Eighteenth-century Travel Research Articles

Material Culture and the Other: European Encounters with Chinese Porcelain, ca. 1650-1800

The consumption of Asian luxury goods in early modern Europe has generated a large volume of scholarly research, much of it exploring connections between the exotic object and the identity of the consumer. Links between luxury goods and perceptions of producers in the early modern world remain relatively unexplored. To what extent did European travelers imagine a connection between material culture and Chinese identity or "Chineseness"? Through a close reading of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel accounts, this article traces changing European perceptions of material culture and the "other," that is, perceived links between luxury objects and their Chi­nese producers.

Les voyageurs d'îles: sur la route des Indes aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles par Arlette Girault-Fruet

GIRAULT-FRUET, ARLETTE. Les voyageurs d’îles: sur la route des Indes aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Garnier, 2010. ISBN 978-2-8124-0152-7. Pp. 598. 84 a. Presented as a search for “la topique de l’île,” Girault-Fruet’s study catalogues the commonplaces shared by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel narratives to Madagascar and other islands of the Indian Ocean. The book synthesizes nearly a hundred texts written by over seventy-five European authors— first-hand travelers as well as those who chronicled others’ adventures from the comfort of home. Offering an essentially structuralist analysis, the book is organized according to the four stages of the typical island journey. “Le temps de la navigation” covers the sea voyage itself, with its inevitable storms, shipwrecks, navigational errors, encounters with sharks and sea monsters, and worries about day-to-day survival. In “Le temps de la découverte,” travelers recognize the island as a locus amoenus, a characterization elaborated during the “Escale, ou le temps de l’île d’or,” when authors revel in the abundance of flora and fauna. Throughout these three parts, the book demonstrates the commonalities among texts separated by many decades and authored by travelers from different countries and social groups. Indeed, the author argues that the works’ efficacy depended on these repetitions. To convince readers that their accounts were truthful, writers had to repeat what was already known about the place. Readers of travel literature will be familiar with this self-referential quality of the genre. Often, though (and perhaps especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), travel writers cited their predecessors in order to correct or augment those earlier accounts, so that appeals to authority served to highlight the originality or superiority of the new narrative. Such gestures become invisible in the early sections of Les voyageurs d’îles, as Girault-Fruet’s approach to the texts inevitably elides their individuality. The book offers little in the way of close reading, supporting its observations instead with ample quotes from various authors. At times, this assimilation of texts from two centuries of travel leads the reader to question the functioning of the topoi that the author identifies. How did they become commonplaces in the first place? When and how were authors influenced by those travelers whose footsteps they retraced? The book deals with these questions in the final and most successful section, “Le peuplement, ou le temps de l’île,” which examines representations of a “fallen” island paradise, mostly in later eighteenth-century texts, where writers lament “l’ampleur des dégâts” (435) caused by the European presence, comment on the slave system, and describe the island with an “exotisme désenchanté” (439). Girault-Fruet illustrates how travelers’ experience of disillusionment stems from their disappointment as readers upon finding that the island fails to live up to the Paradise described by their predecessors. The tonally complex passages cited in this part are especially compelling to modern readers, due to their resonance with today’s languages of environmentalism. In addition to presenting a synoptic overview of early modern travel writing about the Indian Ocean, Les voyageurs d’îles considers the island as an imaginative place as well as a geographical one. The author characterizes travelers’ island depictions as imago rather than image, “à la fois portrait et fantôme, description et vision” (166). Contemplating the island’s emotional connotations (desire, euphoria, nostalgia, isolation), Girault-Fruet draws parallels to islands in modern literature from Defoe to Baudelaire and Aragon. These trans-historical observations tantalizingly suggest how early modern travel narratives might have participated in the evolution of the insular paradise in the European imagination. Although it does not present such a genealogy of literary 180 FRENCH REVIEW 86.1 islands or island travel, this study offers an admirably thorough exposé of a relatively uncharted body of literature, uncovering themes and questions worthy of future exploration. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Ellen R. Welch GROVE, LAURENCE. Comics in French: The European Bande Dessinée in Context. New York: Berghahn, 2010. ISBN 978-1-84545-588-0. Pp. xiv + 346. $100. Il est de coutume de commencer tout article concernant la bande dessinée en...

