Publisher:
Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam
;
JSTOR, New York, NY
1860-2020 invites readers to explore Mongolia as an important cultural space for Western travelers and their audiences over three historical eras. Travelers have framed their experiences and observations through imaginative geographies and...
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1860-2020 invites readers to explore Mongolia as an important cultural space for Western travelers and their audiences over three historical eras. Travelers have framed their experiences and observations through imaginative geographies and Orientalizing discourses, fixing Mongolia as a peripheral, timeless, primitive, and parochial place. Readers can examine the travelers' literary and rhetorical strategies as they make themselves more credible and authoritative and as they identify themselves with Mongolians and Mongolian culture or, conversely, distance themselves. In this book, readers can also approach travel writing from the perspective of women travelers, Mongolian socialist intellectuals, twenty-first-century travelers, and a Han Chinese writer, Jiang Rong, who promotes cultural harmony yet anticipates the disappearance of Mongolian culture in China...
Acknowledgements Maps Introduction Chapter 1 Frans Larson's Edenic Mongolia and the Possibilities of Cosmopolitanism Chapter 2 Language Scenes in Travel Writing about Mongolia: Hybrids and Heroes Chapter 3 Traveling Women: Beatrix Bulstrode's A Tour of Mongolia and Strategies of Reflection Chapter 4 Byambyn Rinchen's and Tsendiin Damdinsüren's Socialist Travel Writing: Nationalist, Internationalist, and Cosmopolitan Strategies Chapter 5 Contemporary Travel Writing about Mongolia: Imaginative Geographies and Cosmopolitan Visions Chapter 6 Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem and the Myth of Mongolian Pastoralism Conclusion References
