The representation of Mongolia in contemporary travel writing: Imaginative geographies of a traveller's frontier

Abstract

This thesis adopts a hermeneutical framework in order to undertake a discourse analysis of the representation of Mongolia in five works of contemporary travel writing. It argues that this travel writing is characterized by a discourse that reflects and reproduces an 'imaginative geography' of Mongolia as a traveller's frontier. Evidence of this discourse can be found in sets of collective, cohesive representations that cross-cut the works studied and have the effect of naturalizing a very particular conceptualization of Mongolia as a travel destination in an age of globalization and mass tourism. This research adds to the growing body of geographical scholarship on travel writing, but departs from it by considering contemporary works rather than ones from the colonial period.