| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

"A Truthful Impression of the Country": British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880–1949. By Nicholas Clifford. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. xxii, 231 pp. $39.50, ISBN 0-472-11197-3.)

Travelers writing of the exotic East have fascinated Western readers since the age of Marco Polo. Recently, however, scholars have ceased regarding such accounts as eyewitness reports, treating them instead as "textual productions" that reveal little of the reality of Asia or the Middle East. According to Edward Said, such texts primarily illuminate the imbalance of power between the two regions—particularly in the creation of certain kinds of knowledge—along with the authors' preoccupation with the state of their own civilization. Once considered important historical evidence, travel writings have become mere literary texts, a loss of significance that is perhaps literally encapsulated in recent scholarly findings that Marco Polo never visited China but drew his seminal account from the writings of contemporaries who did. . . .

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