Travel Writing in Mongolia and Northern China, 1860-2020.

• Superior document: North East Asian Studies ; v.4
• Author: Marzluf, Phillip.
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam : : Amsterdam University Press,, 2023.; ©2023.
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: North East Asian Studies
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (219 pages)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1 Frans Larson’s Edenic Mongolia and the Possibilities of Cosmopolitanism -- 2 Language Scenes in Travel Writing about Mongolia: Hybrids and Heroes -- 3 Traveling Women : Beatrix Bulstrode’s A Tour in Mongolia and Strategies of Reflection -- 4 Byambyn Rinchen’s and Tsendiin Damdinsüren’s Socialist Travel Writing : Nationalist, Internationalist, and Cosmopolitan Strategies -- 5 Contemporary Travel Writing about Mongolia : Imaginative Geographies and Cosmopolitan Visions -- 6 Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem and the Myth of Mongolian Pastoralism -- Conclusion -- References -- Index