Fantasies of Immediacy, or, the Boundaries of the Book in Eighteenth Century Travel Narratives

This article explores a structural shift in techniques of representation in eighteenth-century travel literature as a reaction to the changing needs of cameralist governance, one in which space is no longer grasped as enyclopedic and all-encompassing. Instead of being understood as static territory, space is increasingly represented as a dynamic and continually updatable dataset. As a consequence, travel literature itself goes in search of new representational modes appropriate to this new understanding of space. And as I show, the medium of the book becomes increasingly problematic in this regard. As early modern travel literature (ars Apodemica) largely splits in the eighteenth century into statistics and geography on the one hand and literary travel experiences on the other, each of these categories requires new forms of mediation for their successful presentation. Common to both, however, remains a desire to communicate an immediacy of perception through representation. Taking Friedrich Nicolai’s Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781 as my primary example, I show how the medium of the book arrives at its own media boundary, one whose transgression necessarily results in failure because it can no longer account for an epistemological divide that has already transpired. This difference has far-reaching implications for the place of the book within the humanistic sciences today.

Knowledge and Colonialism: Eighteenth-Century Travellers in South Africa - by Siegfried Huigen

Knowledge and Colonialism: Eighteenth-Century Travellers in South Africa - by Siegfried Huigen

The Journée du Dix AoÛt as Witnessed by a Yankee Merchant

James Price, Massachusetts Yankee and successful Boston merchant, visited Paris in August 1792, just when the French Revolution was entering into a new and ominous phase. On a trip designed to combine business with pleasure, he ended up witnessing the famous Journée du Dix AoÛt (Tenth of August) – dubbed the “Second French Revolution” by contemporaries – when provincial militia and national guards assaulted the Tuileries palace, massacred the king's Swiss Guards, and toppled the Bourbon monarchy from its centuries-old throne. As a fairly unbiased and certainly perspicacious observer – though with moderate revolutionary sympathies – Price must be included in the list of more famous, and more highly partisan, American witnesses of revolution, notably Thomas Jefferson, John Trumbull, and Gouverneur Morris. Specific topics addressed by Price include women during the Revolution, the dynamic between crowd action and attempts of municipal authorities at control, and the development of a Revolutionary fashion. Price's fascinating diary is not only a running account of events surrounding the fateful Tenth, but also an evaluation and commentary of an outsider, combined with a lively eyewitness description of the Revolutionary street scene. Not included in Marcel Reinhard's standard study on the Journée du Dix, Price's hour-by-hour chronology provides a valuable corroboration of and supplement to Reinhard. His account notes also provide insight into the eighteenth-century Continental travel habits of Americans on the “Grand Tour” and on business.

<i>Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture David M. Turner Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture. By Laura J. Rosenthal. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. 270. $52.50 (cloth). In spite of the old cliché that it is the world's "oldest profession," prostitution in its modern sense did not emerge until the eighteenth century in England. Whereas moralists of the Tudor and Stuart period had subsumed all categories of sexual immorality under the category of "whoredom," eighteenth-century writers began to use the term "prostitution" to designate commercial sex from other forms of sexual relations. This development and its cultural implications is at the core of Laura J. Rosenthal's engaging study. Eighteenth-century writers were fascinated with prostitution, but their interest went beyond prurient titillation or the expression of moral outrage about female "ruin." Instead, commercial prostitution "provided [End Page 422] an explosive opportunity to hold capitalist relations up for scrutiny" (212). Through the literature of prostitution, writers explored many of the controversies raised by the developing commercial economy, including gender relations, desire, imperialism, trade, luxury, and social mobility, and by the end of the period prostitution had become a focal point for exploring the ills of commercial society. In this book Rosenthal focuses on the commercial transaction that defined prostitution as sex work, departing from previous studies of prostitution that have emphasized the growing sympathy for prostitutes in this period. What defines "modern" prostitution, Rosenthal argues, is not only the ways in which new initiatives policed, reformed, or sentimentalized prostitutes but also the way in which culture represented the commercial exchange of prostitution itself. Earlier portrayals of prostitution had placed little emphasis on this transaction, regarding whores as agents of insatiable desire, and only ironically was prostitution presented as a form of labor. Yet as eighteenth-century writers became increasingly concerned about the development of commercial society, so prostitution as a form of "infamous commerce" became "an explosive opportunity to hold capitalist relations up for scrutiny" (212). In particular, writers were intrigued by the "disturbing intersection of the economic and the personal that prostitution comes to emblematize" (4). The troubling self-division entailed in presenting the most "private" part of the self as a commodity came to exercise a powerful hold over the eighteenth-century British literary imagination. Infamous Commerce explores this transformation in perceptions of prostitution through a series of case studies that take the reader from Restoration stage comedy to late eighteenth-century travel journals and also using canonical texts such as Daniel Defoe's Roxana and John Cleland's Fanny Hill. One of the strengths of Rosenthal's book is her command of a rich variety of texts, and she places the better-known novels in their wider cultural context by incorporating a host of more obscure sources, ranging from prostitution narratives, biographies, reform literature produced by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, and the literature of roguery. Through a close reading of her sources, she skillfully elucidates the relationship between portrayals of prostitution and broader anxieties raised by commercial expansion. Moral reformers, for example, drew attention not only to the insatiable lust of prostitutes but also to the ways in which the sex trade might threaten legitimate commerce, for example, by distracting men from "business." Yet the boundaries between "infamous" and "legitimate" commerce were increasingly questioned by writers such as John Dunton, whose Night-Walker periodical began to expose some of the economic forces that drove women onto the streets, and, most radically, by Bernard Mandeville, who proclaimed that luxury, pride, and vanity were essential features of a successful marketplace. [End Page 423] While few commentators went as far as Mandeville in demolishing the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate commerce, writers became increasingly intrigued with prostitution as a form of transaction, often at the expense of the sexual aspects of prostitution. This is apparent in a variety of biographical narratives of prostitutes, both fictional—as in the case of Defoe's Roxana—and in accounts of "real-life" prostitutes such as Sally Salisbury and Margaret Leeson. Although Roxana is set in the bawdy world of the Restoration, Rosenthal argues that in...

