Travelling and Cycling: Borders and Borderscapes in Thomas Stevens’s Around the World on a Bicycle

Year 2025, Volume: 35 Issue: 1, 57 - 75, 19.06.2025

Ömer Öğünç

https://doi.org/10.26650/LITERA2024-1577488

Abstract

This study focuses on the representation of borders and the role of the borderscape in the travelogue Around the World on a Bicycle (1887) written by Thomas Stevens. As the text is examined as a narrative of bordering and debordering practices in the context of recent theoretical approaches to border lines and borderscapes, such practices invite a comprehensive analysis as regards their function and role in the life and identity of the traveller. Travel writing is mostly embedded with tendencies and burdens to meet requirements emanating from colonial and oriental discourses, whereas Stevens adopts a challenging outlook on his journey with the precise mission of moving forward, and inevitably crosses borders to circumnavigate the world. Instead of visiting a particular landscape, country, or people, he transcends great distances to accomplish this mission, which dissociates him from many travellers in the travelling world. His settings enable readers to observe the interaction between others on each side of a border. Through repetitive encounters between Thomas Stevens and the borders on his path, social, cultural, ethnographic, and individual dimensions of these incidents initially create and, then, call for the discussion of borderscapes as they expose various forms of identity resulting from the dichotomy between such notions as home and away. Therefore, this study illustrates the diversity of interactions and identities formed by means of border crossings and borderscapes in the context of Stevens’s travelogue about his journey on a bicycle around the world.

Keywords

Border, bordering, borderscapes, travel, Thomas Stevens

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