Meyer, Michael (2017): "Romantic Travel Books." Handbook of British Romanticism. Ed. Haekel, Ralf. Berlin: DeGruyter. 237 255. Handbooks of English and American Studies 6. Sammelbandbeitrag / Article in Anthology Veröffentlichte Version / published version http://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?fidaac-11858/1872 Nutzungsbedingungen: Mit der Verwendung dieses Dokuments erkennen Sie die Nutzungsbedingungen an. Terms of use: By using this particular document, you accept the terms of use stated above. Michael Meyer 12 Romantic Travel Books Abstract: Romantic travel books add introspection to observation. The shift towards sentiment, aesthetic experience, and self-reflection locates perception in the embodied observer rather than the disembodied eye, inviting phenomenology as a useful approach. Rather than only serving as ideal representatives of universalized Englishness or Britishness, Romantic travel writers tend to reveal divisions within the self and the nation. The selection of examples provides an insight into the shared quality and the differences of Romantic travelogues in terms of the authors’ class and gender, the regions travelled, the modes and genres of writing, and their functions: The Scottish physician Mungo Park explores the region of the Niger River in West Africa, constructing the self as both empirical observer and suffering hero. The aristocrat William Beckford rejects the educative function of the Grand Tour to Europe for the sake of subjective experience and the realm of his imagination. The radical writer Mary Wollstonecraft puts Scandinavia on the British map from the perspective of a sentimental and educated woman. Key Terms: Travel, Grand Tour, exploration, sentiment, picturesque, sublime, gender, phenomenology 1 Theory The introduction to fundamental problems of travel writing and a phenomenological approach to explore its encounters between the self and the other precedes an outline of the major genres of eighteenth-century travel writing and their conceptual foundations, which form the basis of a closer analysis of three Romantic travelogues. The two central problems of travel writing are the experience and the communication of travelling (see Thompson 2011, 67–71). The real encounter between the self and the other may give rise to numerous problems on the levels of experience and of understanding. The self may grow with experience according to the journey’s purpose or change in unexpected ways. Experience is only accessible to others through representation. Some experience may resist representation per se or in a coherent and comprehensible form. The travelogue blurs the boundary between fact and fiction since every travelogue reconstructs or re-creates experience in retrospect even if it claims to present a transparent record of experience (see Korte 2000, 10–11). For publication, the traveller constructs a persona and a discourse for an audience in a particular cultural context. The traveller may figure as a trustworthy narrator and dispassionate, impersonal observer who intends to give an accurate account of DOI 10.1515/9783110393408-013 238 Michael Meyer reality or as a more subjective, autobiographical persona who foregrounds sentiment, aesthetic experience, and literary style (see Thompson 2011, 83; 89). Often, the traveller assumes some kind of authority, based on knowledge, authenticity, taste, agency, power, or social status (see Thompson 2011, 117–121). In order to project an image that invites credibility and reliability, the material needs to be selected according to norms of probability rather than truth to experience, which, occasionally, might have transcended the European view of reality (see Thompson 2011, 79–80). The understanding of the other necessarily takes shape within the mental horizon of the traveller and may expand it in a hermeneutic sense. However, phenomenology addresses the gap between embodied experience and understanding in a more nuanced way, which corresponds to Romantic sensibility. For the phenomenological philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels (2011, 4), the extra-ordinary alien cannot be subsumed under a shared and familiar order, as opposed to the other who shares the self’s culture (see Meyer 2015, 168–169). Establishing the self requires positioning an alien on ‘the other side’ and establishing a fundamental asymmetry (see Waldenfels 2011, 16). The path from experience to understanding is marked by pathos, attention, ethos, response, and answer. Attention begins with pathos, which transgresses the threshold of the senses and affects the embodied self (see Waldenfels 2011, 45; 63). The contrast of the strange and the unexpected with the familiar “brings about the tension (tensio) which permeates attention (attentio)” (Waldenfels 2011, 65). The subject, Waldenfels (2011, 28) argues, “appears as patient and as respondent, […] as somebody who is literally subject to certain experiences,” and whose response does not exhaust the affection of something or somebody. In terms of the ethos, the call of the other is “an appeal that is directed at someone and a claim or pretension to something” (Waldenfels 2011, 37; emphasis in the original). “Everything that appears as something has to be described […] as something which provokes sense without being already meaningful in itself” (Waldenfels 2011, 46). One effaces the “responsive difference” (Waldenfels 2011, 36; emphasis in the original) between what one responds to and how one answers if one reduces the alien to a meaningful difference according to a familiar norm. An appropriate response to the alien requires a creative rather than a repetitive answer (see Waldenfels 2011, 41–42). The necessary asymmetry and gap between pathos and response can be revealed in the fissure between the description of an other and the process of making sense, which always lags behind the potentially disruptive event (see Waldenfels 2011, 32; 41). The singularity of the embodied self is doubled in the other; the doubling is asymmetrical because the other transcends our feelings and ideas, and we are exposed to the other’s gaze and voice, perceiving ourselves from another perspective (see Waldenfels 2011, 54–57). However, the experience of the alien already begins at home since our own body “continuously evades the reflections of consciousness” (Waldenfels 2011, 16). The experience of a stranger can result in an estrangement of experience, as the alien “might alienate us from ourselves. Hence the perpetual motivation to resist, avoid, or assimilate the alien” (Waldenfels 2011, 3). 12 Romantic Travel Books 239 Phenomenological concepts are helpful for the analysis of British travelogues in the Romantic period because these often display a tension between the refinement of sense experience in the wake of Empiricism and sentiment, and making sense of the world through a Eurocentric framework of concepts. Of course, both empirical observation and sentimental response are also Eurocentric notions of experience. The question is whether or how these forms of experience are transformed into particular forms of understanding, inflected, for example, by concepts of race, class, and gender, and represented in various genres of travel writing. 