Turkish Travels

This elective offers an introduction to travel writing as a literary genre, and to a selection of travel writing in English about the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Students taking this course will examine some of the central critical conversations concerning both travel writing as a genre, and western literary and artistic representations of the East. Readings will range from the early seventeenth century to the twenty-first century, and will include authors famous for their work in other genres, such as Lord Byron and Mark Twain, as well as others best known for their travel writings, such as Mary Wortley Montagu and Freya Stark. Themes examined may include the Grand Tour; responses to Turkey's ancient, classical and Byzantine heritage; Orientalism, and strategies of othering; representations of Turkey's natural environment; aesthetic categories such as the picturesque, the beautiful and the sublime; women travellers, the representation of Turkish women, and the gendering of travel writing; Turkey's minority communities; travel writing as autobiography; the city and the country, and Turkey's various regions and cities; frontiers and borders; and the complex of relations in travel writing between fact and fiction, authority and veracity.