Wild animals in Russian, Siberian and Central Asian households according to eighteenth-century travel reports


 
 
 Wild animals, such as mammals, birds and reptiles, have been kept in houses and nomadic tents for various purposes throughout historical times. At the same time, domestic animals such as horses and cattle have roamed freely in the forests and steppes of Russia, Siberia and Central Asia. In the late eighteenth century, European travellers explored the Russian Empire and kept wild animals in cages and baskets for scientific purposes. This comprehensive article discusses in detail the relationships between local peoples, scientists and wild and feral animals. Various functions of the animal resources are explored, especially the use of animals as tax payment, trade goods, food supply, pets and pest controllers, and for entertainment.
 
 

Material Culture and Colonial Networks in the Cape Colony and the Indian Ocean

ABSTRACT This review article considers four recent books published on the social and cultural history of the Cape Colony and Batavia, spanning a chronological period from the mid-seventeenth through to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The books address a wide range of topics and themes, but they all share an interest, to a greater or lesser extent, in the material culture of colonial societies and the networks of migration, political power and colonial knowledge. While Kerry Ward and Siegfried Huigen are concerned to expand the conceptual frontiers of the Cape Colony, Laura Mitchell and Yvonne Brink examine the nature of the settler society that first took root in the southwestern Cape and subsequently expanded to frontier regions. Each of these studies takes the study of colonialism in the Cape beyond the concerns of political economy that characterised the historiography of past decades. While there is much that is illuminating and fruitful in these approaches, this article also points to their limitations. Y. Brink, They Came to Stay: Discovering Meaning in the 18th Century Cape Country Dwelling. Stellenbosch: AFRICAN SUN MeDIA, 2008. ix + 220 pp. ISBN 978 1 920109 39 4. L.J. Mitchell, Belongings: Property and Identity in Colonial South Africa (An Exploration of Frontiers, 1725–c.1830. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. xv + 232 pp. ISBN 978 0 231 14252 6. S. Huigen, Knowledge and Colonialism: Eighteenth-Century Travellers in South Africa. Leiden: Brill, 2009. xii + 273 pp. ISBN 978 90 04 17743 7. K. Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xv + 340 pp. ISBN 978 0 521 74599 4.

L'Idee d'Europe au XVIIIe siecle: actes du Seminaire international des jeunes dix-huitiemistes, Genes, 24-29 octobre 2005/The Idea of Europe in the 18th Century: Proceedings of the International Seminar for Young Eighteenth-Century Scholars, Genoa, 24-29 October 2005

This multilingual collection of thirteen articles is the outcome of a conference on the historical dimensions surrounding the notion of European identity, a subject that has become a prominent feature of recent discussions on the nature and future of the European Union and, more particularly, of the legitimacy of its decision-making procedures on the one hand, and its relationship with Turkey on the other. The focus of the collection is whether either of these aspects of the identity of Europe had any antecedents in the eighteenth century. The volume is divided into four sections, dealing respectively with European concepts of Europe, Europe seen from the outside, Europe as described in eighteenth-century travel writing, and Europe as seen in the eighteenth-century arts and sciences. The result is an interesting collection about an important subject, even though the variable quality of the contributions makes the whole array rather heterogeneous. Some contributions, like Nere Basabe's wide-ranging chapter on eighteenth-century peace plans and their bearing on the work of Juan Francisco Siñeriz, an early nineteenth-century Spanish advocate of a European constitution, and Sabrina Broselow Moser's chapter on Swiss Robinsonades, contain fascinating and absorbing material. Others, however, cover familiar ground (Saint-Pierre, d'Argenson, Rousseau, and Kant) in predictable ways. It is a pity that the publisher appears not to have checked the final proofs before the collection was printed, because the Index contains a list of names but no page numbers.

