Tropical Travel: The Representation of Central America in the Nineteenth Century; Facsimiles of Ilustrated Texts (1854-1895)

• De: Vargas, Juan Carlos.
• ISBN: 978-9968-46-088-0.
• Editorial: EUCR.
• Edición: 1ª edición 2008.
• Año: 2008.
• Género: Periodismo.
• Dimensión: 20cm x 30,5cm.
• Número de páginas: 572.
• Peso (g): 1310.
• País: Costa Rica.

In this remarkable collection of primary documents, Juan Carlos Vargas, Professor of British and North American literature at the University of Costa Rica, has brought together twenty-one articles on Central America published in four of the most prestigious North American magazines of the nineteenth century between 1854-1895. Taken from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Scribner’s Magazine, the Century Illustrated Magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly, these articles cover six of the seven countries that today make up Central America—Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Using a wide range of documentation on the development of “scientific” racism in the mid-nineteenth century, Professor Vargas traces the proliferation of theories of racial “superiority” and “inferiority,” showing how they came to influence many travelers to Central America and the image of Central America those travelers transmitted to readers in their home countries. Through an extensive analysis of the illustrations in these original articles and of the writings of Ephraim George Squier, chargé d’affaires for the United States government to the Central American Republics in 1849 and in 1853, Professor Vargas’s book shows just how much truth there was in the assertion by African novelist Chinua Achebe when he wrote that “travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves.” While most academic studies of travel writing come from the metropolis, this study speaks and “writes back” from the vantage point of the scrutinized and disparaged. This is one of the first collections of facsimiles that has been specifically put together to show Central Americans how they were represented, how they were spoken about, how they were imagined in popular magazines in the nineteenth century in New York and London. This massive volume of primary documents will serve as an indispensable sourcebook for future studies of travel writing about Central America for years to come. Cover Illustration, The Hand Car from Oran, “Tropical Journeyings: The Panama Railroad,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (January 1859)