Eighteenth-century Travel Research Articles

Eighteenth century travel writing as proto-ecocritical literary efforts: Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” as an ecocritical travel writing example

Today, ecocritical theory challenges the logic which damages and exploits nature in the sake of technological developments, and which draws human beings to a more mechanised and alienated life. However, when ecocriticism had not arrived at the scene of literary history, there had been some poets who tried to do what today’s ecocritical theory did through their accounts of travels in nature that they transfused into their poetry, by expressing their desires to become one with nature again, thus, moving away from the anthropocentric point of view which ecocriticism aims to undermine today. One of these poets was the prominent Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who lived between 1770 and 1850, and dealt with human-nature relationship in his poetry with a proto-eco-centric point of view as early as the eighteenth century. Hence, the aim of this study is to investigate his poem titled “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, which was written during a walking tour in nature that he had attended with his sister, with an ecocritical perspective so as to demonstrate the fact that Wordsworth realised what today’s ecocritical theory tries to do more than two centuries earlier, which makes it possible to classify him as a proto-ecocritical poet.

Eighteenth century travel writing as proto-ecocritical literary efforts: Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” as an ecocritical travel writing example

Today, ecocritical theory challenges the logic which damages and exploits nature in the sake of technological developments, and which draws human beings to a more mechanised and alienated life. However, when ecocriticism had not arrived at the scene of literary history, there had been some poets who tried to do what today’s ecocritical theory did through their accounts of travels in nature that they transfused into their poetry, by expressing their desires to become one with nature again, thus, moving away from the anthropocentric point of view which ecocriticism aims to undermine today. One of these poets was the prominent Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who lived between 1770 and 1850, and dealt with human-nature relationship in his poetry with a proto-eco-centric point of view as early as the eighteenth century. Hence, the aim of this study is to investigate his poem titled “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, which was written during a walking tour in nature that he had attended with his sister, with an ecocritical perspective so as to demonstrate the fact that Wordsworth realised what today’s ecocritical theory tries to do more than two centuries earlier, which makes it possible to classify him as a proto-ecocritical poet.

Medieval Russian Journeys and Modern Russian Travelogues: Temporal Corrections of Representative Practices

La Topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte by M. Halbwachs was one of the first studies which employed the strategy of comparing “travelographic” descriptions tracing the dependence of descriptions of the physical world on predetermined settings. The author concludes that the geographical space of the “Promised Land” is realised through “legendary” images. The localisation of specific events occurs following the collective ideas of communities that transform physical reality based on models accepted within the communities. Thus, when we identify descriptive models, it is necessary to consider the constructive nature of spatial representations and correlate various rhetorical strategies used by the authors of travelographic descriptions. The article considers the possibility of using the comparative method when comparing the descriptive strategies of the authors of Russian Modern period travelogues. The author considers the role of images of the past in the descriptive strategies of eighteenth-century travellers. Referring to extensive material, the article traces the evolution of elements of space recorded by various authors, from itineraria (Ignatius Smolnyanin, Afanasy Nikitina, Trifon Korobeinikov, etc.) to fiction travelogues (A. F. Veltman, O. I. Senkovsky, V. A. Sologub, etc.). The author concludes that texts from the late eighteenth – first half of the nineteenth centuries reflect the loss of Christian values and the “crisis of objectivity”. One of the consequences was the crisis of travelographic descriptions and the fragmentation of images of reality, which is stated by members of the Baden school of Neo-Kantianism, who use the concept of “values” to create new research guidelines.

Revering Spain’s Colonial Past and Colonial Propaganda in the Prologue to Volume II of Antonio Ponz’s Viaje fuera de España

In recent years there has been no shortage of critics exploring the controversy that arose in Spain following the publication of Masson de Morvillier’s contentious entry on Spain in the <em>Encylopédie méthodique</em> in 1782. Largely overlooked in these discussions, however, is the eighteenth-century travel writer Antonio Ponz (1725–92), whose prologue to the second volume of his <em>Viaje fuera de España</em> (1785) is a direct rebuttal of Masson de Morvillier’s text. It is the aim of this article to shed light on Ponz’s second prologue and to reveal its contribution to eighteenth-century debates over Spanish colonialism. It analyses the overt colonial propaganda contained in Ponz’s prologue, which depicts Spanish imperialism as paternalistic, righteous, and benevolent, especially in comparison to the rapacious commercial imperialism of France, Britain, and Holland, and examines how the prologue in its vigorous endorsement of Spanish colonial rule conceals and misrepresents the reality of the Spanish empire in the late eighteenth century.

