| Summary: | <p>The purpose of this thesis is to interrogate the stylist forms and literary devices employed in the travel writing of Cyprus with particular attention to how they relate to the political history of the island from the time of British imperial rule, to the rise of nationalist movements, and the ethnolinguistic partition of 1974. Doing so, this thesis uses the concept of transportal literatures to interrogate how these works manoeuvre through these political paradigms in the writings of Cyprus. From its earliest representations in English, the island has been depicted as a limen between cultural spaces, including Asia and Europe and East and West. It is through this literary motif that travel writers frame Cyprus as a portal through which they can explore their own ethnic, national, or gendered identities. The setting exists as a gateway between different ideas of culture and, consequently, as a gateway through which mobile travel writers understand their post/colonial identifications – including British and Cypriot writers alike. It is important to trace the intertextual links between these authors whose works explicitly respond to one another. These texts are chosen to complicate our understanding of the postcolonial discipline: Cyprus, home to two British military bases, and under partial Turkish ‘occupation’, sits in an ambivalent juncture between colonisation and independence. Writers reacting to this – lingering British imperialism, the double hegemonies of Greece and Turkey, the partition dividing islanders – reveal a need to transport notions of nations, cultures, and identities beyond expected binary lines.</p>
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