Humanities

14 pages, 376 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Eighteenth-Century Day Excursions: Finding Authority in the Narration of Brief Visits and “A Diversity of Objects”

by Zoë Kinsley

Humanities 2025, 14(2), 23; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020023 - 31 Jan 2025

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This article argues that a focus on the day excursion as a particular form of journey, with its inherent limits in relation to scale, distance, and duration, enables us to bring recent critical thinking on microtravel as a form with “foundations in the depth or intensity of description” into dialogue with scholarship that has given sustained attention to modes of descriptive practice that were specific to eighteenth-century British literature and the narrative representation of interior domestic space. The three English travellers under consideration are John Loveday (1711–1789), Dorothy Richardson (1748–1819), and Caroline Lybbe Powys (1738–1817). All made numerous home tour journeys of different kinds but never published their records of their travelling in their lifetimes. All displayed sustained interest in interior description, whether that was for the purpose of antiquarian research, as was the case with Loveday, and to some extent, Richardson, or as a means of collecting, arranging, and performing domestic aesthetic sensibility, as in the writing of both Richardson and Powys. The small local journeys analysed here speak of privileged leisure: the accounts offer experimentation in the narration of journeys made within limits, but those limits are rarely of opportunity. Yet these young travellers still negotiate authority: in the practice of day excursioning, and in writing up those experiences, we see each traveller utilising this compact form to find opportunities for self-assertion, employing the formulaic structures of antiquarian record and country house catalogue in order to articulate an independent curatorial voice. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing: New Directions)

15 pages, 253 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Zoocritical Reading of Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799)

by Neil Cliff

Humanities 2025, 14(2), 22; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020022 - 29 Jan 2025

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Abstract

Thinking about how animals are categorised in Mungo Park’s journey into the interior of Africa provides a deeper understanding of their significance in the early exploration experiences of Africa by Europeans during this era. As it stands, there certainly exists a small but growing body of animal criticism in literary studies, and what can be suitably described as the animal turn is certainly gaining momentum more broadly within twenty-first century literary criticism and debate. However, there has been scant scholarly research on this theme of animals within eighteenth-century travelling practices. In recent times, the scholarship on Park’s journey has been highly particular; new understandings of Park’s trip are still being reached. Considering such specificity, an examination of Park’s narration of nonhuman animals during his trip will not only provide original insight into this aspect of his African experience but also interpret the ways that his narrative differentiates and categorises the various animal experiences he had whilst in Africa. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing: New Directions)

9 pages, 328 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Translating Franz Kafka’s “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People” as a Metaphor for A.I

by Dylan James Peterson

Humanities 2025, 14(2), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020021 - 29 Jan 2025

Viewed by 554

Abstract

Differing English translations of Franz Kafka’s “Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse People” have inspired diverse critical readings of the story. As a post-liminal text, a translation retrospectively highlights the ambiguity of the original’s rhetorical meaning. Read as a metaphor for artificial intelligence (A.I.), “Josefine” reflects an uncanny sort of regenerated reality as a conflicted narrator ponders the meaning of Josefine’s song following her disappearance. Likewise, the form produced by A.I. programs like ChatGPT following an initial human input is typically that of a narrative, albeit one devoid of creativity, replaced instead with algorithmic determinism. Philosophical questions about the discursive potential of technology such as generative A.I. pose challenges to the definitional assumptions about the form narrative takes in rhetorical situations, wherein the audience/reader is left with a message untethered from its prompter/writer. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Franz Kafka in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)

17 pages, 292 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Echoes of Albany: The Transatlantic Reflections of Anne Grant in Memoirs of an American Lady

by Rob Sutton

Humanities 2025, 14(2), 20; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020020 - 29 Jan 2025

Viewed by 294

Abstract

This essay explores the mid-eighteenth-century travel experience of Scottish writer Anne Macvicar Grant [^1775–1838]. Grant is perhaps best known for her late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel writing and anthropological discourse focussed primarily upon the Scottish Highlands. Yet, the majority of Grant’s childhood was spent in Albany, New York. After she had established herself as a writer and published various texts dealing with her more recent experience in the Scottish Highlands, in 1808, Grant published Memoirs of an American Lady, a semi-biographical account of her childhood spent in the multicultural contact zone of a British military outpost. There are two key issues that this essay explores. First, I discuss the process of memory. Unlike intentional travelogues of the time, Grant’s text was not compiled with the aid of a diary or ledger. Grant’s entire account comprises memories of events that occurred over forty years in the past. Part of this essay then discusses the potential fallibilities of the fragility of human memory upon the traveller. While it may be anticipated that this first issue is detrimental to the account of the traveller, the second key issue that I explore is arguably advantageous to Grant’s account. The extent to which Grant, throughout her life, immersed herself within various marginalised communities undoubtedly allows for the production of a more nuanced and balanced account of external cultures than was the custom at the time. What complicates this account is the mixing of memory and cultural immersion. In her writing around the Scottish Highlands, Grant frequently relies upon her experience of certain cultures as a child to explain and convey her understanding of the different marginalised communities she encounters as an adult. Integral to this essay is the fact that this mixing of memory and cultural exposure also occurs the opposite way around. In the Memoirs, the writer’s recollections of the Mohawk or the Kanien'kehà:ka people and colonial Dutch communities as a child seem to be coloured and subjected by her more recent experience of the Highland people. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing: New Directions)

15 pages, 1243 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Thinking Through the Tiger: Korean Cultural Identity, Space, and Time

by Eunkyung Yi

Humanities 2025, 14(2), 19; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020019 - 24 Jan 2025

Viewed by 298

Abstract

In the region of Northeast Asia, Korea has been identified as a nation that has a distinctive affinity for tigers. Koreans’ lives are deeply ingrained with emotions and thoughts related to tigers, even though they have completely disappeared from Korea due to historical changes and urbanization. This study first connects the image of tigers in Korean creation myths and folk tales with cultural identity. The analysis uncovers that the satire and humor present in the literature and paintings depicting tigers were employed to surmount the realistic fears associated with these creatures. Subsequently, the study delves into historical perceptions and spatial concepts by examining folk tales and maps of the Korean Peninsula that are symbolized by tigers. During the Japanese colonial period, tigers were regarded as a symbol of Korean national consciousness, and since then, they have played a significant role in disseminating national spirit and identity discourse. Finally, the analysis of Korean proverbs related to tigers reveals the profound influence of these animals on the development of Korean concepts of seasons and time. This study thus demonstrates the significant role of tigers in shaping the cultural identity and conceptual framework of space and time in Korea. Full article

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Humanities, Volume 14, Issue 2 (February 2025) – 5 articles

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