Haunted Journeys

Book excerpt: Focusing on travel journals by writers, navigators, philosophers, scientists, and anthropologists--from the eighteenth-century grand tour to the modern period--Dennis Porter explores how male authors at different historical moments conceptualized and represented the lands they encountered. Efforts to portray unfamiliar peoples and cultures are shown to give rise to rich and complex works, in which individual psychic investments frequently subvert an inherited cultural discourse. In exploring the various uses and pleasures of travel, Porter interprets it as a transgressive activity animated by desire and haunted by different forms of guilt. Broad in its historical scope and interdisciplinary in its approach, the book draws on literary theory, psychoanalysis, gender criticism, and the social history of ideas. Texts analyzed include works by Boswell, Diderot, Bougainville, Cook, Stendhal, Darwin, Flaubert, Freud, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, Gide, Lvi-Strauss, Barthes, and V. S. Naipaul. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.