Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel-Writing, 1770-1840
'From an Antique Land'
- Publisher's listprice GBP 52.00
-
24 843 Ft (23 660 Ft + 5% VAT)
The price is estimated because at the time of ordering we do not know what conversion rates will apply to HUF / product currency when the book arrives. In case HUF is weaker, the price increases slightly, in case HUF is stronger, the price goes lower slightly.
- Discount 10% (cc. 2 484 Ft off)
- Discounted price 22 359 Ft (21 294 Ft + 5% VAT)
Subcribe now and take benefit of a favourable price.
Subscribe
24 843 Ft
Availability
printed on demand
Why don't you give exact delivery time?
Delivery time is estimated on our previous experiences. We give estimations only, because we order from outside Hungary, and the delivery time mainly depends on how quickly the publisher supplies the book. Faster or slower deliveries both happen, but we do our best to supply as quickly as possible.
Product details:
- Edition number New ed
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 5 February 2004
- ISBN 9780199269303
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages352 pages
- Size 233x157x18 mm
- Weight 616 g
- Language English
- Illustrations numerous halftones 0
Categories
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 credit worthiness, and the nebulous epistemological 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.
... a thoughtful and wide-ranging book ... Leask has provided an illuminating exploration of the relationship between travel writing, aesthetics and reception.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Practices and Narratives of Romantic Travel
Cycles of Accumulation, Curiosity, and Temporal Exchange
Curious Narratives and the Problem of Credit: James Bruce's 'Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile'
'Young Menmon' and Romantic Egyptomania
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
Conclusion: William Bullock's Mexico and the Reassertion of Popular Curiosity
Bibliography
Index
