Description
Book SynopsisTravel Writing in Mongolia and Northern China, 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 ContentsAcknowledgements
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