2 History: Context and Genres Travel literature is often hybrid and partakes of the genres and modes of the quest, anecdote, essay, autobiography, memoir, report, analysis, etc. (see Thompson 2011, 15–21). It has been suggested to use the term ‘travel writing’ for all literature in which travel figures prominently, and ‘travel book’ for representations of real journeys (see Thompson 2011, 23; 26–27). Travel writing dominated the long eighteenth century both in fiction and non-fiction, even if the boundaries are fuzzy. The journey forms the quintessential plot of many novels, such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) or Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), examples that can be positioned on a sliding scale between an interest in encountering – and mastering – the other and a focus on the traveller’s affective and affected self. Eighteenth-century travel books in the more restricted sense of narrating the experience of a real journey in retrospect fall into two broad categories: narratives of scientific exploration, and tours of commerce, education, or pleasure. In the following, these generic traditions will be briefly introduced in order to appreciate their Romantic revisions. Scientific exploration was informed by a desire for knowledge or “intellectual conquest” (Bridges 2002, 57) and often – more or less directly – related to capitalist ventures and imperial expansion. Scientific exploration was fostered by institutions as the Royal Society (founded in 1660) or the African Association (founded in 1788), and inspired by seminal publications, such as John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which posited experience as the quintessential path to knowledge, and Carl von Linné’s Systema Naturae (1735), which provided the means to categorize nature (see Thompson 2011, 45–47; 74). Exploration was mostly interested in geographical, botanical, and ethnographic knowledge, acquired through empirical observation, the massive collection of specimens, their detailed description, and exact classification. In order to provide a reliable account of phenomena, the traveller ideally took the position of a disembodied eye and recorded his or her observations on the spot in simple language in notebooks (see Bridges 2002, 56–57; Thompson 2011, 76–78). William Dampier’s New Voyage around the World (1697) and Thomas Cook’s Voyages serve as prime examples of scientific exploration (see Korte 2000, 37–39; 240 Michael Meyer Thompson 2011, 74–78). That said, Cook was also concerned with economic opportunity and the potential impact of Europeans on natives as well as native cultures as a foil of Europe (see Youngs 2013, 50–52). The claim to objective knowledge endorsed the ethnocentric assumption of Western superiority, occasionally modified by idealizing others as noble savages rather than denigrating them as barbarians. The postcolonial critique of the entanglement of exploration in imperialism (see Pratt 1992; Richardson and Hofkosh 1996; Bohls 2013) has been questioned recently with the view to the limitations of European hegemony, the Romantic traveller’s vulnerability, and “the instability rather than authority of their published narratives” (Leask 2002, 16). Mungo Park’s Travels into the Interior of Africa (1799) will be analysed below because it records both his research of empirical data and his suffering from numerous difficulties. Tours of Great Britain and Europe are less exotic than exploration narratives but come in more shapes. The Grand Tour was designed to provide the finishing touch to the education of the male elite in order to prepare them for eminent positions. The young men were supposed to broaden their horizon and establish social contacts with European elites. They should acquire useful knowledge, polish their manners and French in Paris and Geneva, and cultivate their taste in appreciating ancient and Renaissance art and architecture in Venice, Florence, and Rome. To this end, they travelled with experienced tutors, who, however, were not always able or willing to reign in the young men’s penchant for dissipation (see Buzard 2002, 38–42; Thompson 2011, 47; Youngs 2013, 44–46). Addison’s Letter from Italy (1703) and Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705) served as models of the Grand Tour, but his classical reading often replaces rather than informs his experience of classical and Renaissance art and architecture. In spite of its educational European agenda, the Grand Tour was not meant to change the self (see Korte 2000, 45–48) but to reproduce Englishness or Britishness. Aristocratic Grand Tours did not often find their way into print as writing for the marketplace was considered to be rather vulgar. Most tours of any length or purpose were published – and read – by middle-class authors for profit and participation in “the discussion of national affairs” (Turner 2001, 3). Middle-class writers took the opportunity to juxtapose manly, economic Britishness and effeminate, extravagant cosmopolitanism of the aristocracy as represented in William Beckford, for example (see Turner 2001, 45–46; 59–61). From the mid-1760s, middle-class domestic and continental tourism was on the rise, motivated by leisure, mobility, money to spend on travel or to earn via writing, and the desire for knowledge and aesthetic experience (see Buzard 2002, 45–47; Turner 2001, 25). The traveller’s sentimental and aesthetic experience abroad was supposed “to draw forth a corresponding response in the armchair traveler, the reader.” (Lawrence 1994, 90) Laurence Sterne’s novel A Sentimental Journey (1768) initiated real journeys and travel books, which highlighted feeling rather than reason along with a disruptive, associative, and digressive style of writing suggesting that the eccentric traveller 12 Romantic Travel Books 241 directly expressed his or her feelings (see Turner 2001, 52). Sentiment connects the traveller to his or her fellow human beings but is also self-indulgent and detracts from empirical observation. Sterne’s traveller, Yorick, has his share in misadventures and suffering, but this is often treated with irony which is lost in many Romantic travel books that dramatize the suffering travellers (see Thompson 2007, 6–8; 171) such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mungo Park. William Gilpin’s domestic travelogues and his Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape of the 1770s helped to shape an anti-utilitarian, aesthetic perception of landscape, which partly met with resentment by travel writers and reviewers more directly interested in social, economic, and political conditions of space (see Thompson 2011, 175). However, the middle-class aesthetic appropriation of space – rather than the ownership of landed property – and sentimental interest in the poor reveal an implicit political agenda (see Turner 2001, 4–5). In his first “Essay on Picturesque Beauty” (1794, 4–26), Gilpin juxtaposes the smooth beauty, elegance, and regularity of art and architecture with the irregular, rough, and rugged picturesque of nature and ruins. The satisfaction of picturesque travel, he continues in his eponymous second essay, lies less in the analytic examination and judgment of views than in the initial impression that suspends “every mental operation” and triggers “an enthusiastic sensation of pleasure” in the soul (Gilpin 1794, 49): “We rather feel, than survey it.” (1794, 50; emphasis in the original) The picturesque gaze does not see “nature for what it is, but for how it measures up to a culturally shaped aesthetic” (Youngs 2013, 43). The sketch and the imagination (re-)shape the composition of nature. In sleep, the active imagination transforms perceptions, “producing such exquisite scenes, such sublime arrangements, such brilliant lights, such depth, and clearness of shadow, as equally foil description, and every attempt of artificial colouring.” (Gilpin 1794, 54) In spite of praising picturesque nature and art, Gilpin seems to grant the highest status to the Romantic imagination that surpasses and defies representation. Gilpin’s holistic and aesthetic response to nature clearly opposes the dissecting and scientific gaze. Very few women’s travel narratives were published before 1800 since the female traveller violated two precepts of “the patriarchal ideology of the separate spheres by quitting her home” (Thompson 2011, 180) and publishing a travelogue. However, between 1770 and 1800 twenty travelogues by women were published (see Turner 2001, 127). Women’s cultural positioning does not make every female traveller an exceptional woman or every woman’s travelogue a feminist text, but accounts for the female traveller’s apologetic self-consciousness and interest in the private and everyday life of others (see Bassnett 2002, 228–230; Turner 2001, 130). Famous Romantic travel writing in verse, such as William Wordsworth’s poetic autobiography The Prelude (1805–1850; ↗ 21) and Lord Byron’s epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818), cannot be dealt with here because of limited space and other contributions on these poets in this volume. Earlier innovative prose texts selected to represent diverse genres, itineraries, personas, and experiences, have to ((Ggf. Die Jahresangaben anpassen, siehe TOC. bitte prüfen)) 242 Michael Meyer take precedence here: In his sentimental version of an exploration narrative to Africa, the Scottish physician Mungo Park shifts the focus from objective observation to embodied experience and to reflections on individual struggle, sentimental encounters, and the limits of his horizon. In his inversion of the Grand Tour to Italy, the ironic and Byronic (avant la lettre) aristocrat William Beckford rejects education as social constraint and strives for individual freedom, indulging in dissipations and subjective reveries. On her tour to Scandinavia, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft combines an interest in the politics of private life and develops a Romantic aesthetic of nature that impressed Romantic poets. 3 Analysis 3.1 Scientific exploration and sentiment: Mungo Park’s Travels into the Interior of Africa (1799) The African Association, founded by the natural historian Joseph Banks, who had sailed with James Cook around the world, sponsored Mungo Park’s exploration to provide information on people, fauna, flora, natural resources, and the course of the Niger River, and to establish European trade with West Africa. Park set out on his first journey in 1795 with two Africans, a horse, two asses, a few scientific instruments, guns, and goods, and returned with barely his life and his notes in 1796 (see Bohls 2013, 25–27). Since he could only acquire little knowledge about the Niger, he undertook a second journey from which he never returned. Research on Mungo Park tends towards three different positions (Meyer 2015, 167): Denise Brahimi (1990, 153) considers Park as a representative of reason and Enlightenment because he subjects his experience to rational reflection. For Ashton Nichols (1996, 94), Park embodies the pre-colonial Romantic, who also foreshadows Victorian imperialism. Most scholars view Park as a scientific and a sentimental traveller, who harbours some Western stereotypes but is fairly open towards Africans. They stress the reciprocity and shared humanity of Park’s encounters: The Western traveller discovers Africa, as Africans discover the West in the traveller (see Bode 2009, 20–22; Brahimi 1990, 154–156; Brantlinger 1988, 170; 173; Marsters 2000, 3; Nichols 1996, 94–95; 97; 100; Pratt 1992, 75; 80; Thompson 2005, 568–571). From a phenomenological perspective, it becomes apparent that both the anti-hero’s sentimental fellow-feeling and his empirical observation are embodied and tend towards universalism and abstraction at the same time. In addition, both sentiment and science tend to efface the asymmetry and liminality of embodied intercultural experience, which also surfaces in Park’s text. The framing of Park’s Travels into the Interior of Africa in the preface, the first chapter, and the scientific appendix, reveals the relationship between the body and 12 Romantic Travel Books 243 knowledge. The mission meant turning geographical and ethnographic information to advantage for the British, “opening to their ambition and industry new sources of wealth, and new channels of commerce” (Park 1954, 2). The lengthy appendix (in Marster’s edition), confirms Park’s mission as it lists economic information and presents Major Rennell’s “Geographic Illustrations” and map of the itinerary. The mission and the map rely on, but efface, the explorer’s embodied experience. Park claims to have a healthy and resilient, implicitly masculine, body able to persevere in adverse circumstances. However, his experience contradicts his optimism at the very beginning of his journey: “I imprudently exposed myself to the night dew, in observing the eclipse of the moon, with a view to determine the longitude of the place; the next day I found myself attacked by a smart fever and delirium” (Park 1954, 6). Park implicitly disclaims any Romantic interest in the moon and fashions himself as a detached observer, but his body puts him into place as a stranger. Ironically, Park as a medical doctor diagnoses the fever and the delirium as an alien aggression, ignoring that the fever and the delirium are his own psychosomatic response. The observation cannot be had without the embodied observer. The narrative reveals a gap between the physician’s answer and his embodied response, his self-image as a detached agent and a suffering patient (see Meyer 2015, 170). In other words, this encounter of the other alienates Park from himself. Repeatedly, Park struggles to come to terms with his experience of the other. During his prolonged convalescence, Park suffers from the “suffocating heats,” the terror of “unimaginable” sounds at night: “a dismal concert, interrupted only by the roar of such tremendous thunder as no person can form a conception of but those who have heard it” (Park 1954, 7). The phenomenological description registers the impact of the heat and sounds (pathos, response) as well as the inadequate verbal representation of the alien/ating experience (answer). Mary Louise Pratt (1992, 205) identifies the trope of the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” as a leitmotif of imperial exploration narratives, but she ignores Park’s problems with this attitude and vistas. Park’s panoramic prospects are often qualified by visual impairments, existential threats, and the natives’ reversal of the explorer’s gaze. Instead of being able to concentrate on the ‘pure’ perception of the disembodied eye, Park becomes aware of the bare existence of his embodied “I”: Often, the lonely traveller is frustrated due to the lack of a vantage point or the uniformity of the landscape, which offers no landmarks and boundaries to the Western eye. If Park climbs a tree or a hill, he often cannot discern anything of value because the unfamiliar space offers neither aesthetic pleasure, nor orientation, nor the bare necessities of survival: “Their country itself, being an immense level, and very generally covered with woods, presents a tiresome and gloomy uniformity to the eye” (Park 1954, 7). The heat and hunger leave him disoriented, alienated both from the country and his own self, being deprived of control over the view and his body (see Meyer 2015, 170–171). Park’s ethnographic investigation is frequently inverted as others closely inspect the self as a stranger. The embodied self is subject to the gaze of the other as well as 244 Michael Meyer to expropriation and incarceration. Pratt argues that reciprocity marks these visual exchanges (1992, 81), but Park is usually turned into a victim (see Bode 209, 169). As an ‘extra-ordinary’ stranger, the explorer is not protected by local customs. Park acknowledges his own otherness when he begs them to excuse his “inexperience and ignorance” (Park 1954, 51). The traveller becomes a spectacle because as a white man and an infidel he is perceived as an object of fear or scorn, a target of abuse and robbery (Park 1954, 62; 64; 90; 92–95; 97). As a white stranger and Christian anti-hero, who loses everything except his life, faith, and hat (see Bode 2009, 168), Park finds himself in the West African social order as a liminal outsider in need of charity. He feels sympathy for black and animist African slaves (Park 1954, 273), but is dependent upon an Arab Muslim slave trader’s hospitality and protection, which he promises to reward with “the value of one prime slave” (Park 1954, 195) upon his return to the coast. Thus, Park’s survival is intricately related to the slave trade (see Bohls 2013, 27): He buys his own life at the expense of another’s (or his/her value in goods; see Meyer 2015, 172–177). The traveller cannot simply return to his old self and life at the coast or at home. Park is alienated from Western culture because he cannot answer all of a Muslim slave trader’s questions concerning the use of Western articles. Park looks so strange that the African mistress of a white man takes him for a Moor. However, after a shave, Park loses his masculinity with his beard in the eyes of the African trader. The traveller suffers from health problems and nightmares of Africa even when he is back in Scotland (Park 1954, 281) – Park’s psychosomatic response to the other kept haunting him. He could no longer feel at home in Scotland, and did not have the answer to the question of the exact course of the Niger, two motives that drove him back to Africa, never to return (see Meyer 2015, 177–178). In spite of the Romantic transformation of the exploration narrative that complicates the traveller’s position, his suffering dovetails nicely with the benevolence of the civilizing mission that legitimizes British exploration, trade, and imperialism (see Thompson 2007, 180–181). 3.2 The inverted Grand Tour: William Beckford’s Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents; in a Series of Letters from Various Parts of Europe (1783) William Beckford’s father, the Mayor of London, died when he was ten, leaving him a large fortune, Fonthill estate, and Jamaican plantations that made him one of the richest heirs in Britain. However, Beckford fashions himself as the extra-ordinary other rather than the privileged representative of his society. He resents the idea of being formed into a “charming Gentleman,” who learns “to despise poetry and venerable Antiquity, murder Taste, abhor imagination, detest all the charms of Eloquence unless capable of mathematical Demonstration, and more than all to be vigorously incredulous, […] to smell of the stable, swear, talk bawdy, eat roast beef, drink, speak 12 Romantic Travel Books 245 bad French, go to the Lyons, and come back with manly disorders” (qtd. in Gemmett 1977, 38). Beckford is “self-consciously, almost defiantly, aristocratic” and disinterested in economic and political affairs (see Turner 2001, 46–47): “The news of the World affects me not half so much as the chirping of a sparrow, or the rustling of withered leaves […]. Ambition at present lies dormant in my breast and far from envying the triumphs of others, I exult in my happy tho’ inglorious leisure.” (qtd. in Fothergill 1979, 77). However, Beckford also defies sexual and aristocratic conventions, and, in a Romantic way, refuses to share adult reality and common sense. His departure for his Grand Tour to Italy at the age of twenty was precipitated by his love affair with his cousin’s wife Louisa Beckford, who was supposed to distract him from his passion for the eleven-year-old William Courtenay (see Chapman 1972, xx–xxiii). The tour from 1780–1781 did not achieve its immediate moral goal. At his coming of age during his tour he writes: The World grows more and more irksome to me every Day, […] I am now approaching the Age when the World in general expect me to lay aside my dreams, abandon my soft illusion and start into public life. How greatly are they deceived and how firmly am I resolved to be a child forever! (qtd. in Gemmett 1977, 95–96). In summer 1781 he rewrote his travel notes into fictionalized letters under the influence of his intense Oriental reading at the time (see Chapman 1972, xxiv; Gemmett 1977, 67). His family decided that the travel letters were not fit to be published since they might harm Beckford’s reputation, future marriage, and political career. He destroyed almost all of the 500 printed copies in 1783, and revised the material for publication under the title of Italy: With Sketches of Spain and Portugal in 1834 (see Gemmett 1977, 72–74). Beckford’s youthful rebellion is more than merely eccentric and therefore a proof of English liberty (see Turner 2001, 43; 47). Beckford reverses the tenets of the Grand Tour because he replaces observation by subjective visions and introspection (see Kalb 1981, 119; 135; Redford 1996, 105–107). This “essentially Romantic” expression (Korte 2000, 58) explores the gap between subjective needs and the limitations of reality (see Kalb 1981, 135). The very beginning of Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents (1972) refuses to meet any expectations of utilitarian observation: Shall I tell you my dreams? – To give an account of my time, is doing, I assure you, but little better. Never did there exist a more ideal being. A frequent mist hovers before my eyes, and, through its medium, I see objects so faint and hazy, that both their colours and forms are apt to delude me. This is a rare confession, say the wise, for a traveller to make: pretty accounts will such a one give of outlandish countries. (Beckford 1972, 1) Beckford promises not to deliver a single “remark,” a fact being worthy of notice, but rather “purblind observations” and “a visionary way of gazing” (1972, 2). The Roman- 246 Michael Meyer tic traveller omits to mention his tutor as the companion of his journey and fashions himself as a lonely, melancholic individual, who prefers to swap the reality of his journey for his dream of home: “All through Kent did I doze as usual […] How often did I try to wish away the reality of my separation from those I love, and attempt to persuade myself it was but a dream” (Beckford 1972, 1–3). In a cathedral, he has a vision of the itinerary of the Grand Tour as a skeleton or corpse, grotesquely inverting the function of the Grand Tour as an initiation rite into adult life. The visit to the cathedral establishes the Gothic leitmotif of the traveller in search of twilight, which gives rise to visions that reflect his imagination (see Kalb 1981, 122). In spite of his initial resistance to the journey, Beckford is eager to reach Italy, or rather, the classic Italy of his mind, “where my spirit had so long taken up its abode” (1972, 15). Beckford’s visionary Italy is characterized by the juxtaposition of the sublime and the picturesque in landscape and in architecture (see Redford 1996, 108). He has to traverse a rocky pass that is guarded by a terrifying fortress before he descends into the picturesque country near the rampart of Bassano, “whose classic appearance recalled the memory of former times, and answered exactly the ideas I had pictured to myself of Italian edifices” (Beckford 1972, 75). Here, Beckford’s depiction of Italy follows stereotypical preconceptions, such as crossing the threshold between Brixen and Bolzano to the promised land that evokes the garden of Eden. On the other hand, his response transcends ready-made answers, such as chancing upon unknown butterflies. This fact implies that he masters the relevant discourse of classification. However, he refuses to kill and collect the insects. He prefers the amateur’s pleasure to the expert’s discipline, refusing to gain credit and authority for his discovery. The unclassified butterfly stands for the native right to life and freedom against death and science, serving as a metaphor for his own desire to be free. In the same vein, Beckford avoids antiquarian lectures and prefers to ramble on his own in search of experience beyond the prescribed neo-classical education (see Redford 1996, 107; Korte 2000, 59–60). He is fascinated by traces of the Orient in Italy, for example in the “Mosque of St. Mark” with its “Greek and barbarian [Egyptian, MM] elements”: the noble irregularity of these imperial piles, delighted me beyond idea; and I was sorry to be forced to abandon them so soon, especially as the twilight, which bats and owls love not better than I do, enlarged every portico, lengthened every colonnade, and increased the dimensions of the whole, just as imagination desired. (Beckford 1972, 89) Beckford’s vision of the Oriental is stimulated by empathy, desire, and imagination (see Said 1994, 118–119). In Venice, he seems to relish the Babylon of voices and languages in quarters frequented by Orientals (Beckford 1972, 269). The inversion of night and day pleases him. Like the Italian aristocrats, he spends the day in idleness and sleep, and gets up for the night to enjoy feasting and luxury. With surprise, he notices how Venetian nights make some Italians leave their professional identities 12 Romantic Travel Books 247 behind in the labyrinth of deception, affairs, and decadence (Beckford 1972, 90–93). However, his enthusiasm about nightly dissipation in the casinos is dampened due to the languor and decadence he deplores. For all his fascination with the ‘Oriental’ transgression of social conventions, Beckford stops half-way between the Occident and the Orient, presenting himself as a liminal being who almost becomes the other, but not quite because his own inactivity pretends to more than mere idleness since it generates reveries and dreams that inspire his writing. In Rome, Beckford is not interested in St. Peter’s architecture or Christian heritage. He imagines creating an oriental pleasure dome in St. Peter’s as a perfect heterotopia that suspends change and time (Beckford 1972, 187–189). He would shade the windows with transparent yellow silk to give the illusion of perpetual summer, and create artificial firmaments with numerous tapers in lanterns as the Chinese emperor Ki did: “I should like of all things to immure myself, after his example, with those I love; forget the divisions of time, have a moon at command, and a theatrical sun to rise and set, at pleasure” (Beckford 1972, 188). His own “decadent vision of suspended time and blasphemous pleasure undermines his criticism of the degenerate Venetians” (Meyer 2003, 81). In spite of his fascination with Italian landscape, art and life, the traveller reasserts his Englishness in the last letter of his first excursion (Beckford 1972, 234). Beckford considers the contemporary Italians as the Orientals of the Occident. The English represent the Occident since they reproduce the classical tradition by education in Greek and Roman literature. The moralizing and patriotic conclusion contains Beckford’s Orientalized persona in the travelogue (see Meyer 2003, 81). His retraction may have been a concession to his family, but it does not cancel his ironic inversion of the Grand Tour as a journey into his imagination. 