Introduction

Abstract

The Introduction outlines the primary purpose of the book – that is, to view the souvenir through a gendered lens – and its central research questions. It lays out the book’s three-part structure, which reflects three overlapping arenas for representing travel in the eighteenth century: connoisseurship, science and friendship. After establishing the significance of the souvenir, the Introduction proceeds to address four subjects in turn. Firstly, the woman tourists, the elite women who feature in the book, are introduced. Their involvement in the Grand Tour and domestic tourism within Britain is foregrounded in the history of the origins of the Grand Tour in the late seventeenth century. Secondly, gendering eighteenth-century travel: this study is placed within the scholarship on eighteenth-century women’s travel, travel literature, collecting and connoisseurship. The third and fourth subjects of the Introduction are two interrelated sets of challenges posed by gendering the souvenir. One is theoretical and concerns determining how women related to the objects they brought home, the other is methodological and concerns interpreting both the objects themselves and how they were represented in text. The third subject is gendering the souvenir: the theoretical frameworks of Walter Benjamin, Susan Stewart and Beverley Gordon are introduced and used to theoretically foreground the subject. Finally, reflecting on the souvenir: the scope, benefits and limitations of the methodology are discussed.