GENDERING THE SCOTTISH GUIDEBOOK: SARAH MURRAY'S COMPANION AND USEFUL GUIDE

In May 1796, Sarah Murray, a 52-year-old widow, left London for a tour of Scotland with the specific aim of writing a guidebook. Presenting herself as competent and capable, Murray used a variety of rhetorical strategies to establish her authority while at the same time retaining her respectability. Not afraid of physically demanding activity, she encouraged her readers to do as she did, persuading them that true “lovers of nature” should be willing to take risks and accept uncomfortable conditions. Much of her advice was aimed directly at women and it is clear that she considered adventurous travel a suitable occupation for upper-class women like herself. This essay discusses Murray's travels and writings within the wider context of eighteenth-century travel writing, focusing on issues of self-representation, women's roles and the destabilizing nature of travel in the late eighteenth century.

Staging Ruins: Paestum and Theatricality

This article looks at the connection between architecture and theatre. By focusing on how eighteenthcentury travellers experienced the Greek temples in Italian Paestum, it highlights the analogies between architectural experience and theatricality. Travellers at the time found it diffi cult to comprehend Paestum becausethe architecture of the temples was different from the classical architecture they had seen in Rome and illustrated in publications. Travellers, by using strategies of representation related to the theatre, tried to present this strange architecture of Paestum in an accessible way to their eighteenth-century public. It also shows how the various roles assumed by spectators or traveller-observers defi ned the way they experienced the architecture.

Dr Anders Sparrman: Travelling with the Labouring Poor in the Late Eighteenth-Century Cape

ABSTRACT This article examines an account by Dr Anders Sparrman, who visited the Cape of Good Hope in the 1770s, with the view of utilising travel accounts as historical evidence. Late eighteenth-century travel accounts of the Cape have attracted the attention of geographers and literary scholars, who focus on the emergence of naturalist history. Drawing on Edward Said, Mary Louise Pratt has linked naturalist classificatory schemes, promoted by scientific travellers such as Sparrman, to Euroimperialism and the assertion of a male bourgeois authority. This work elucidates the emergence of modern theories of nature, representations of colonised strangers, and the unequal relations of imperialism. Yet, scholars have paid little attention to what travellers have written about the labouring poor on whose labour their transcontinental journeys rested. This article reads Sparrman's account against the grain by examining his anecdotes of the sailors, servants, guides and wagon drivers he encounters. These stories, which diverge from the naturalist focus of the narrative, reveal a great deal about changing views of colonialism. They also complicate our understanding of race and class in an imperial context by pointing to a multi-racial underclass fellowship, centred on the sharing of commodities such as tobacco and brandy, in the Cape colony and beyond.

Shifting Edenic Codes: On Two Exotic Visions of the Golden Age in the Late Eighteenth Century

The topos of Edenic far-flung islands seems a self-explanatory cliché rooted in contemporary popular mythology. However, the archaeology of its origins across eighteenth-century travel writing reveals the existence of two strongly contrasted models of the exotic golden age: the eroticized social utopia depicted in Bougainville's account of Tahiti and the chaste exotic pastoral world which provides the backdrop to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie. By revisiting these two seminal texts and their legacy, this article strives to account for the drift or derivation of Edenic codes from the eighteenth century onwards, while sketching the unsuspected lineage that links the two image-generating models to modern exoticism.