3.3 Female travel: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) Mary Wollstonecraft was raised in a lower middle-class family in decline, worked as a servant, then set up a school for girls, and served as a governess for an aristocratic Irish family before she became a writer for the radical Analytical Review. Her most famous publication before her travelogue was the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1989 [1792]) (↗ 1 Political and Social History c. 1780–1832). Here, Wollstonecraft (1989, 76) complains that in spite of the subordination of bodily power to moral and mental power in civilized societies, men tend to ignore women’s minds and consider them primarily as bodily subjects, and women turn themselves into “insignificant objects of desire” in order to attract prospective husbands and acquire his social status. She demanded the liberation of women from male domination “in a physical, moral, and civil sense” (Wollstonecraft 1989, 266), a perspective that resurfaces in her travelogue. In 1794, Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth to a daughter from her lover Gilbert Imlay, 248 Michael Meyer an American trader she met in Paris, where she witnessed the French Revolution turning into the Reign of Terror. In 1795, she went on a business trip to Scandinavia on behalf of her meanwhile alienated lover in order to retrieve Imlay’s cargo of silver that had disappeared with the captain and the ship. Imlay authorized her to represent his legal and economic interest as Mary ‘Imlay’, which conveniently moved her away from him, whereas she tried to heal the rift between them and prove herself a valuable partner (see Nyström 1980, 18; Hirakura 2011, 29). Her travelogue does not report any details of her negotiations because Imlay’s trade with France violated the British blockade against the French, incurring the risk of capital punishment, and because of the failure of her mission and her relationship (see Nyström 1980, 20–31; Buus 2001, 241). Nevertheless, the publication of the travel letters helped her secure a livelihood of her own and won the favour of her husband to be, William Godwin. Wollstonecraft’s travelogue impressed her contemporaries, among them notable Romantics because here a sentimental and lonely female traveller discovers the nearly unknown picturesque and sublime north of Europe (see Lawrence 1994, 76). Some scholars locate this travel book in the tradition of Enlightenment because the writer takes herself to be the model of civilized society (see Granqvist 1997) or as a herald of Romanticism as the book is more of an associative, literary autobiography that prefigures Wordsworth’s “search of a reintegration of self, nature, and society” (Myers 1979, 166). Most critics agree that the epistolary travelogue employs both enlightened and Romantic concepts and draws on both the philosophical and the sentimental tradition (see Buus 2001; Favret 1993; Lawrence 1994). Gender plays an important part in criticism with respect to Wollstonecraft’s female aesthetics of nature (see Bohls 1995; Mergenthal 2003; Mills 2000), her comments on economy and politics (see Hust 1996; Chaney 2004; Hirakura 2011; Pollock 2011), or the connection between the two (see Lawrence 1994; Turner 2001; Whale 1995). Framing the travel account in the letters by an Advertisement and an appendix pursues a double agenda concerning the subject-position and the purpose of the travelogue (see Whale 1995, 178). The Advertisement of Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence apologizes for employing the first person (see Mergenthal 2003, 95) but stresses the right of an egotist “to talk of himself when he can win on our attention by acquiring our affection” (Wollstonecraft 1989b, 241), privileging the sentimental relationship to the reader, who is supposed to be moved in turn (see Favret 2002, 225–226). Detached, systematic observation is discarded for the sake of subjective perception and expression, “relating the effect different objects had produced on my mind and feelings, whilst the impression was still fresh,” without restraining the flow of “remarks and reflections” in “desultory letters” (Wollstonecraft 1989b, 241; emphasis mine). The episodic travels overlap with intimate and associative memoirs (see Myers 1979, 181). In addition, Wollstonecraft also claims to deliver a “just description” of “what I saw” (Wollstonecraft 1989b, 241), trying to establish credibility. The appendix with some statistical data on Norway adds to, but also qualifies, the traveller’s powers of observation because she admits that private business and cares 12 Romantic Travel Books 249 deflected her attention from inquiry. However, she downplays this disadvantage as in the long perspective of the Enlightened, “humane investigator,” the poverty and despotism in Sweden and Denmark have gradually “vanished before the meliorating manners of Europe.” (i.e. England and France, Wollstonecraft 1989b, 346) Here, the generalizing, more or less preconceived answer of expected progress towards Enlightenment (see Granqvist 1997, 16) is supposed to compensate for a lack of sufficient attention. In the first and the last of her letters, the traveller expresses her bodily and mental exhaustion due to the tiresome journey and disappointed hope (in healing her broken relationship with Imlay) that interfere with her observation and communication of information, reiterating the clash between her sentiment and her aim of appropriate observation (Wollstonecraft 1989b, 243; 345). However, she omits an accident from the travelogue at the beginning of her journey, which she only reports in her Letters to Imlay, presenting herself as a suffering woman: “I fell, without any previous warning, senseless on the rocks – and how I escaped with life I can scarcely guess. I was in stupor for a quarter of an hour; the suffusion of blood at last restored me to my senses – the contusion is great, and my brain confused.” (Wollstonecraft 1989, 416) The pathos of her inexplicable experience cannot be translated into a meaningful answer. She conspicuously avoids the word ‘swooning’ and thus the association with female weakness. In her public letters, she counters the image of the suffering traveller with that of a caring mother and an empowered woman in the shape of a keen observer and rhetorically persuasive interlocutor, who asks “men’s questions” – in the eyes of a man, implicitly validating herself as an extra-ordinary woman in opposition to housewives (Wollstonecraft 1989b, 248; emphasis in the original; see Mergenthal 2003, 96). The letters display “discursive clashes […] between the positions of anthropological observer and feminist social critic, empirical observer and subjective wanderer, and national and universalist theories of history and politics” (Turner 2001, 230). Wollstonecraft represses her frequent commercial interactions in order to fashion herself primarily as a solitary wanderer in search of the picturesque and a singular Promethean persona representing progress (see Buus 2001, 248–254). However, while she mostly omits her personal business contacts, she does not avoid the topic of economy and politics in general: in addition to her self-image as a suffering woman, she constructs “a masculine mode of subjectivity […], a ‘universal’ kind of self, the subject of enlightened mercantile capitalism” that criticizes “calculation and instrumental rationality as the basis for social and economic organization” related to the sublime (Pollock 2011, 194–195). The traveller frequently wavers between hope in Enlightened progress and Romantic bouts of “melancholy and even misanthropy” (Wollstonecraft 1989b, 248) caused by disappointment with the world and friends, which is only countered by sympathy (see also Wollstonecraft 1989b, 246–247): 250 Michael Meyer I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind; – I was