The mock arts written by Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and their circle touched on issues of mechanical instruction, but their satire depended on its application to incongruously non-mechanical subjects. It was in Gulliver’s Travels that Swift turned more directly to descriptions of material production and mechanical ingenuity. The framing of those descriptions in a travel narrative recalls Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Both texts reduced scenes of human ingenuity and manufacture to a proto-anthropological ground zero in distant and solitary locations. But reading Gulliver and Crusoe from a mock-technical perspective reveals a surprising reversal in their authors’ attitudes to mechanical ingenuity. Defoe, the propagandist for commerce, is sceptical about the value and cognitive significance of handicraft skill. Swift, by contrast, uses his commentary on mechanical technique to depict different richly-imagined ecologies of mind in the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels.

Shelley was a prolific and varied writer of correspondence throughout his short life. The work of collecting, editing, and annotating Shelley’s letters has been going on since the 1840s, but large portions of his early and Italian correspondence remain lost. The essay discusses this corpus and its critical history before examining three types of letters that Shelley was particularly adept at writing. Shelley’s adversarial letters to older men such as his father show his mastery of a radical bombast; correspondence with contemporaries such as Hogg and Hitchener shows him harnessing the form for the debate of ideas; and his long descriptive epistles about Italy, addressed to his friend Peacock, constitute some of the finest travel writing in English. T. S. Eliot was quite wrong to claim Shelley’s letters are ‘insufferably dull’: this essay begins to think about the elements of their content and style that reveal their literary achievement.

The Introduction summarizes the book’s thesis and offers a survey of current critical thinking on Henry James and travel. Demonstrating how studies of the author’s oft-cited ‘international theme’ have tended to approach his treatment of journeying either in abstractly cultural ways or in terms of place or destination, it argues for the need to consider the process of travel in more detail and in its own right. The first half of the Introduction outlines the crucial role of transport throughout James’s life and career and his interest in the epistemological and relational value of both small-scale (urban) and transatlantic ‘comings and goings’. The second half of the Introduction considers James’s association with what I call an aesthetics of stasis, whereby certain pictorial or architectural conceits from his Prefaces, notably the house of fiction, have become dominant models in Jamesian criticism. As I argue, much of James’s style and aesthetic logic, including his complex use of metaphor, borrows rather from the idea of conveyance. In support of its claims, the Introduction provides short readings and exempla from a number of James’s fictions, including The Sense of the Past, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.

Among all the narratives collected in the Bible, none tells a story quite like the Acts of the Apostles. Readers travel along with the action over very long distances and visit a range of cultural settings in this geographically expansive tale that brings a wide spectrum of people onto the narrative stage.

This chapter discusses the role of Imelda Marcos in the diplomatic practice and foreign policy of the government of Ferdinand Marcos. At the outset, Imelda is cast not only as a First Lady but as a vital colleague and co-operator in running the affairs of the Philippine state from the 1960s through the 1980s, the other half of the so-called conjugal dictatorship. At one point in time, she was simultaneously governor of Metro Manila, Minister of Human Settlements, member of the Interim Parliament, and Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary. This being said, her status as First Lady and Patroness of the Arts is not dismissed as mere tangent or appendage; it was as First Lady that Imelda became a compelling presence in the political theatre. The combination of her beauty and her charisma formed a particular aesthetic that inevitably evolved into a policy of culture and democracy so central in the formation of a post-independence nation-state in Southeast Asia.

The phenomenon of ‘Ireland’s spiritual empire’, denoting the influence that Irish churches had on the world through lay and clerical migration in the (very) long nineteenth century, has attracted considerable attention from both contemporary commentators and historians. Yet the converse reality that national churches so embroiled in the global growth of their religions must also have undergone far-reaching changes themselves in the process has been much less studied. Focusing on both Catholic and Protestant churches, this chapter will address a number of modes of religious ‘Americanisation’ that can be detected in Ireland between 1841 and 1925. These will include: the backflow of a ‘cosmopolitan clergy’ who frequently spent long periods in North America and returned to Ireland as potential agents of a religiously inflected Americanisation; the visits of Irish-American and ‘Scotch-Irish’ clergy to Ireland; and the material role that a much-vaunted American religious ‘freedom’ played in the imaginaries of both Catholic and Protestant Irish people, enhanced by both media portrayals and discussion in personal correspondence.

Chapter 3 considers the various forms of writing about the city that imagined or invoked the perspective of the stranger who walked its streets. It examines how tourist accounts of London in pocket guidebooks shared with proposals for urban improvements and surveys of the city an understanding of the visitor to London as both an audience for accounts of London and also a potential critic of the city. While map, print, and booksellers began to produce items that walked strangers around the city and pointed out its key sites, those proposing improvements expressed concerns that foreign travellers might be disappointed by a city that lacked the grand and magnificent architecture of its European neighbours. Together, these works point to a desire to accommodate strangers and to offer them an account of Britain as a polite and commercial nation.

