A Scientist’s and Tourist’s Touch – The Haptic in Travelogues about the Island of Java (M. Siedlecki and E.R. Scidmore)
Tomasz Ewertowski
Shanghai International Studies UniversityTomasz Ewertowski, PhD, is a lecturer at the Shanghai International Studies University. He graduated from the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. His research interests focus on travel writing studies, especially 19th-century travels in Asia. He served as a principal investigator on two grants from the Polish National Science Center and his publications include Images of China in Polish and Serbian Travel Writings (Leiden: Brill, 2020).
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1133-137X
Abstract
The article explores the haptic aesthetic of selected Polish and Anglophone travelogues about the island of Java: Jawa – przyroda i sztuka (1913) by a Polish biologist named Michał Siedlecki, and Java, the Garden of the East (1897) by the American writer Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore. A comparison of texts coming from different literary traditions should yield a deeper insight into the various aspects of conceptualising the haptic in travel writing. Java’s tropical environment provided travellers with new sensory experiences, consequently scrutinising how writers represented what they touched and felt, along with how descriptions of haptic sensations were associated with the ideological and aesthetic dimension of travel writing, can shed new light on how travel writing works and how multi-layered it is.
Shanghai International Studies University
Tomasz Ewertowski, PhD, is a lecturer at the Shanghai International Studies University. He graduated from the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. His research interests focus on travel writing studies, especially 19th-century travels in Asia. He served as a principal investigator on two grants from the Polish National Science Center and his publications include Images of China in Polish and Serbian Travel Writings (Leiden: Brill, 2020).
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1133-137X