The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (review)

Reviewed by: The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland Sharon Alker (bio) Ina Ferris. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. x+205pp. US$85. ISBN 0-521-81460-X. The national tale, as a genre, emerged as an object of literary study in the 1990s in the work of such critics as Katie Trumpener, Mary Jean Corbett, Miranda Burgess, and Ina Ferris. Despite its relatively recent appearance, its significance in the configuration of cross-border relations has been clearly established. Katie Trumpener, in "National Character, Nationalist Plots: National Tale and Historical Novel in the Age of Waverley, 1806–1830" (ELH 60, no. 3 [1993]: 685–731), introduced the national tale as an "allegorical presentation of the contrast, attraction, and union between disparate cultural worlds" (697) that seeks "not only to reflect but to direct national sentiment" (689). Burgess, in "Violent Translations: Allegory, Gender, and Cultural Nationalism in Ireland, 1796–1806" (MLQ 59, no. 1 [1998]: 33–70), has analysed the manifestations of violence that rupture the move towards resolution in the proto-national tale. Corbett, in Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing (2000), has demonstrated that allegories of union, such as those present in the national tale, did not merely originate from subordinated nations, noting that "a liberal English discourse [was] dedicated to producing ideological fictions through which Irish disaffection from English rule could be rhetorically minimized, managed, or resolved" (4). Ferris herself has been a vital part of this critical conversation. In "Narrating Cultural Encounter: Lady Morgan and the Irish National Tale" (Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, no. 3 [1996]: 287–303 ), she introduces the "shock of cultural encounter" that she substantially develops in her astute and valuable book, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (295). Ferris's book is the first full-length scholarly work that dissects and examines the early nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish national tale. It offers a rich and deeply historicized analysis of the genre's trajectory, from its origin in forms that include the travel narrative and the romance, through its complication by impulses that disturb its cross-border focus, such as the desire to mediate women's position in the nation, to its final decay under [End Page 227] the pressures of historical forces in the turbulent 1820s. In chapter 1, Ferris delineates the origins of the national tale, paying close attention to the late eighteenth-century travel narrative, in particular the Irish tour, a loose "magpie genre" in which the traveller stands firmly outside his object of study (43). While the national tale certainly emulates the form, she notes, it also satirizes it, and works to complicate and destabilize the representation of the traveller-figure. Chapter 2 explores this disturbance in detail, noting, for example, that in Sydney Owenson's Wild Irish Girl (1806), the derogatory account of the Anglo-Irish traveller Horatio's encounter with a small boy and a pig is ruptured by a footnote that offers a competing reading. This paratextual intervention dislodges colonial hierarchies and impels English readers to reconsider their reading of cross-border relations. The national tale, in its original form, seems to centre on a quest for cross-border amelioration through the acquisition of sympathy, but Ferris ably demonstrates that we must be cautious in determining precisely how sympathy manifests itself in the genre. The model of sympathy deployed by such authors as Edgeworth and Owenson, she suggests, is not that of Adam Smith, who emphasized concord and the elimination of unquiet emotions. The case of Ireland, with its layers of dissonance, not only between Britain and Ireland, but also between the Anglo-Irish and the Irish, does not allow for such a model. Rather, Ferris reads the national tale through Humean concepts of sympathy that privilege discomfort rather than stability and equilibrium. Indeed, it is the seeds of negativity within the original form, Ferris implies, that enable it to evolve into a novel of insurgency. This notion of sympathy frequently becomes visible in the experience of the encounter between the traveller and the Irish, which is often a jarring one that seeks to disrupt and alter the consciousness of the...

The Czarina's Russia through Mediterranean Eyes: Francesco Algarotti's Journey to Saint Petersburg

Francesco Algarotti's Viaggi di Russia is a work dealing primarily with Russian Realpolitik and war. And yet it includes a great number of "d�lices" and "agr�ments." This can be explained in part by the demands of the eighteenth-century travel genre, but also by the combination of "stoicism" and "epicureanism" that existed in the circles that Algarotti frequented, and especially in that of Friedrich II of Prussia. Algarotti has been criticized for adorning the account of his journey through the northern seas to Russia with Latin quotations referring to the classical Mediterranean world. But allusions to ancient Rome, playful and serious at the same time, are essential to his analysis of Russian military power and to his criticism of the Russian campaign of 1736-39 in the Crimea.