Notes on the Location of Happiness

This article explores the world making capabilities of travel writing (Goodman 1978; Youngs 2013). The premise is that literary products are key elements in the configuration of the world itself and that specifically authors of travel accounts mediate the world to their readership at home (Archetti 1994).&#x0D; By highlighting three different examples of travel writing, the article discusses the persistent notion of the tropical island as an actually existing paradise on earth. More specifically, the discussion focus around the notion that happiness exists in places to which one can travel to.&#x0D; The examples at hand are two eighteenth century travel logs one French and one English; Louise-Antoine de Bougainville’s from 1772 and William Bligh’s from 1792, while the third and final example is a contemporary Swedish travel piece written by Anders Mathlein and first published in 2001.

Introduction

Introduction

Presenting “Truth” in Early Eighteenth-Century Travel Narratives

This essay clarifies the bibliographical history of the three published accounts of the sufferings of a Dutch sailor abandoned on Ascension Island in 1726 for sodomy, but is ultimately less concerned with what actually happened than with how the story was represented in each of three versions and with what those changes might tell us about shifts in expectations of fiction readers between 1726 and 1740. It also examines how later critics have responded to the story to demonstrate that ideas about credibility are relative and socially determined. While narrative theory generally argues that “the more information we have on a narrator, the more concrete will be our sense of the quality and distinctness of his or her voice,” this case study questions that relationship, at least for the early novel, when narrative techniques and readerly practices were still being developed.

(RE)PORTER EN SUBSTANCE: Forme et fonction de la micro-relation de voyage dans la Gazette de France (1762–1792)

The essay identifies a sub-genre of the eighteenth-century French gazette, the micro-relation de voyage [micro-travelogue], studying it as it appeared in the Gazette de France between 1762 and 1792. I argue that the micro-travelogue should be considered as an integral part of the field of travel writing in this period, as it intervenes in the process of mediation operating between the experiences of travel and the readership. Although usually quite short and written in the impersonal narrative voice proper to the French-language gazettes, these texts contain the major elements of eighteenth-century travel writing, contributing as such to the geographical imaginary of the readers.

Mediated education in early modern travel stories: How travel stories contribute to children’s empirical learning

ArgumentLinking up with recent studies on the experience of space and place in modern youth literature, this article analyzes how the “journey” as a narrative line and motif transformed Dutch early modern travel books for children from classical teaching instruments into explorative knowledge places. In the popular seventeenth-century Glorious and Fortunate Journey to the Holy Land, young readers were invited to travel within the book, which was presented as a place that covers material pages to observe as well as imagined places to read about. Eighteenth-century travel books, for example written by Joachim Heinrich Campe, shifted from an inner to an empirical mode of travelling. They raised the suggestion that they offered unmediated observations and travel experiences, as if reading about places was equal to seeing places. Since travel literature facilitated active knowledge quisition among youngsters, but also left little room for autonomous innovations or different interpretations, this article reveals the emancipatory as well as restrictive character of such places of learning. By turning reading into a kind of travelling, travel books served as a substitute for travel.

Tracing the Local: The Translator-Travellee in French Accounts of India

This paper examines aspects of multilingual India as described in a few eighteenth-century French travel accounts of the subcontinent to underscore the interactional history of representation that the conventions of European travel writing have tended to elide, particularly in the context of the subcontinent. It draws on the notions of fractal and vertical in travel to examine vernacular-Sanskrit relations encountered by the travellers, and to render visible the role of the “translator-travellee” in embedding vernacular knowledge in international discursive networks. Rather than merely questioning the travellers’ often skewed and necessarily partial readings of India’s linguistic plurality, I approach these travel accounts as crucial for understanding the specificity of the region’s multilingualism, one that was largely incommensurable with the typology of language that the accounts seek to establish.

Personal Identity and Tory Commercialism in John Campbell’s The Travels and Adventures of Edward Brown (1739)

Abstract Critics have argued that a shift toward the “inward” occurred later in eighteenth-century travel writing in part because of earlier questions of credibility. However, John Campbell’s fictional The Travels and Adventures of Edward Brown (1739) focuses upon the “inward” by drawing upon a technique already used in novels—that is, depicting the narrator as a consciousness. Consciousness, or personal identity, derives from John Locke and appears in Campbell’s travel account to demonstrate how circumstances define the narrator’s travel experiences. These circumstances at once establish the credibility of the narrator’s descriptions and also promote Campbell’s Tory commercialism. For the first, the narrator’s consciousness offers a credible account by describing how people live in time and place; for the second, the narrator demonstrates how personal identity and political ideology were attached from the outset, promoting commerce and colonialism through the narrator’s depiction of a nation’s circumstances that produce unique customs and commodities.

A cabinet of the ordinary: domesticating veterinary education, 1766-1799.

