Istria in Charles Yriarte's travelogue. Analysis of travel writing as literary and cultural text

The author brings forth a short overview of the problems connected to the marginalization of non-fiction narrative prose and its structural changes from the standpoint of theory and history of literature and discusses the position of travelogues in the history of ethnological research and scientific turns that brought travelogues to the centre of both disciplines. Travelogue is analyzed not only as a literary text, but, what is more important, as a text of culture, using Geertz's concept of culture as text and anthropological research as interpretation of the same. To analyze a travelogue from the two mentioned standpoints, the author uses Charles Yriarte's Istria and Dalmatia (1878). Reprinted by permission of the publisher