Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel-Writing, 1770-1840
'From an Antique Land'
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 10 January 2002
- ISBN 9780199247004
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages348 pages
- Size 236x163x25 mm
- Weight 644 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 19 halftone engravings 0
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Short description:
The first book of its kind to study the Romantic obsession with the 'antique lands' of Ethiopia, Egypt, India, and Mexico, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing is an important contribution to the recent wave of interest in exotic travel writing. Drawing generously on both original texts and modern scholarship in literature, history, geography, and anthropology, it focuses on the unstable discourse of 'curiosity' to offer an important reformulation of the relations between literature, aesthetics, and colonialism in the period.
MoreLong description:
The decades between 1770 and 1840 are rich in exotic accounts of the ruin-strewn landscapes of Ethiopia, Egypt, India, and Mexico. Yet it is a field which has been neglected by scholars and which - unjustifiably - remains outside the literary canon. In this pioneering book, Nigel Leask studies the Romantic obsession with these 'antique lands', drawing generously on a wide range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel books, as well as on recent scholarship in literature, history, geography, and anthropology. Viewing the texts primarily as literary works rather than 'transparent' adventure stories or documentary sources, he sets out to challenge the tendency in modern academic work to overemphasize the authoritative character of colonial discourse. Instead, he addresses the relationship between narrative, aesthetics, and colonialism through the unstable discourse of antiquarianism, exploring the effects of problems of creditworthiness, and the nebulous epistemologicial claims of 'curiosity' (a leitmotif of the accounts studied here), on the contemporary status of travel writing.
Attentive to the often divergent idioms of elite and popular exoticism, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing plots the transformation of the travelogue through the period, as the baroque particularism of curiosity was challenged by picturesque aesthetics, systematic 'geographical narrative', and the emergence of a 'transcendental self' axiomatic to Romantic culture. In so doing it offers an important reformulation of the relations between literature, aesthetics, and empire in the late Enlightenment and Romantic periods.
... addresses the intersections between space and time more fully than any other recent book on Romantic travel ... Leask's detailed study contributes valuably to the body of criticism on Romantic travel literature and, more broadly, to criticism on Romantic conceptions of place and space.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Practices and Narratives of Romantic Travel
Cycles of Accumulation, Curiosity, and Temporal Exchange
Curious Narratives and the Problem of Creidt: James Bruce's 'Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile'
'Young Menmon' and Romantic Egyptomania: pt. 1 Shelley's 'Ozymandias' and Napoleon's Savants; pt. 2 Belzoni, Burckhardt, and the 'Rape of the Nile'
Indian Travel Writing and the Imperial Picturesque
Domesticating Distance: Three Women Travel Writers in British India
Alexander von Humboldt and the Romantic Imagination of America (the Impossibility of Personal Narrative)
Conclusion: William Bullock's Mexico and the Reassertion of Popular Curiosity
Bibliography
Index
