The Turn to the Romantic in the Travel Literature of the Eighteenth Century

Parks, George B.

doi:10.1215/00267929-25-1-22

Cited by 12 publications

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“…As 51 Spengemann (1977) comments on the way contradictions between the two concepts of ideas are expressed in travel writing (51). On romantic expression in travel writing of the eighteenth century, see Parks (1964). 52 See also Pratt (1992).…”

Section: The National Imagination: New Boundaries New Authorshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere Transnational Imagination in Early American Travel Writing (1770–1830)

Heide¹

2022

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Travel reports have shaped the emergence of early U.S. culture and its “geographical imagination” (David Harvey). Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere examines the trans-national imagination in travel reports by American authors written between 1770 and 1830. Its range is from John and William Bartram’s pre-revolutionary travelogues and Jonathan Carver’s exploratory report on his journey in the Great Lakes region (1778), to Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative (1789), to early nineteenth-century reports, such as Anne Newport Royall’s Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the United States (1826) and William Duane’s A Visit to Colombia (1826). The chapters of the monograph concentrate on writing about journeys to the North American ‘interior‘, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. The primary sources were written between the beginning of the struggle against British rule, following the end of the French and Indian War, and the beginning of Andrew Jackson’s presidency. The decades between 1770 and 1830 were times of shifting colonial boundaries, nation-building, and emergent discourses of collective identification in North America. The study reads travel writing in the context of the identity-generating discourses of nation-building, imperialism, anti-colonialism, and cosmopolitanism. In contrast to scholarship that engages a notion of Americanness based primarily on ‘domestic’ outlooks and experiences such as westward expansion (the frontier), the study highlights the function of categories such as the outside world, neighboring nations, and colonial empires in the emergence of U.S. national literary imagination. How does a shift in focus from a discursive ‘domestication’ of North American space to an interest in the Othering of what lies beyond national borders affect the understanding of the emergent national self? These are the kind of questions that begin by seeing the transnational as a fundamental element of national emergence. The monograph ultimately works to demonstrate how travel writing – with very few exceptions – supports and affirms processes of nation-building. Thus, the national narrative evolves from representations of contact scenarios in North America, in the transatlantic world, and around the globe. Without ignoring the roles of national mythology, the analysis concentrates on the continual co-existence of fluid notions of both ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ in times of shifting geographical borders. From such a perspective, travel writing not only contributes to shaping the national imagination and its conceptions of superiority but is also complicit in territorial expansionism and its subjugation of conquered peoples and their respective cultural histories. The present study emphasizes the significance of accounts of non-voluntary movement that embrace captivity narratives, slave narratives, sailor narratives, and reports by individuals who had access to neither publishing nor public culture. Accounts by such authors have often been published posthumously, promoted by printers, professional authors, or scholars. The central focus of analysis, however, examines how American self-fashioning and self-positioning in the world appear in the travel writing of the period. The trans-national imagination engages in a symbolic construction both of the collective national ‘Self’ and of the outside world as the nation’s ‘Other.’ Travel writing functions as a tool in the nation-building process of the United States: a tool that reflects the mindset of the time, a tool that imagines a national community, and a tool that shapes the mindset of a people. The study maintains that travel writing, as a literary format, negotiates the triangular relationship between American post-revolutionary nation-building, continued European colonial expansion in the Americas, and the ongoing existence of indigenous nations. Underlying each of the readings is a common thesis that travel writing defines and negotiates borders, limits, and territorial expansion, and that it does so within the parameters of nation-building.

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Section: The National Imagination: New Boundaries New Authorshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere Transnational Imagination in Early American Travel Writing (1770–1830)

Heide¹

2022

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“…Scholars likeParks (1964), Stafford (1984,Cardinal (1996) CarlThompson (2011) used the dichotomy of Enlightenment versus Romantic to account for this shift, while BarbaraKorte (2000) wrote, in a similar fashion, about "object oriented" versus "subject oriented" travel narratives.…”

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confidence: 99%

Edward Thomas as a Travel Book Writer

Moroz

2023

Crossroads

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The aim of this paper is to examine Edward Thomas’s literary representations of his walks and bicycle rides from the perspective of the development of the genre of the travel book in Britain. The paper provides a brief outline of the history of the synergy and friction of travel books with the genres of the novel and the autobiography, and the ways in which the developing naturalist and pedestrian discourses influenced travel books and travel accounts. A key argument constructed and developed in the second part of the paper is that the combination of Thomas’s dissatisfaction with the loose collage-like nebulousness of his early travel accounts from Beautiful Wales (1905) to The South Country (1909) and his wide knowledge of 19th-century British travel writers resulted in two ‘conventional’ travel books The Icknield Way (1913) and In Pursuit of Spring (1914), in which Thomas relied on such standard generic features as the diary format and the central role of the narrative persona.

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“…A number of critics have argued that travel writing at the end of the eighteenth century underwent a shift from objective reportage to a more Romantic focus on the individual traveller"s inner and outer experience. 39 Nigel Leask questions this standard account by relocating the "disjuncture between scientific and literary travel writing in the decades after 1790-1820." "In the earlier decades", he suggests, "travel writing struggled to integrate … anecdotal personal narrative with "curious" or "precise" observation".…”

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James Hutton’s Geological Tours of Scotland: Romanticism, Literary Strategies, and the Scientific Quest

Furniss

2012

Sci & Educ

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This version is available at https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/39986/ Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of Strathclyde. Unless otherwise explicitly stated on the manuscript, Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Please check the manuscript for details of any other licences that may have been applied. You may not engage in further distribution of the material for any profitmaking activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute both the url (https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/) and the content of this paper for research or private study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge.Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to the Strathprints administrator: strathprints@strath.ac.ukThe Strathprints institutional repository (https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk) is a digital archive of University of Strathclyde research outputs. It has been developed to disseminate open access research outputs, expose data about those outputs, and enable the management and persistent access to Strathclyde's intellectual output. Abstract: Rather than focussing on the relationship between science and literature, this article attempts to read scientific writing as literature. It explores a somewhat neglected element of the story of the emergence of geology in the late eighteenth centuryJames Hutton's unpublished accounts of the tours of Scotland that he undertook in the years 1785 to 1788 in search of empirical evidence for his theory of the earth. Attention to Hutton's use of literary techniques and conventions highlights the ways these texts dramatise the journey of scientific discovery and allow Hutton's readers to imagine that they were virtual participants in the geological quest, conducted by a savant whose self-fashioning made him a reliable guide through Scotland's geomorphology and the landscapes of deep time. hybrid between what we now distinguish as "science" and "literature", we need to remember, as Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson remind us, that these terms had very different meanings at the end of the eighteenth century and that "scientific" discourses -natural history and natural philosophy -were as much part of "polite literature" as poetry. Powered by Edit orial Manager® and Preprint Manager® from Aries Syst em s Corporat ion1 Yet, as Ralph O"Connor points out, most studies of the relationship between science and literature -even those which recognise that modern disciplinary designations did not apply in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries -tend to reiterate distinctions between these "disciplines" by yoking them together with the conjunction "and".

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The Turn to the Romantic in the Travel Literature of the Eighteenth Century

Cited by 12 publications

References 0 publications

Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere Transnational Imagination in Early American Travel Writing (1770–1830)

Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere Transnational Imagination in Early American Travel Writing (1770–1830)

Edward Thomas as a Travel Book Writer

James Hutton’s Geological Tours of Scotland: Romanticism, Literary Strategies, and the Scientific Quest

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