ABSTRACT
Travel Writing in Mongolia and Northern China makes travel writing about Mongolia more visible, introducing readers to the imaginative geographies, Orientalizing discourses, and rhetorical strategies that fix ideas about Mongolia for European and North American audiences. According to these discourses, Mongolia is a decaying, peripheral, ahistorical, and primitive place or, nostalgically, it exists to recuperate overly civilized Westerners. Travel writing is an ideal source for the exploration of these imaginative geographies because it focuses readers on the asymmetrical relationships between travelers and their Mongolian interlocutors and because it is a malleable genre serving various ideological, public, and rhetorical purposes. In the introduction, the five travel eras that constitute the 800-year history of Western travel writing about Mongolia are also defined.