alone, till some involuntary sympathetic emotion, like the attraction of adhesion, made me feel that I was still a part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever myself (Wollstonecraft 1989b, 249). Being saved from alienation in human society through the sympathetic bond to a quasi-organic whole configures a core Romantic – and gendered – experience (see Sørensen 2003, 100–106): Nature is the nurse of sentiment, – the true source of taste; yet what misery, as well as rapture, is produced by a quick perception of the beautiful and sublime, when it is exercised in observing animated nature, when every beauteous feeling and emotion excites responsive sympathy, and the harmonized soul sinks into melancholy, or rises to extasy (Wollstonecraft 1989b, 271). She continues with praising the power of the imagination to preserve moments of sensation or pathos for future solace, a concept that prefigures Wordsworth’s spots of time: When a warm heart has received strong impressions, they are not to be effaced. Emotions become sentiments; and the imagination renders even transient sensations permanent by fondly retracing them. I cannot, without a thrill of delight, recollect views I have seen, which are not to be forgotten, – nor looks I have felt in every nerve which I shall never more meet. (Wollstonecraft 1989b, 271) Human relations and sentiments of love and loss are closely connected to the perception – and imaginative recall – of sublime nature (see Lawrence 1994, 96; Mills 2000, 29). “Like Coleridge and Wordsworth,” Lawrence writes, “Wollstonecraft treats aesthetic response as moral and social.” (1994, 80) She employs strategies of both the ‘masculine sublime’ that ultimately empowers the observer, who turns from an overwhelmed self into a transcendent ego detached from the object of observation, and the ‘feminine sublime’, which grants agency to nature and establishes a relational self, sometimes even immersing the self in picturesque or sublime landscape (see Mills 2000, 20–22; 28; 31): Every thing seemed to harmonize in tranquility […]. With what ineffable pleasure have I not gazed – and gazed again, losing my breath through my eyes – my very soul diffused itself in the scene – and seeming to become all senses, gilded in the scarcely-agitated waves, melted in the freshening breeze, or taking its flight with fairy wing, to the misty mountains which bounded the prospect, fancy tript over new lawns, more beautiful even than the lovely slopes on the winding shore before me. – I pause, again breathless, to trace, with renewed delight, sentiments which entranced me, when, turning my humid eyes from the expanse below to the vault above, my sight pierced the fleecy clouds that softened the azure brightness; and, imperceptibly recalling the reveries of childhood, I bowed before the awful throne of my Creator, whilst I rested on its footstool. (Wollstonecraft 1989b, 280) 12 Romantic Travel Books 251 A proto-Wordsworthian sense of communion pervades this embodied experience of the picturesque and the sublime, in which sight drifts into fancy and reveries. In a veritable moment of vision, she takes into account the gap between the visual, embodied response in the past (breathless gaze, wet eyes), its present re-experience of emotions in imaginative and pleasant recollection (“pause, again breathless, to trace, with renewed delight, sentiments”), and her past recollection of childhood. The Trollhatten cascades offer another sublime moment that anticipates Wordsworth and Coleridge (Favret 1993, 104): “I gazed I know not how long, stunned with the noise; and growing giddy with only looking at the never-ceasing tumultuous motion, I listened, scarcely conscious where I was” (Wollstonecraft 1989b, 316). She anticipates the “masculine aesthetic of the Romantic sublime” (Whale 1995, 181; see Granqvist 1997, 22) but sometimes “extends beyond the conventional reaction of sublime reverie” in “its sense of dislocation and disappointment” (Whale 1995, 182). In the cascades, “sterility itself reigned with dreary / grandeur”: the conflux of various cataracts, rushing from different falls, struggling with the huge masses of rock, and rebounding from the profound cavities […]. A little island stood in the midst, covered with firs, which, by dividing the torrent, rendered it more picturesque; one half appearing to issue from a dark cavern, that fancy might easily imagine a vast fountain, throwing up its waters from the very centre of the earth. (Wollstonecraft 1989b, 316) Wollstonecraft’s Romantic response to northern nature and landscape complements her alienation from home. Hope in universal progress clashes with disappointment in her personal relationship (see Lawrence 1994, 82–84; Turner 2001, 234–236): “The possibilities of homecoming and of national belonging are unavailable to the abandoned and deracinated subject.” (Turner 2001, 237) 4 Conclusion Romantic travel writers responded to the scientific exploration narrative and the Grand Tour as well as to the material, social, and mental conditions of their time. There is no radical shift from the ‘objective’ observer in the tradition of Enlightened empiricism towards a Romantic subject interested in aesthetic perception and self-development. Romantic travel writers often combined observation and introspection, as well as analytic and literary modes of writing (Thompson 2011, 117–118). However, Romantic travellers tended to reflect more on the qualities and problems of embodied experience, social relationships, and introspection than their predecessors. 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A New Voyage around the World: Describing Particularly the Isthmus of America, Several Coasts and Islands in the West Indies, the Isles of Cape Verd, the Passage by Terra del Fuego, the South Sea Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico, the Isle of Guam, one of the Ladrones, Mindanao, and other Philippine and East-India Islands near Cambodia, China, Formosa, Luconia, Celebes &c., New Holland, Sumatra, Nicobar isles, the Cape of Good Hope, and Santa Hellena. 2nd ed. London: Knapton, 1697. Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, 12 Romantic Travel Books 253 wherein all the Men perished but himself. With an Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself. 3 vols. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1927. Ebert, A. “I May Be a Little Partial (‘Je Suis Peut-Etre Un Peu Partiale’). Constructions D’images Nationales de Soi et Des Autres Dans Les Letters Writing during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark de Mary Wollstonecraft.” Revue Germanique Internationale 2001.16 (2001): 27–46. Favret, Mary A. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Favret, Mary A. “Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark: traveling with Mary Wollstonecraft.” The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Claudia L. Johnson. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 209–227. Fothergill, Brian. Beckford of Fonthill. