Essays on Unfamiliar Travel-Writing: Off the Beaten Track
This book comprises a number of essays on travel-narratives which are somewhat unknown to the general reader. They include writing by people who travelled from the East to the West, as well as those going the usual way. The travellers include a seventeenth-century accountant, a Persian shah, an Indian rajah and a Hawaiian king, as well as an Irish doctor, an American journalist and a Japanese poet. The book presents these travellers in an informal manner, although there are discussions about identity, “otherness” and stereotyping as they are displayed in the narratives. The book will appeal to students and academics, as well as the general reader.
John Butler received an MA from the University of Toronto and a PhD from the University of Manitoba, Canada, and has taught at various universities in Canada, Japan, and Nigeria. He has written biographies of Richard Cromwell and Lord Herbert of Chirbury, and edited a number of seventeenth-century texts, including Sir Thomas Herbert’s Travels in Africa, Persia and Asia the Great (2012) and Sir Paul Rycaut’s Present State of the Ottoman Empire (2017). He has also co-edited (with Sue Matheson) two collections, The Fictional North (2012) and Horizons North (2013). A former Associate Professor of English and Senior Scholar at the University College of the North, Canada, Dr Butler retired in 2015.
"Essays on Unfamiliar Travel-Writing is a work of prodigious research, densely written, with rafts of historical and cultural data for the reader to absorb. It includes a six-page bibliography and numerous footnotes. It’s possible that historians and academics will make up a large part of the book’s readership, but armchair travelers with an interest in history will find much to discover here. Also, anyone planning to travel to or live in one of the regions dealt with in the book can amass a rich trove of background information before setting forth. With vintage black-and-white photos of historic scenes and people."
William Caverlee PerceptiveTravel.com Book Reviews May 2017
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