The Age of Johnson, Vol. XV by Paul J. Korshin, Jack Lynch

820 Reviews the kind of fictional frame familiar in Lucian within which to present his vision of the truth of things. The circumstances surrounding Kepler's reaction, involving his mother's prosecution forwitchcraft, and the history of the interaction between these two luminaries make fascinating reading. The book is intimately concerned with early print culture and its concomitant reading practices. In the final chapter, devoted toMargaret Cavendish, Spiller argues that Cavendish's reading of scientific texts by Hobbes, Descartes, and Hooke made her develop 'an anti-mechanistic and anti-experimental theory of reading in order to challenge the ways that the new science defines reading' (p. 22) from an active form of doing to apassive form of seeing. In reaction, Cavendish in her own scientific writings develops a vitalist theory of reading 'that allows for amore active reader who is able to destroy as well as create knowledge' and attacks what she sees as the "'arts" upon which observational and experimental science depends' (p. 23). In addition to drawing on recent work on early print culture, this book joins debates about large issues in the philosophy and history of science: 'What a historical perspective allows us to remember, that is, is the ways in which fictions have not always been false and scientific laws at least began as fictions' (p. i8o). The historical perspective is thoroughgoing and the book's synthesis of materials from disciplines more usually considered separately, in true Renaissance fashion, is illuminating to novitiates and thought-provoking to those initiates with whom Spiller engages. A cleverly conceived afterword on 'The Sokal Hoax' itself provides an illuminating perspective upon the argument and material of the foregoing chapters, suggesting that the conclusions of this study are not confined to the period covered (I580-I670) but can also resonate in the present. UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING ROBIN SOWERBY The Age of Johnson, vol. xv. Ed. by PAUL J. KORSHIN and JACKLYNCH. New York: AMS. 2004. xvii+493 pp. $144.50. ISBN o-404-62765-x. The fifteenth volume of The Age of Johnson is a handsome, substantial book, impres sively wide-ranging within the terms of its brief, and very expensive. If, however, it is increasingly out of place as a hardback book inwhat is effectively the journal market, the eighteenth-century specialist will find much of interest, and a good deal to admire, for the asking price. This volume is partly devoted to retrospective, from Paul Korshin and Jack Lynch's preface, which pauses to 'reflect on the state of John sonian studies at this milestone' (p. ix), and the landmark studies from the I950S onwards, to generous review essays on the history of The Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue, by Robin C. Alston, on eighteenth-century studies anthologies, by Lisa Berglund, which, from a teacher's point of view, is particularly thorough and helpful, and on eighteenth-century travel writing, by David Espey. If some of the reviews that, as usual, conclude the volume seem a little incestuous, with Gloria Sybil Gross's own book on Austen and Johnson up for review while Gross herself reviews Robert Mayer's book of essays on Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and editor Jack Lynch's book The Age of Eli zabeth in theAge of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) is also selected for review, thereby suggesting something of a closed circle, nevertheless the bulk of the dozen essays, which are the substance of the volume, are stimulating in their breadth and often challenging in their contentions. A little over half of the essays address topics concerning Johnson and the Johnso nian canon, from Loren Rothschild's detailed and absorbing account of 'The True History' of Reynold's controversial 'Blinking Sam' portrait to, unusuallyand interest ingly, Amiya Bhushan Sharma's 'Samuel Johnson's Image of India', which examines MLR, 101.3, 2oo6 82I both Johnson's relations to those, likeWarren Hastings, who were intimately con cerned in Indian politics and the representation of India and things Indian in his writing. One of themost satisfying, however, isKathleen Nulton Kemmerer's piece, 'Domestic Relations in Samuel Johnson's Life ofMilton', in which she places his treatment ofMilton's...

Raza, genero e hibridez en El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes

Mariselle Melendez studies the dynamics of colonial subject identity construction as elaborated in the exemplary eighteenth-century travel book, El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (A Guide for Inexperienced Travelers ). She analyzes elements of race and gender to argue that they become essential parts of the colonialist project which the author articulates throughout his travel diary by means of the voices of his two narrators: the Spanish Visitador Alonso Carrio de la Vandera and his companion and amanuensis, Calixto Bustamente Carlos Inca. Melendez shows how racial and cultural hybridity constitute unstable elements for the colonialist agenda proposed by the author.

The Modernisation of Russia 1676-1825 by Simon s> Dixon (review)

