Writing the "Self" in 14th Century Travel Narratives: John Mandeville and Ibn Ba????a
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Date
2020-01-20
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Department
English
Program
Texts, Technologies, and Literature
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Distribution Rights granted to UMBC by the author.
This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu
This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu
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Abstract
In the medieval travel narrative genre, autography and protoethnography relate to the conception of the self. Medieval writers from Western European and Islamic cultures all use description and definition of the exotic as a means by which they establish themselves and their own cultures as rhetorical conceptions. Travel writing connects the concepts of self and other by serving as both a representation of contact zones and as a contact zone in itself. By analyzing notable travel narratives, including the Book of Marvels and Travels, a 14th century text written about a pilgrimage to the East and ibn Battuta'sRihla narrative describing his journeys around the Islamic world of the same century, it is possible to understand how premodern travel writing contributes to the rhetoric of the self as narrative construction, and how the self contributes to the rhetoric of the foreigner as Other.