The epilogue briefly considers Ovid’s exile poetry from an environmental and place-based perspective. Ovid demonstrates that environmental poetry does not need to rely on a positive attachment to a local land. His exile poetry is about and is marked by place, shaped by the location from which Ovid is estranged and the location in which he writes. Moreover, local place matters to Ovid as a particular more-than-human environment. Tomis is represented as an environment with its own specific geography, climate, and ecologies. Ovid further explores ecological themes by emphasizing the physical effects Tomis has on his body, through motifs of cold and sickness. The epilogue also uses Ovid’s exilic work to clarify the theoretical foundations of the environmental poetics identified in Vergil and Horace. Through his provocative play with intertextuality and fictionality, Ovid demonstrates that environmental poetics can rely not on realistic description or extratextual reference, but rather on the poetic imagination.

Contrary to some accounts, particularly older ones, which portray Clare as a lonely, isolated, and somewhat misanthropic figure, he was a man with a rich social life who had many friends, including literary figures, antiquarians, ornithologists, entomologists, botanists, and artists. Through these friendships, he was abreast of contemporary thought and techniques, and, if only at second hand, he was in touch with the activities of some of the leading naturalists in this country and abroad. This obviously led to an increased knowledge and sophistication in Clare’s understanding of nature, as well as leading to subtle changes in his attitude to the natural world. In particular, it meant that he no longer regarded a love of nature as something to be rather ashamed of, but instead as something which he was able to celebrate.

A substantial collection of sources indicates that women constituted a considerable part of the travelers in the first centuries of the Roman Empire, a period in which traveling became increasingly popular with various social classes. These travelers have left traces of their experiences en route in personal letters on papyri and ostraca, in graffiti and on votive inscriptions. Classical scholarship has long ignored these sources, even though they offer us a unique insight into female experiences and self-representation. Recent excavations on and near the trade routes in the Eastern and Western Desert of Egypt, along which units of the Roman army were positioned in military outposts, protecting and controlling the area, have uncovered letters in which women – most of them of lower rank – discussed their concerns about traveling from and to the military camps of their husbands, fathers, or brothers. When combined with other sources such as papyri and graffiti, these documents give insight into the mobility of the female relatives of soldiers in Roman Egypt. They tell us something about the reasons why they decided to undertake journeys, the distance they covered (some while being heavily pregnant), where they stayed, and the dangers they encountered during the trip.

Prospect Poetry’ situates Goldsmith’s poem The Traveller, or A Prospect of Society (1764) at the confluence of various literary genres and show how its hybridity contributes to its innovative and influential qualities. Goldsmith’s poem modifies the prospect poem by decoupling the observer from any sense of belonging to the landscape, instead developing the figure of the wanderer that comes to inhabit many prose travelogues as well as Romantic epics. It also develops the political tendencies of its various precursor genres by exploring the relationship between individual, family, nation, and empire.

This chapter explores the topic of Roman military families’ mobility in the late first through third centuries CE by discussing a case study of British families abroad. It surveys the evidence for families that came from Roman Britain and settled on the continent. In doing so, the author assesses and compares various types of evidence (literary, epigraphic, and archaeological) to discuss the case of British military families on the move, families that had been present in the Roman Empire but not accounted for in the modern scholarly literature. The sources analyzed include literary texts, inscriptions, military diplomas and personal dress accessories that the members of such families took with them as part of personal possessions during their travels. Since most sources available to trace such families come from the Roman military context, the focus lies on emigrant soldiers’ families. The first section relies heavily on the historical texts and epigraphic material while the second part is devoted to the discussion of the potential and limitations of material culture in our search for migrant communities. The chapter provides a case to support the view that British military families traveled far and wide in the empire.

Historians have tended to view postwar labor migration, including the Turkish-German case, as a one-directional story whose consequences manifested within host country borders. This chapter complicates this narrative by arguing that Turkish migrants were mobile border crossers who traveled as tourists throughout Western Europe and took annual vacations to their homeland. These seasonal remigrations entailed a three-day car ride across Central Europe and the Balkans at the height of the Cold War. The drive traversed an international highway (Europastraße 5) extending from West Germany to Turkey through Austria, socialist Yugoslavia, and communist Bulgaria. Migrants’ unsavory travel experiences along the way underscored East/West divides, and they transmuted their disdain for the “East” onto their impoverished home villages. Moreover, the cars and “Western” consumer goods they transported reshaped their identities. Those in the homeland came to view the Almancı as superfluous spenders who were spending their money selfishly rather than for the good of their communities. Overall, the idea that a migrant could become German shows that those in the homeland could intervene from afar in debates about German identity amid rising racism: although many derided Turks as unable to integrate, they had integrated enough to face difficulties reintegrating into Turkey.