Stephen Graham was a prolific travel writer who lived and wrote in the first half of the twentieth century. Although his love was Russia, and particularly pre-Revolutionary Russia (what came to be known as "Holy Russia"), he traveled throughout the world, including a trip to northern Montana with American poet Vachel Lindsey. He achieved a degree of popularity in his own time through his cultivation of "vagabondage," tramping on foot through highlands and lowlands, rough and meadow. In addition, he was widely regarded as an entertaining lecturer on the subject of Russia. In time, however, he also achieved a degree of notoriety through his insistence that Russia needed to return to its Byzantine, Christian heritage, a stance that set him in opposition to the British government's non-interventionist policy following the 1917 Revolution.
It is a curious fact of working with this prolific traveler and travel writer that, although public libraries across the United States have collections of his works, sadly, Graham has passed into obscurity. An obvious question presents itself: why is Stephen Graham important to scholars and critics studying travel literature? Given that Graham's works were saturated with ethnic prejudice (principally against the Turks) and Christian dogma, a more compelling question is: why should Graham's travel works be of interest to the modern critic? The presentation for the conference "Snapshots from Abroad" will contain two distinct sections: part one presents an introduction to Graham's life and work; part two offers assessment of his work and directions for scholarship (of which there is currently none). In turn, the second part of this presentation will have definite points of division to structure the project of future scholarship: problems of imperialism and essentialist rhetoric in Graham's prose; theories that would reintroduce his work to the academic community and lead to constructive, productive, and effective considerations of the rhetoric of travel as affected by historical situation; continuation of Graham and Lindsay's aborted project of American Hieroglyphics; and finally, the most likely works of Stephen Graham's to be republished in critical editions.
Readers visiting the conference home page may be interested in linking to an excerpt from Graham's book The Gentle Art of Tramping, reproduced on the Rhetoric, Culture, and Travel Home Page at http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/helmers/graham.html
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