526 SEER, 79, 3, 2001 eighteenth-century travellers)and Moscow (often seen as interesting rather than beautiful), it now became much more common for Italians to visit the Volga valley, Kiev, the new cosmopolitan successstoryof Odessa and, by the end of the century, even Siberia.Also it was now becoming as clear to many Italian as to other West Europeantravellersthat Russia had developed into a great culturalforce in her own right. The composer Giovanni di Dominicis, for example, who spent more than two decades (i809-30) in the country, provideda substantialdiscussionof the developmentofpoetryin Russiawhich included a very earlywesternevaluationof Pushkin. The picture of Russia and its people painted by these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italians was not fundamentally different from that provided by other West European travellers. However, the book is useful in bringing to the attention of the non-Italian reader a wide range of accounts many of which will almost certainly be unfamiliar to him. The volume includes fourteen pages of illustrations and, perhaps rather surprisingly,a sixty-pageglossaryof Russiantermswhich includes a good deal of interesting informationabout theirhistoryand usage. London M. S. ANDERSON Dixon, Simon. TheModernisationof Russia I676-I825. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, I999. xvii + 267 pp. Notes. Bibliographical notes. Index. 3 7.50; ?1 395. IT is not easy to synthesize one and a half centuries of Russian history in a way that is comprehensive, balanced, but also readable and much more than just a survey of the literature. One problem is that in some cases there is a great deal of excellent literature to synthesize: this applies to Simon Dixon's chapters on culture, society and some aspects of government. In other cases there is too little available literature, and much of what does exist is, to put things politely, difficult to interpret and of patchy quality. This applies above all to questions of taxation and finance, on which the author has produced a truly heroic chapter, which will be very helpful to scholars as well as students. The book is organized thematically, which is certainly the right way to be comprehensive and to use the available literature to best effect. There are in any case a number of good chronological histories of the period already. The first chapter, on modernization theory and Russian history, holds the themes together and provides an overall structure to the argument. Simon Dixon discusses the theory and its critics with an historian's proper scepticism but also makes the sensible comment that Russia's rulers would have been surprised by some of modernization theory's detractors, since they themselves in this period seldom had much doubt that they were modernizing their empire and had no alternative to doing so if they and it were to survive in the harshly competitive world of great-power politics. Of course, Dixon is well aware of the irony that tsarist-style modernization had many implications that were ambiguously liberal and unambiguously anti-democratic. After this introduction the author devotes one chapter to government and justice, and two more to the core of any old regime polity: foreign policy, the REVIEWS 527 armed forces, taxation and finance. Particularlyas regards the latter two chapters,he fillssome majorgaps in the literatureavailableto students.These are unfashionable subjects among British and, much more, American historiansof Russia. So too is Russian economic history,which is the subject of Dixon's last chapter. This becomes evident when one comparesthe wealth of good, recent English-languageliteraturelisted at the end of the chapteron culture with its paucity where issues of power and, still more, finance and economics are concerned. That does not make these subjects any less crucial to Russia. Western academic economists in the I990S also greatly played down the role of institutions-andof the statein generatingdevelopment andprosperity.Forthis Russians paid a price. It is not in the power of historians directly to inflict damage on a society in the manner of economic advisers to governments. Nevertheless, the Anglo-Americandisdain for the statewhich was part of the heritage of the Reagan-Thatcher era, not to mention many Russians' own distaste for a despotic heritage, have to be tempered by awareness of the state'scrucialand by no means entirelynegative role in the historyof Russia...

Il Grande Orso Bianco: Viaggiatori Italiani in Russia by Giorgio Maria s> Nicolai (review)

