From endnotes to the ends of the earth: Moore, Staël, and romantic transport

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholarship on travel writing tends to focus on accounts by writers who spent time in the places they depict. But neither Romantic-era nor twenty-first-century cognitive theory gives such a limited notion of travel. Lalla Rookh (1817), a hybrid poetic text by Irish writer Thomas Moore, presents the idea that reading is a form of travel that provides access to distant places. Moore had never been to the lands – India, Egypt, Persia – about which he wrote, but rather constructed his text through meticulous research. In both Lalla Rookh’s text and paratext Moore makes the Orientalist argument that his research gave him the same experience of the East as one who had seen it first-hand. Through readings of Lalla Rookh and Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy, this essay argues that “travel” studies might benefit from the more capacious notion of “transport” as a disciplinary and conceptual category.