Showing how specific rhetorical strategies used in nineteenth-century British travel writing produced fictional representations of continental Europe in works by Ann Radcliffe, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and Bram Stoker, Katarina Gephardt argues that nineteenth-century writers envisioned their country simultaneously as distinct from the Continent and as a part of Europe. She suggests that their imaginative geography of Europe anticipated Britain's ambivalence about European integration.
The nineteenth century was the heyday of travel, with Britons continually reassessing their own culture in relation to not only the colonized but also other Europeans, especially the ones that they encountered on the southern and eastern peripheries of the continent. Offering illustrative case studies, Katarina Gephardt shows how specific rhetorical strategies used in contemporary travel writing produced popular fictional representations of continental Europe in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and Bram Stoker. She examines a wide range of autobiographical and fictional travel narratives to demonstrate that the imaginative geographies underpinning British ideas of Europe emerged from the spaces between fact and fiction. Adding texture to her study are her analyses of the visual dimensions of cross-cultural representation and of the role of evolving technologies in defining a shared set of rhetorical strategies. Gephardt argues that British writers envisioned their country simultaneously as distinct from the Continent and as a part of Europe, anticipating the contradictory British discourse around European integration that involves both fear that the European super-state will violate British sovereignty and a desire to play a more central role in the European Union.
This book explores the boundaries of British continental travel and tourism in the nineteenth century, stretching from Norway to Bulgaria, from visitors’ albums to missionary efforts, from juvenilia to joint authorship. The essay topics invoke new aesthetics of travel as consumption, travel as satire, and of the developing culture of tourism. Chronologically arranged, the book charts the growth and permutations of this new consumerist ideology of travel driven by the desires of both men and women: the insatiable appetite for new accounts of old routes as well as appropriation of the new; interart reproductions of description and illustration; and wider cultural manifestations of tourism within popular entertainment and domestic settings. Continental tourism provides multiple perspectives with wide-ranging coverage of cultural phenomena increasingly incorporated into and affected by the nineteenth-century continental tour. The essays suggest the coextension of travel alongside experiential boundaries and reveal the emergence of a consumerist attitude toward travel that persists in the present day.
Abstract: This dissertation contributes to the project of re-mapping British national literature inspired by postcolonial theory. I argue that the representations of Britain as an imperial center draw on internal divisions between Western Europe and the southern and eastern peripheries of the continent. As European borders solidified in the long nineteenth century (1789-1914), I analyze the generic intersections of fictional and non-fictional travel narratives to examine how nineteenth-century British writers conceived the imagined boundaries between Britain and the Continent. While the fictional and non-fictional accounts of Europe share representative strategies such as the Picturesque or Orientalism, fictional settings adapt particular features of continental locations to accommodate plots of British national consolidation. In order to illustrate the ideological functions of fictional travel narratives, I distinguish between two kinds of settings. Writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Bram Stoker, whose Gothic settings are based on existing travel narratives, displace British ideological struggles onto European peripheries to contain foreign threats. These Gothic, or synthetic, settings blur the boundaries between home and abroad, reminding readers of the sometimes terrifying fact that Britain is a part of Europe. On the other hand, writers such as Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Dickens, who draw on their own travel experience and travel writing in constructing their satirical or realist settings, attack British complacency in periods of relative stability and prosperity. Although synthetic settings are conventionally considered to be instances of othering, it is the mimetic settings that absorb the travel writers opposition of home and abroad and thus highlight the isolation of Britain from the Continent. My research on the literariness of travel writing and its construction of European peripheries brings a new perspective to the study of genre and nationalism in the field of nineteenth-century British literature. As I demonstrate how cross-cultural contact may sharpen rather than bridge the boundaries among Europeans, my dissertation also helps explain the persistence of imaginative geographies in our age of global communication and travel.
The nineteenth century was the heyday of travel, with Britons continually reassessing their own culture in relation to not only the colonized but also other Europeans, especially the ones that they encountered on the southern and eastern peripheries of the continent. Offering illustrative case studies, Katarina Gephardt shows how specific rhetorical strategies used in contemporary travel writing produced popular fictional representations of continental Europe in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and Bram Stoker. She examines a wide range of autobiographical and fictional travel narratives to demonstrate that the imaginative geographies underpinning British ideas of Europe emerged from the spaces between fact and fiction. Adding texture to her study are her analyses of the visual dimensions of cross-cultural representation and of the role of evolving technologies in defining a shared set of rhetorical strategies. Gephardt argues that British writers envisioned their country simultaneously as distinct from the Continent and as a part of Europe, anticipating the contradictory British discourse around European integration that involves both fear that the European super-state will violate British sovereignty and a desire to play a more central role in the European Union.
Interrogating the multiple ways in which travel was narrated and mediated, by and in response to, nineteenth-century British travelers, this interdisciplinary collection examines to what extent these accounts drew on and developed existing tropes of travel. The three sections take up personal and intimate narratives that were not necessarily designed for public consumption, tales intended for a popular audience, and accounts that were more clearly linked with discourses and institutions of power, such as imperial processes of conquest and governance. Some narratives focus on the things the travelers carried, such as souvenirs from the battlefields of Britain’s imperial wars, while others show the complexity of Victorian dreams of the exotic. Still others offer a disapproving glimpse of Victorian mores through the eyes of indigenous peoples in contrast to the imperialist vision of British explorers. Swiss hotel registers, guest books, and guidebooks offer insights into the history of tourism, while new photographic technologies, the development of the telegraph system, and train travel transformed the visual, audial, and even the conjugal experience of travel. The contributors attend to issues of gender and ethnicity in essays on women travelers, South African travel narratives, and accounts of China during the Opium Wars, and analyze the influence of fictional travel narratives. Taken together, these essays show how these multiple narratives circulated, cross-fertilised, and reacted to one another to produce new narratives, new objects, and new modes of travel.
