Abstract :
Travel writing which once dismissed as inferior and unworthy of scholarly attention has received “sustained scrutiny and investigation” (Thomson, 2016, p. xvi) in recent decades. To analyze travel books, travel writing scholars have often deployed a postcolonial lens to illuminate that the travel accounts are enmeshed in both colonial and neocolonial agendas and their representations of ‘others’ and their spaces are in reality misrepresentation which are mediated through the cultural baggage of travel writers (Youngs, 2013). Relinquishing this classical methodology as reductive and myopic in its scope, the current article will instead deploy an alternative approach for the analysis of Jurgen Frembgen’s travelogue, The Closed Valley: With Fierce Friends in Pakistani Himalayas which accounts his arduous voyage to Harban in Indus Valley: one of the remotest regions (that untouched by modernity) to see whether the travel writer is sympathetic towards three ‘others’: nature, women, and an enraptured fool or not. To this end, it will build on the theories of ecocriticism, feminism and Romanticism to present answers to the above-mentioned question.
