Earth. The experience of dislocation in Alistair MacLeod’s short stories.