Travel Literature. Mircea Eliade’s Occidental View in the Himalayan Journal and the Portugal Journal
Abstract: This article retraces Mircea Eliade’s mystical travel through the Himalayas as shown in his Himalayan Journal and his struggle to survive as a writer under the weight of brutal historical events in his Portugal Journal. The two travel journals reveal the influence of geographical and his...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Hyperion University
2025-06-01
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| Series: | HyperCultura |
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| Online Access: | https://litere.hyperion.ro/hypercultura/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Armianu-Irina_final.pdf |
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| Summary: | Abstract: This article retraces Mircea Eliade’s mystical travel through the Himalayas as shown in his Himalayan Journal
and his struggle to survive as a writer under the weight of brutal historical events in his Portugal Journal. The two
travel journals reveal the influence of geographical and historical elements on Eliade's mystical writing. A deeper
analysis of these journals is necessary to link travel genre to mystical thought. The next pages will show (1) how these
journals fit into the category of existential travel, as theorized by Erik Cohen in "The Phenomenology of Tourist
Experiences" (179-201), (2) Eliade’s own transcendence of his identity in two key moments of his creative path, and
(3) that the latter creative crisis in Portugal is also the time when Eliade embarked on a transcendence towards the
history of the religious thought, his most important philosophical and literary contribution. His accomplishments in
the history of philosophy in the 1930s, his contribution to the aesthetics of myth, and his fantastic short stories,
inspired him to travel to the ends of the world at the bottom of Himalayas to seek out Eastern philosophies and yogis
engaged like him in the same quest for the absolute. By doing so, Eliade pioneered the genre of travel literature even
before travel became a literary theme. |
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| ISSN: | 2559-2025 |