Travel Writing in Mongolia and Northern China, 1860-2020

Travel Writing in Mongolia and Northern China, 1860-2020 invites readers to explore Mongolia as an important cultural space for Western travelers and their audiences over three historical eras. Travelers have framed their experiences and observations through imaginative geographies and Orientalizing discourses, fixing Mongolia as a peripheral, timeless, primitive, and parochial place. Readers can examine the travelers' literary and rhetorical strategies as they make themselves more credible and authoritative and as they identify themselves with Mongolians and Mongolian culture or, conversely, distance themselves. In this book, readers can also approach travel writing from the perspective of women travelers, Mongolian socialist intellectuals, twenty-first-century travelers, and a Han Chinese writer, Jiang Rong, who promotes cultural harmony yet anticipates the disappearance of Mongolian culture in China.

Phillip P. Marzluf is Professor of English at Kansas State University. He has published Language, Literacy, and Social Change in Mongolia (Lexington 2018) and a co-edited collection, Socialist and Post-Socialist Mongolia (Routledge 2021). His work about Mongolia has appeared in the Central Asian Survey, the Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and other journals.|Franck Billé is a cultural anthropologist based at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is program director for the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies. He is the author of (Hawaii, 2015), coauthor of On the EdgeVoluminous States (Duke, 2020), and coeditor of Yellow Perils (Hawaii, 2019) and Frontier Encounters (Open Book, 2012). He is currently finalizing his latest book, Somatic States: On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity (Duke University Press). More information about his current research is available on his website: www.franckbille.com. Professor Caroline Humphrey is an anthropologist who has worked across Asia and countries of the former Soviet Union. She is currently based at the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at Cambridge, which she co-founded, and she is a Director of Research at the Department of Social Anthropology. She has been a Fellow of King's since 1978.

Acknowledgements, Maps, Introduction, Chapter 1 Frans Larson's Edenic Mongolia and the Possibilities of Cosmopolitanism, Chapter 2 Language Scenes in Travel Writing about Mongolia: Hybrids and Heroes, Chapter 3 Traveling Women: Beatrix Bulstrode's A Tour of Mongolia and Strategies of Reflection, Chapter 4 Byambyn Rinchen's and Tsendiin Damdinsüren's Socialist Travel Writing: Nationalist, Internationalist, and Cosmopolitan Strategies, Chapter 5 Contemporary Travel Writing about Mongolia: Imaginative Geographies and Cosmopolitan Visions, Chapter 6 Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem and the Myth of Mongolian Pastoralism, Conclusion, References.