In the late eighteenth century, the Ecole vétérinaire d'Alfort was renowned for its innovative veterinary education and for having one of the largest natural history and anatomy collections in France. Yet aside from a recent interest in the works of one particular anatomist, the school's history has been mostly ignored. I examine here the fame of the school in eighteenth-century travel literature, the historic connection between veterinary science and natural history, and the relationship between the school's hospital and its esteemed cabinet. Using the correspondence papers of veterinary administrators, state representatives and competing scientific institutions during the French Revolution, I argue that resource constraints and the management of anatomical and natural history specimens produced new disciplinary boundaries between natural history, veterinary medicine and human medicine, while reinforcing geographic divisions between the local and the foreign in the study of non-human animals. This paper reconstructs the Ancien Régime reasoning that veterinary students would benefit from a global perspective on animality, and the Revolutionary government's rejection of that premise. Under republicanism, veterinary medicine became domestic.

Primrose Island: Keats and the Isle of Wight

This article argues that Keats’s visits to the Isle of Wight in 1817 and 1819 were key to his imaginative development. Eighteenth-century and Romantic-period travel literature reveal the island’s importance as a picturesque destination rivalling the English Lakes. The medical endorsement of sea-bathing added to its popularity, while the sea itself had recently become an object of aesthetic appreciation. Keats’s strong attachment to the sea is event in ‘On the Sea’ and Endymion, which he began on the island. Keats’s letters chart his changing relationship to the solitude and beauty the Isle of Wight offered him.

Travellers, Connoisseurs, and Britons: Art Commentaries and National Discourse in the Travel Writings of Daniel Defoe and Tobias Smollett

Abstract This article seeks to explore the interrelationship of two facets characterising eighteenth-century travel writing – art commentaries and national discourse. It is demonstrated that one of the reasons behind the travellers’ repetitious attempts to fashion themselves as connoisseurs was a need to re-affirm their national identity. To this end it offers an analysis of two travel texts coming from two different political moments – Daniel Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–1726), constituting an attempt to read the British as a “great” and prosperous nation after the union of 1707, and Tobias Smollett’s idiosyncratic Travels through France and Italy (1766), shedding light on the British attitude towards the South in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War and at the outset of the cult of feeling in Britain. It will also be argued that the numerous art commentaries throughout the narratives had a political agenda and supported the national discourse underpinning the texts.

Afterword: Improvement and Overburden

Afterword: Improvement and Overburden Jennifer Wenzel (bio) “The mouth of this river forms the best harbour I have yet seen; being wide, deep and free from shoals, with a fine situation for a town and fortifications where ships may lie close along the shore, the land high, with a good air and fine streams of water”: so observed Christopher Columbus on November 12, 1492 (124–25). The report of this promising scene concludes Columbus’s inventory of the resources he found at the newly-named Rio de Mares: gold, spices, cotton, aloe, and mastic to be traded, as well as pliant souls to be converted. It’s a curious kind of inventory, not so much a list of current stock as a vivid projection of what could be. I take it as a seminal instance of what Mary Louise Pratt has aptly called an “improving eye,” in which a European explorer’s survey of the landscape offers a prospect both spatial and temporal: a vision of a “Euro-colonial future,” with “resources to be developed, surpluses to be traded, towns to be built” (61). What both Columbus’s inventory and Pratt’s analysis of eighteenth and nineteenth century travel writing tell us is that a resource logic is also a resource aesthetic. From the “beginning,” if you will, Columbus’s judgments—the best harbor, good air, fine streams and situation—are at once economic and aesthetic. You can just picture the scene, no? (Perhaps you’ve seen it in a vacation brochure.) The profitable and the beautiful are brought into alignment, envisioned as one and the same. This emphasis on aesthetic rather than merely economic value in the logic of improvement serves to “presuppose — naturalize — a transformative project embodied in the Europeans” (Pratt 59). Europeans might not have been the first to gaze upon these beckoning landscapes, but they were (so the logic goes) the first to discern in them what they were meant to become. The gap between the actual and the possible is bridged with a teleology. In this Afterword, I trace a kind of pre-history of (post)modernity, taking the improving impulse evident in Columbus’s prospect as a blueprint for capitalist modernity—a map of the future that, in its very immateriality, bears a complex yet instructive relation to the uneven territory of our present. Anatomizing the forms of desire and coercion at work in the improving eye, Raymond Williams puts the link between economy and aesthetics more baldly than Pratt when he observes that, in reading conventional histories of English landscape, you might almost believe—you are often enough told—that the eighteenth-century landlord, through the agency of his hired landscapers, and with poets and painters in support, invented natural beauty. And in a way, why not? In the same ideology he invented charity, land-improvement and politeness, just as when he and his kind went to other men’s countries, such countries were ‘discovered’. (120) Elsewhere in The Country and the City, Williams links the agricultural and infrastructural aspects of “improvement” or “cultivation” more explicitly with their social, cultural, or moral aspects, “which were historically linked but in practice so often contradictory” (115). He identifies the false promise in the tautology: “improvement is or ought to be improvement” but seldom is (116). Thus the anger with which Aimé Césaire tallies the murders, stolen resources, and ruined lifeworlds attributable to the European “civilizing mission” in his Discourse on Colonialism: “They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks…. I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life (43). In the exchange from which this passage is excerpted, Césaire offers a counter-inventory of what Columbus and his successor-improvers have wrought. Although he was concerned more with morality than with aesthetics (and, above all, with economic value), John Locke was another key theorist of “improvement” in its manifold senses. “In the beginning,” Locke writes in “Of Property,” “all the world was America” (V.49), by which he means that the entire earth was unimproved waste land gifted by the Creator to humankind for them to labor upon and...

