Katalieva K.S. Colonial discourse in H. Melville's travelogue “Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, October 11, 1856 — May 6, 1857”

The article is devoted to identifying the specifics of colonial discourse in H. Melville's travelogue “Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, October 11, 1856 — May 6, 1857”. Dominant discursive strategies and well-established colonial stereotypes of reproducing the national image of Constantinople as an image of the Other is defined. Travelogue, the main genre-forming feature of which is the desire for an authentic depiction of the world of the Other, missed, however, always through the subjective perception of the Traveler, provides extensive material for colonial and postcolonial studies. Melville can truly be called a Traveler with a capital letter, whose unrestrained youth contains incredible adventures and a huge number of impressions received from them. They will later become invaluable materials for his work. The components of Melville's colonial narrative in his orientalist travelogue “Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, October 11, 1856 — May 6, 1857” are defined: ethnocentricity; the opposition “Self / The Other”; retrospective mode as a kind of temporary perspective of perception of space; deliberate poetization of the landscape as a strategy for symbolic “appropriation” of territory and a narrative about an adventure.

For citation: Katalieva K.S. Colonial discourse in H. Melville's travelogue “Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, October 11, 1856 — May 6, 1857”, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2024, iss. 2, pp. 13—20.