This article analyses a set of French periodical articles on British travel writing, exploring the complex and ambivalent relationship that the French press entertained with translations of British travelogues. As travel writing was a highly popular genre in this period, but also politically charged, its periodical reception in revolutionary and Napoleonic France offers a rich object of study for understanding the entanglement of political and cultural conflict. In a political climate heavily influenced by the military conflicts between France and Great Britain, and dealing with a travel book market dominated by translations from English, the French periodical travel review partakes in the overall mediation of national stereotypes. Relatively restrained in literary journals such as the Magasin encyclopédique and La Décade philosophique, the mediation of stereotypes turns into outright Anglophobic propaganda in the Napoleonic Journal de l'Empire, but without hiding a deeper and more complex dynamic of cultural transfer, characterized by a mix of fascination and concern for the influence of British travel writing.

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This article analyses practices of appropriation at work in French travel book reviews at the turn of the eighteenth century. It establishes six categories of appropriation, consisting of rhetorical, literary and formal devices, which entail different ways of altering, sometimes radically, sometimes almost imperceptibly, the value and functions of the travel texts. The article argues that travel book reviews operated to alter the representation of travel, in a form of journalistic criticism which sought not only to review a book, but also to remediate and appropriate a set of experiences, thus re-viewing the world described by the travelogue. The analysis of these appropriative practices sheds new light on the role of the French press as an actor in the public discourse on travel, history and geography, in a period where non-fictional travel writing was immensely popular among the reading public.

This article makes a comparative analysis of La carte des Mendelssohn (2015), by the Belgian novelist Diane Meur, and Det uoppløselige episke element i Telemark i perioden 1591–1896 (2013), by the Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad. It examines how these two original literary projects explore different modalities of the relationship between genealogy and geography in order to challenge established forms of historical family narratives. Solstad's text is anchored in the local, circumscribed to the rural areas of the Norwegian region of Telemark, while Meur's text is an exploration of cosmopolitanism; however, they come together in exposing the profound interconnectedness between people and places and its relational productivity.

The reviews in the Monthly Review and La Décade philosophique of Bartolomeo Benincasa's travelogue from revolutionary France, Journal d'un voyageur neutre (1796), offer valuable insight into the periodical practice of the travel review. The present article examines the processes of rewriting and remediation at work in these reviews, showing how they were driven by political concerns, but also by different views on the function of the review within the larger framework of the periodicals. The article argues that rewriting and remediation are important analytical tools to be put to use if book reviews are to be better exploited as historical sources. We can thereby acquire a better understanding of the role of the travel review in late-eighteenth-century literary culture, notably of its complexity in transmitting and constructing perceptions of major historical events such as the French Revolution.