Metaphor, travel, and the (un)making of the steppe

Abstract

In contrasting two pieces of contemporary travel writing on Central Asia — Jeffrey Tayler’s Murderers in Mausoleums (2009) and Christopher Robbins’s Apples are from Kazakhstan (2008) — this chapter examines two organizing spatial metaphors with particular relevance to travel writing: the network and the meshwork. While each text refers to the same topography, they tend towards one or other of these metaphors in representing how the spaces of the steppe are imagined and lived. The result is that each yields places that are worlds apart, and the Central Asian setting becomes a disputed space not only geopolitically, but also through the manner of its representation. The conflict among metaphors has implications for the whole of contemporary travel writing.