Lions, landscape and legacy: ‘exploring’ Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa

Cliff, Neil Anthony (2022) Lions, landscape and legacy: ‘exploring’ Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

Lions, Landscape and Legacy: ‘Exploring’ Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa focuses on the Scottish explorer’s first journey into West Africa in 1795, then considers how contemporary travel writers have reacted to this seminal narrative by producing their own individual accounts of journeying down The Niger. Authors such as Kira Salak, Richard Owen, Tom Freemantle and Peter Hudson all pay homage to Park in their own narratives. By examining how their texts connect to Park’s work, this research makes a timely contribution to Park scholarship as well as negotiates some of the burgeoning critical practices taking place in twenty-first century literary studies. A growing body of Park criticism exists nevertheless, a number of key elements in his narrative appear to have been neglected: noteworthy encounters with animals, commentary on landscape, as well as the literary legacy that, in recent years, has grown significantly. This study not only examines the way Park narrates animals, as well as landscape, it also brings together and expands upon some of the existing research and criticism that deals with Park’s experiences of native women whilst travelling through Africa. Furthermore, in acknowledging how modern analytical approaches sit alongside more traditional types of readings, a spatially-minded examination of the other travel narratives connected to Travels, which imitate Park’s journey, highlights some of the ways in which modern Western travellers seek to reconcile their own complex relationships with the colonial context whilst also travelling through challenging post-colonial landscapes. This thesis makes a number of contributions to the expanding field of travel writing studies by placing Park scholarship at the heart of contemporary critical debate through a range of critical concepts, in particular, zoocriticism, postcolonial green, and geocriticism.