Orientalizing Southern Europe?: Spain Through the Eyes of Foreign Travelers

This essay explores the role that eighteenth-century travellers assigned to Spain in the imaginary geography of European civilization, looking at the origins of the Romantic orientalizing stereotypes. If the full incorporation of Spain within the geographical and imaginary frontiers of the European world was still quite evident, and its imperial role acknowledged, its symbolic conversion (among other South-European countries, but even more so) into a somewhat exotic “Other” of north-west Europe would be accomplished in the nineteenth century, with lasting effects even today. The eighteenth century represents a particularly interest transition period of conflicting representations of Spain, which have to be understood within the broader contexts of Enlightenment political and philosophical reflection on cultural differences, and of the building of national and European identities.

In Love with a Cold Climate

This essay discusses representations of the North in late eighteenth and nineteenth century travel narratives from Scandinavia. It takes as its starting point the traditional conflation of the North with cold that has permeated travellers’ views of Scandinavia, and shows how this stereotype persists even when it is contradicted by the actual experience or observations related in northern travelogues. From some examples of the tension between a real and imaginary North in a selection of travelogues, the essay moves on to look at the aesthetics of the northern landscape in terms of the concepts of the sublime and picturesque. It then shows how an idealising aesthetic emphasis is modified in many northern travel narratives by a foregrounding of realistic details that function as markers of an “anti-aesthetics” of the everyday or commonplace, and give readers a sense of the locally specific and specifically northern in descriptions of places, landscapes and human encounters. It concludes with an example that indicates how an acknowledgment of the aesthetic qualities of everyday human activities such as the dried fish trade helps to undermine the stereotype of the cold, barren, desolate and distant north.

Virtual Travel in Second Life

This article argues for the use of experiential learning to teach eighteenth-century travel literature to undergraduates. Exploring the three-dimensional virtual world of Second Life, students wrote their own travelogues and reflected on the ways in which the experience affected how they analyzed travelogues for the rest of the semester.

‘Come and triumph with your Don Quixote’: or, how James Bruce travelled to discover the Nile but found Scotland instead

After spending several years travelling through East Africa gathering scientific and geological data, battling disease, and dodging pirates, bandits and soldiers, James Bruce expected to return to Britain a hero. Instead his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, while wildly popular, was met with such derision from the London public that his reputation never recovered. I argue that his readers’ scepticism was inextricably tied to the fact that national identity is a fluid construct within the text: at various points in the narrative, in order to facilitate his safe passage through unknown or even hostile territory, Bruce claims to be Scottish, English, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Indian and Abyssinian, and he apparently transgresses both national and class boundaries with ease. I consider how the various cultural identities that Bruce adopts compete with the nationalistic narrative of his account, which demonstrates the extent that late eighteenth-century travel writing challenged the conceptual foundations of British nationalism even as it inscribed them.

Transparency and Truth: Prefatory Material in Fictional and Non-Fictional Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing

Cette étude porte sur les paratextes, et plus précisément les préfaces, des récits de voyages du dix-huitième siècle. Nous proposons que ces préfaces deviennent, au fil du temps, des objets plus complexes et nous analysons ce processus en trois temps. La complexité formelle des préfaces semble s’accroitre et des éléments textuels et iconographiques de plus en plus sophistiqués sont progressivement intégrés dans ce matériel liminaire. Dans un deuxième temps, l’analyse aborde la question de la transparence discursive et la relation changeante entre genres, stylistique et vérité. Enfin, cette étude examine l’utilisation évolutive des performatifs dans les préfaces. Fondée sur un corpus comprenant des textes de fiction (Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels) et des textes non-fictionnels (récits de Dampier, Woodes Rogers, Shelvocke, Anson, Byron, Wallis, Cook), cette mise en parallèle ouvre des perspectives sur la fonction et l’évolution des préfaces et suggère en même temps de nouveaux liens entre les deux formes de récits.