Tom Paine's iron bridge

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Robert Cole

Hundreds of thousands of travellers visit France each year. The glories of the French countryside, the essential harmony of much of French architecture, the wealth of historical remains, the enormous variety of experience that France offers, act as a perennial and irresistible attraction. For these visitors this lively and useful guide provides the essential clues to an understanding of France's past, and present, in entertaining and sometimes surprising detail.

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James Bromwich

"Precise instructions, carefully designed maps and numerous annotated illustrations ensure that readers will be able to find the places and things they wish to see. As well as guiding visitors to great sites like Lyon with its magnificent ruins, superb Roman museums and immense siphon aqueducts, the book encourages the search for hidden temples, brick kilns and Roman roads, often 'lost' in the forest. The book also offers a comprehensive examination of the area's Roman heritage, interpreting the varied surviving remains and exploring the lifestyles and environment of the Gallo-Roman people."--Jacket.

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Earl Miner

Travel is one of literature's great metaphors for life; to investigate the properties of travel writing in different cultures affords a particular opportunity for intercultural comparison. In Naming Properties, Earl Miner examines closely four travel accounts: in Japanese, Basho's great Narrow Road through the Provinces, and, as control, the nonliterary account of his friend Sora; in English, Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell's manuscript version, his unbowdlerized Journal. The works were carefully chosen to provide a maximum of literary evidence. The focus of Miner's comparison is on the practical and philosophical implications of naming. Because comparison can reveal parochialism, it puts currently familiar and unexamined Western conceptions in question on such issues as identification (what is a name, what is identity in different cultures?); reference (why name a child or river if they do not exist?); intention (how can we refer without intending to?); and fact and fiction (do names differ in fiction and in fact? What of a factual or historical character in a fiction like the novel? or a legal fiction in daily life?). In addition to examining the travel accounts, Miner considers the philosophical issues of naming in a range of other texts, from the Bible, Plato, Thucydides, Confucius, and earliest Japanese writing to current western philosophers such as Kripke, Donnellan, and Nelson. This book will interest scholars in eighteenth-century English and premodern Japanese literature; comparative literature; Intercultural study; and naming (onomastics).

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Jeremy Black

"In this innovative study of the Grand Tour, Jeremy Black relies on archival sources to provide an exploration of the real tourist experience rather than, as with the majority of studies of the Grand Tour, an account that is essentially based on travel literature. While sensitive to wider cultural dimensions, the author demonstrates his interest in the experience of tourists, particularly the circumstances they encountered, and the impact of the Grand Tour on British society. Black conjures up a vivid account of the pleasures and predicaments experienced by tourists. He also asks about the impact of tourism on Britain and locates foreign travel in the tension between cosmopolitanism and xenophobia in British culture and society. The book closes with the impact of the French Revolution on tourism."--BOOK JACKET.