The Travellee’s Eye: Reading European Travel Writing, 1750–1850

Abstract

How did Europeans read and respond to foreign travel writing about their societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? The importance of the genre in shaping its readers' views of the world is often assumed. The problem, as usual with the history of reading, is one of evidence for travel writing's wider influence. As one scholar has memorably phrased it: 'reading is not eating'. i Consuming books is not the same as consuming food: we cannot assume that travellers' perceptions were shared by those who read their accounts. This hasn't prevented conclusions being drawn about the importance of the genre for a home readership's knowledge about the world, and ideas about their place in it, for instance in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Britain, where travel writing is credited both with fostering free thinking and with confirming a smug ethnocentricity. ii Evidence for direct influence is, however, scant, even where travel writing's place in reading patterns can be mapped. iii Travel writing of the same period is also attributed key significance in other European societies, where the 'gaze of the other', apprehended through foreign accounts, is credited with shaping collective identities and national ideologies. Here, self-differentiation was supposedly spurred by the alterity attributed to these societies by travellers from Europe's North-West, while the vernacular reiteration of tropes of backwardness or inferiority is taken as evidence of the internalization of travellers' characterizations. iv However, ambivalent or self-stigmatizing national discourses are one thing; attributing them directly to foreign travel writing and a hegemonic Western gaze is another. Here too, the links are usually inferred rather than demonstrated.Asking precisely how readers received foreign accounts about their societies, and how they reacted to the depictions they found there, is worth pursuing beyond these issues of knowledge and self-knowledge. Such a project goes a long way towards fulfilling the transnational potential offered by travel writing studiesby opening to scrutiny intercultural circuits of communication, influence and interaction, so often viewed from only one perspective, that of the western European traveller. Doing this means following the challenge Mary Louise Pratt laid down more than two decades ago, of paying attention to the 'travellee' (her slightly awkward coinage describing those people who were travelled to), and tracing the

Travel, Modernity and Rural Landscapes in Nineteenth-Century Liguria

“…As in other cases in Europe, contemporary travel books unveil approaches and relations between travellers, 'travellees' and places. 9 Since the 1820s, the number of guidebooks of Italy increased dramatically thanks to publishers like Later in the century (1853) the Sardinian Kingdom built the first railway line between Genoa and Turin. The increasing speed and comfort of new carriage roads and later railways transformed the way that rural landscapes were perceived.…”

“…As in other cases in Europe, contemporary travel books unveil approaches and relations between travellers, 'travellees' and places. 9 Since the 1820s, the number of guidebooks on Italy increased dramatically thanks to publishers like John Murray. As well as providing technical information on the routes, the guidebooks informed readers about the climate, geography and local customs and traditions.…”