REVIEWS 525 Nicolai, Giorgio Maria. II GrandeOrsoBianco. Viaggiatori Italianiin Russia. Biblioteca di Cultura, 582. Bulzoni, Rome, I999. 577 pp. Notes. Glossary.Illustrations.Index. L 6o,ooo. THIS is a somewhat unusual book. Its core is a collection of summaries of thirty-oneaccounts of Russiaor areaswhich laterbecame partsof the Russian Empire by Italian writers. These range in time from the friar Giovanni di Pian-Carpo, who journeyed to the Mongol court of the Great Khan at Karakorumin the I240s to thejournalist Concetto Pettinatowhose book was published in 19I4. The writersconcerned are thereforea very heterogeneous collection, and not merelyin the datesatwhich theywrote. Some of the earlier ones never set foot in Russia at all: the 'viaggatori' of the title is therefore something of a misnomer.Two of the best-knownsixteenth-centuryaccounts, those of Paulo Giovio (I525) and AlessandroGuagnini (I578) are examplesof this. Moreover, until well into the seventeenth century a good deal of this Italian interesthad a rathernarrowgeographicalfocus. Genoa's long trading connection with the Crimea meant that the area north of the Black Sea still attracteda good deal of attention,while the existence of Christiancommunities in parts of the Caucasus, coupled with the fact that many of the writers were churchmen,ensuredthatit was describedin relativedetail.Nevertheless, Nicolai is quitejustified in stressingthe importance of these Italian accounts in the firststages of the European discovery of Russia and the relativelyhigh level of Italian interestin this stilllargelyunknown country.As he points out, the fundamental account by Herberstein appeared in an Italian translation fromthe Latinseveralyearsbefore itspublication in German. He attemptsno comparisonbetween the earlyItaliandescriptionsof Russiaandthose in other languages. Nor does he elaborate on the efforts of popes and sometimes Catholic secularrulers,often using Italian emissaries,to engineer some form of wide-ranginganti-Turkishallianceof which Russiawould be partand even to bringabout a union of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. During the seventeenth century descriptionsof Russia by Italian travellers were losing much of their earlier significance; and by the age of Peter the Great, German, French and English books were clearly more important channels of informationabout this new great power. Some of the eighteenthcentury accounts summarizedhere are interestingas personal testimonies those of FrancescoLocatelli Lanzi, of the singerFilippo Balatri,of Casanova, who spent nine months in Russia in I764. But these are the reminiscencesof individualsratherthan descriptionsor evaluationsof the country as a whole. The nineteenth century sees, as in other West European countries, the emergence in Italy of the tourist travelling in Russia merely for pleasure or amusement. To this the improvement of communications and greaterease of travelwere fundamental.When in I839 Giuseppe Filippo Beruffi,who spent only a month in the country,reached it by steamshipfromLe Havre and used his visitto produce an account aimed at potential touristsand givingdetailsof the prices of rooms and meals as well as of the sights of St Petersburgand Moscow, we are clearly entering a new and different world. Moreover the view of Russia now being presented was wider and usually more favourable than ever before. As well as St Petersburg(almost always much admired by 526 SEER, 79, 3, 2001 eighteenth-century travellers)and Moscow (often seen as interesting rather than beautiful), it now became much more common for Italians to visit the Volga valley, Kiev, the new cosmopolitan successstoryof Odessa and, by the end of the century, even Siberia.Also it was now becoming as clear to many Italian as to other West Europeantravellersthat Russia had developed into a great culturalforce in her own right. The composer Giovanni di Dominicis, for example, who spent more than two decades (i809-30) in the country, provideda substantialdiscussionof the developmentofpoetryin Russiawhich included a very earlywesternevaluationof Pushkin. The picture of Russia and its people painted by these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italians was not fundamentally different from that provided by other West European travellers. However, the book is useful in bringing to the attention of the non-Italian reader a wide range of accounts many of which will almost certainly be unfamiliar to him. The volume includes fourteen pages of illustrations and, perhaps rather surprisingly,a sixty-pageglossaryof Russiantermswhich includes a good deal of interesting informationabout theirhistoryand usage. London M. S. ANDERSON Dixon, Simon. TheModernisationof Russia I676-I825. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, I999. xvii + 267 pp...

História de um país inexistente: O Pantanal entre os séculos XVI e XVIII

Based on the author’s recently completed doctoral thesis at the University of São Paulo, História de um país inexistente by Maria de Fátima Costa documents the history of the world’s largest wetland, a floodplain covering more than 39,000 square miles of southwestern Brazil and northeastern Paraguay: the Pantanal. Initially christened Laguna de los Xarayes by early Spanish explorers who mistook the seasonal floodplain for a large and fabulous lake, the region would not be conceived as the Pantanal (literally “the wetland”) until the middle of the eighteenth century with the signing of the Treaty of Madrid. Costa’s book not only documents the history of the Pantanal, but more especially describes its invenção, or rather, the manner in which early explorers “invented” the region by imposing their own images, conceptions, and designs upon it (p. 22). In examining how the Pantanal was understood by the historical actors themselves, Costa draws upon sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century travel accounts as well as the iconography of the period (including various maps and sketches that have been reproduced in full-color throughout the book). Since relatively little academic work is available on this region in either Spanish or Portuguese (much less in English), Costa has supplemented her primary sources with an assortment of regional materials, including local histories from Argentina, Paraguay, and the Brazilian states of São Paulo and Mato Grosso.The book begins with a short historical synthesis of the Pantanal, from the incursion of Spanish conquistadors at the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century when royal officials demarcated the region’s borders. Following this short historical prelude, Costa turns to the heart of her work: the travel accounts of those who journeyed through the Pantanal during the colonial period. Beginning with narratives by Ulrico Schmidl, Ruy Díaz de Guzmán, and Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Costa examines how early images of the region spread throughout Europe, influencing the cartography of the period with tales of the fabulous Laguna de los Xarayes, an earthly paradise of immense wealth. Costa then contrasts these early accounts with subsequent narratives by Luso-Brazilian explorers who describe the region in pragmatic terms as they explain how to navigate through a fantastically inhospitable wetland. According to Costa, these two contrasting perspectives would briefly coexist until the second half of the eighteenth century when surveying expeditions would establish a more realistic picture of the region.A history of both the real and the imagined, Costa’s book is well researched and gracefully written, making an important contribution to the history of a region and period that have largely been neglected in the current literature.