A Scientist’s and Tourist’s Touch – The Haptic in Travelogues about the Island of Java (M. Siedlecki and E.R. Scidmore)
A Scientist’s and Tourist’s Touch – The Haptic in Travelogues about the Island of Java (M. Siedlecki and E.R. Scidmore)

Summary/Abstract: The article explores the haptic aesthetic of selected Polish and Anglophone travelogues about the island of Java: Jawa – przyroda i sztuka (1913) by a Polish biologist named Michał Siedlecki, and Java, the Garden of the East (1897) by the American writer Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore. A comparison of texts coming from different literary traditions should yield a deeper insight into the various aspects of conceptualising the haptic in travel writing. Java’s tropical environment provided travellers with new sensory experiences, consequently scrutinising how writers represented what they touched and felt, along with how descriptions of haptic sensations were associated with the ideological and aesthetic dimension of travel writing, can shed new light on how travel writing works and how multi-layered it is.

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