Representations of Global Civility

Perhaps unexpectedly, English travel writing during the long eighteenth century reveals a discourse of global civility. By bringing together representations of the then already familiar Ottoman Empire and the largely unknown South Pacific, Sascha Klement adopts a uniquely global perspective and demonstrates how cross-cultural encounters were framed by Enlightenment philosophy, global interconnections, and even-handed exchanges across cultural divides. In so doing, this book shows that both travel and travel-writing from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries were much more complex and multi-layered than reductive Eurocentric histories often suggest.

Sascha R. Klement studied English and comparative Literature at the Universities of Kent at Canterbury and Exeter, eventually writing a thesis on eighteenth-century travel writing, for which he did research in the UK, Germany and Turkey. His research interests include eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, travel writing, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, as well as political activism and social change. He lives in Cairo, Egypt.