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979. Gemmett, Robert J. William Beckford. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Gilpin, William. Observations on the River Wye: And Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770. London: Blamire in the Strand, 1782. Gilpin, William. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: To which is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting. Second edition. By William Gilpin, A. M. Prebendary of Salisbury; and Vicar of Boldre in New-Forest, Near Lymington. London: Blamire in the Strand, 1794. Granqvist, Raoul. “Her Imperial Eyes: A Reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.” Moderna Sprak 91.1 (1997): 16–24. Hirakura, Natsuko. “The Portrait of a Family: Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden.” Romantic Explorations. Ed. Michael Meyer. Trier: WVT, 2011. 229–238. Hust, K. “In Suspect Terrain: Mary Wollstonecraft Confronts Mother Nature in Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.” Women’s Studies 25 (1996): 483–505. Kalb, Gertrud. Bildungsreise und literarischer Reisebericht. Studien zur englischen Reiseliteratur (1700–1850). Nürnberg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1981. Korte, Barbara. English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Lawrence, Karen R. Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Leask, Nigel. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Linné, Carl von. Systema Naturae. 2 vols. Holmiae: Salvius, 1758–1759. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Marsters, Kate Ferguson. “Introduction.” Mungo Park. Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. Ed. Kate Ferguson Marsters. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 1–28. Mergenthal, Silvia. “In Search of the Feminine Sublime: Women Travel Writers of the Romantic Period.” Alternative Romanticisms. Proceedings of the Grimma Conference 2001. Ed. Werner Huber and Marie-Luise Egbert. Essen: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 2003. 89–98. Meyer, Michael. “William Beckford’s Real and Imaginary Travels.” Alternative Romanticisms. Proceedings of the Grimma Conference 2001. Ed. Werner Huber and Marie-Luise Egbert. Essen: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 2003. 77–88. Meyer, Michael. “Mungo Park in Africa: The Traveler’s Embodied Self at Risk.” Romantic Bodyscapes. Ed. Gerold Sedlmayr. Trier: WVT, 2015. 167–180. 254 Michael Meyer Mills, Sara. “Written on the landscape: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.” Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775–1844. Ed. Amanda Gilroy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. 19–34. Moskal, Jeanne. “The Picturesque and the Affectionate in Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.” Modern Language Quarterly 52 (1991): 263–294. Myers, Mitzi. “Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark: Towards Romantic Autobiography.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 8 (1979): 165–185. Nichols, Ashton. “Mumbo Jumbo: Mungo Park and the Rhetoric of Romantic Africa.” Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834. Ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 93–113. Nyström, Per. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian Journey. Acta Regiae Societatis scientiarum et litterarum Gothoburgensis Humaniora 17. Göteborg: Kungl. Vetenskaps- och VitterhetsSamhället, 1980. Park, Mungo. Travels into the Interior of Africa. London: Dent, 1954 [1799]. Pollock, Anthony. “Aesthetic Economies of Immasculation – Capitalism and Gender in Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 52.2 (2011): 193–211. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Redford, Bruce. Venice and the Grand Tour. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. Richardson, Alan, and Sonia Hofkosh, ed. Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Shaffer, Elinor. “William Beckford in Venice, Liminal City: The Pavilion and the Interminable Staircase.” Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice. Ed. Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. 73–88. Sørensen, Anne S. “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Politics of the Picturesque.” Mary Wollstonecraft’s Journey to Scandinavia: Essays. Ed. Anka Ryall and Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2003. 93–114. Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal. Ed. Melvyn New. Gainesville, Fla., et al.: Florida University Press, 2002. Thompson, Carl. “Travel Writing.” Romanticism. Ed. Nicholas Roe. An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 555–573. Thompson, Carl. The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Thompson, Carl. Travel Writing. The New Critical Idiom. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Turner, Katherine. British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800: Authorship, Gender, and National Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts. Trans. Alexander Kozin and Tanja Stähler. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Whale, John. “Death in the Face of Nature: Self, Society and Body in Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.” Romanticism 1.2 (1995): 177–192. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (ed.). The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Vol. 5. London: William Pickering, 1989a. 65–266. Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (ed.).The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Vol. 6. London: William Pickering, 1989b. 237–348. Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters to Gilbert Imlay. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (ed.). The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Vol. 6. London: William Pickering, 1989c. 365–438. 12 Romantic Travel Books 255 Youngs, Tim. The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 5.2 Further reading Almeida, Hermione de, and George H. Gilpin. Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Bohls, Elizabeth A. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Bohls, Elizabeth A., and Ian Duncan, eds. Travel Writing 1700–1830: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Chard, Chloe. Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Colley, Linda. Captives. Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850. London: Cape, 2002. Jarvis, Robin. Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1997. Ryall, Anka, and Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström, eds. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Journey to Scandinavia: Essays. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2003. Stafford, Barbara Maria. Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1984. Teltscher, Kate. India Inscribed. European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. Wyatt, John F. Wordsworth’s Poems of Travel, 1819–42: “such sweet wayfaring.” Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. Youngs, Tim, and Charles Forsdick, eds. Travel Writing: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 2012.