Anglophone Travellers in Portugal
A Storytelling Approach to Travel Writing
Think of Portugal. What is it that you think of?
Now, put yourself in a foreign traveller’s shoes. One that writes and thinks in English. One from the 20th century, or the 19th or 18th century…
Does your picture of Portugal change?
Contributors
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Locations
What Influences Travellers Writing?
Travelling means seeing new realities, meeting different people and getting to know different places. Travel stories reflect not only those who travel, but also the realities, people and places they experienced.
An anglophone traveller can tell us a lot about Portugal. One that either travelled the country temporarily or established a residence of months or years. One that came because of a military mission or merely by curiosity. One that brought his family or travelled alone. The diversity of experiences draws a heterogeneous picture of Portugal and makes us think of all the stories that can be shared about the country.
How did foreigners connect with Portuguese people? What differences did they feel and report between different cities and regions? What changed from then until now? The works you can explore here give you a glimpse of the stories once told about Portugal. The question now is: how much more is still there to discover?
Gender
One might notice most of the works were written by male authors. How has gender influenced the writing of the travellers who visited Portugal? Can a gender-based approach tell us something more about these texts?
Occupation
The occupation of authors influenced how they saw the world, as well as how they travelled. No matter what they did in their lives, what they wrote is the product of those experiences.
Railway
Looking at the development of the railway system is crucial to understanding how foreigners travelled in Portugal. How, when and which cities started to become easier to reach? How did that change the way people travelled?
Browse Through Our Publications
Anglophone Travellers in Portugal is an ongoing project that profits from innovative views on the literary material available. Here you can browse through some of our team’s publications.
Mapping travel writing: A critical digital humanities perspective
Travel writing reflects placed subjective human experience and participates in the collective processes of assembling stable, consensual, or polemical geographical entities and identities. In this chapter, we reflect on the contributions of Critical Digital Humanities to the communication of travel writing studies.
Digital storytelling in travel writing communication: Critical-creative paths
Under the “Anglophone Travellers in Portugal” project, we are exploring communication avenues with digital humanities methods. We realise that we can use the hybrid, multimedia narrative form of digital storytelling not only as a communicational approach, but also as a heuristic self-reflective approach to use iteratively during the research. The approach, amongst other benefits, would engage the audience with the project, promoting readers.
Visit Our Collection
Our collection is home to almost 200 anglophone written accounts about travelling in Portugal, as well as the images that often accompany the texts. You can visit it here, along with information about all the works gathered in the database.
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