Peter Hulme

Travel writing and gender

The essence of adventure lies in taking risks and exploring the unknown, so it is hardly surprising to find that early travel accounts tended for the most part to be written by men, who moved more freely in the public sphere. The great European sagas of knightly questing (such as The Norse Sagas and The Arthurian Cycle ) or seafaring exploration (such as The Odyssey and The Lusiads ) are also male narratives with women the objects of desire or destination points rather than active co-travellers, though the figure of the warrior-princess roaming the world in search of adventure was popular in Renaissance epics like Orlando furioso and Gerusalemme liberata . The adventure quest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when men journeyed in search of fortune and renown to the new worlds that were opening up beyond the frontiers of Europe, was explicitly gendered, since the idea of man as heroic risk-taking traveller underpinned not only the great travel narratives of the next centuries, but much of the travel writing of the twentieth century also. Alongside the myths of the heroic explorer, however, are other kinds of narrative, some of which have been produced by women. The travel text as ethnography or social commentary transcends gender boundaries and, increasingly in the twentieth century, male and female travellers have written self-reflexive texts that defy easy categorisation as autobiography, memoir, or travel account. There is also, in British travel writing, a tendency to self-deprecation and irony, a style of writing that has both Henry Fielding and Jane Austen as its antecedents, despite the fact that the latter did not move beyond the confines of southern England. Contemporary writers like Redmond O’Hanlon and Eric Newby subvert or satirise the image of the explorer-hero, turning themselves into anti-heroes in their narratives, a comic reversal of the dominant image of the male traveller who seeks to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Making sense of the native Caribbean

Critique of recent attempts to make sense of the history and anthropology of the native Caribbean. These works are based on the writings of Columbus and his companions and assume that there were 2 tribes: the Arawaks and Caribs. Author argues however that much work is needed to untangle the complex imbrication of native Caribbean and European colonial history.

Abject in Patagonia: stories from the Wager

The shipwreck of the Wager in 1741 on the western coast of Patagonia brought English seamen into contact with indigenous cultures already undergoing dramatic changes as a result of growing Spanish influence in the area. Many of the survivors wrote their own stories, notably the gunner, John Bulkeley, and one of the midshipmen, John Byron, who later became an Admiral. This essay compares and analyses those stories, paying particular attention to Byrons abjection.

Graham Greene and Cuba: Our man in Havana?

[First paragraph]Graham Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana was published on October 6, 1958. Seven days later Greene arrived in Havana with Carol Reed to arrange for the filming of the script of the novel, on which they had both been working. Meanwhile, after his defeat of the summer offensive mounted by the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, in the mountains of eastern Cuba, just south of Bayamo, Fidel Castro had recently taken the military initiative: the day after Greene and Reed’s arrival on the island, Che Guevara reached Las Villas, moving westwards towards Havana. Six weeks later, on January 1, 1959, after Batista had fled the island, Castro and his Cuban Revolution took power. In April 1959 Greene and Reed were back in Havana with a film crew to film Our Man in Havana. The film was released in January 1960. A note at the beginning of the film says that it is “set before the recent revolution.” In terms of timing, Our Man in Havana could therefore hardly be more closely associated with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. But is that association merely accidental, or does it involve any deeper implications? On the fiftieth anniversary of novel, film, and Revolution, that seems a question worth investigating, not with a view to turning Our Man in Havana into a serious political novel, but rather to exploring the complexities of the genre of comedy thriller and to bringing back into view some of the local contexts which might be less visible now than they were when the novel was published and the film released.

Transatlantic Topographies: Islands, Highlands, Jungles (review)

The books subtitle refers to the Caribbean islands, the Guatemalan highlands, and the Amazon jungle, which form the topographies studied in this latest volume in the University of Minnesotas Cultural Studies of the Americas series. In each case two chapters look respectively at early narratives and a later (nineteenthor twentieth-century) period. The Caribbean has a very brief third chapter which adds little of substance. The topographical focus and comparative methodology are both welcome, and the book takes its place alongside Mimi Shellers Consuming the Caribbean (2003) and Lucia Sas Rain Forest Literatures (2004) which cover similar ground as, respectively, Parts 1 and 3 here.

Colonialism and hegemony in Spain and the Antilles in the nineteenth century 1

Jesus Raul Navarro Garcia, Entre esclavos y constituciones (el colonialismo liberal de 1837 en Cuba) (1991), 299 (C.S.I.C., Seville, [Between Slaves and Constitutions (The Liberal Colonialism of 1837 in Cuba)]. Astrid Cubano Iguina, El hilo en el laberinto: claves de la lucha politica en Puerto Rico (sig10 XIX) (1990), 166 (Ediciones Huracan, Rio Piedras,

Colonial encounters : Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492-1797

9.95), [The Thread in the Labyrinth: Keys to the Political Struggle in Puerto Rico (Nineteenth Century)]. Laird Bergad, Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (1990), xxi + 425 (Princeton University Press, Princeton,

The Cambridge companion to travel writing

69.50). Angel Bahmonde and Jose Cayuela, Hacer las Americas: las elites coloniales espanolas en el siglo XIX (1992), 390 (Alianza Editorial, Madrid) [To Make the Americas: Spanish Colonial Elites in the Nineteenth Century]. Ivor Noel Hume, The Virginia Adventure. Roanoke to James Towne: An Archaeological and Historical Odyssey (1994), xxviii + 491 (Alfred A. Knopf, New York...