Romantic Travellers: Summary
Overall thesis: emergence of modern self (unanchored, self-conscious, relativized, autonomous, progressive; landscape as mirror, especially foreign landscape)
Context:
- Writing: roots in locodescriptive (political to particularized, nature as trope to intrinsic interest)
- Travel: roots in Grand Tour; historical: disruption of wars 1793-1815
- Mode of travel: coach, horseback, walking (subversive)
Picturesque: proportion, coherence, contrast, wilderness; prototypes of nature; romantic objects (e.g., gypsies; furnaces), naturalizing of ruins; class implications; ecological implications
Sublime (waterfalls, ravines, mountains, glaciers, etc.): self-disorientation; universalizing, timelessness; singularity (Burke vs. Kant)
- awe, fear, participatory, transcendence, rapture
- obscurity, threat, solitude, silence, supernatural
- alienation, trauma, the inhuman, death
Cross-cultural
- Pre-lapsarian (e.g., Swiss valleys, patriarchal); locals corrupted by tourism
- Representations of natives: hospitable, superstitious, savage
- Anti-catholicism
- The Classical vs. the modern other
Gothic fiction
- Radcliffe: landscape derivative; appreciation reflects virtue; sublime: landscape awe, fearful Gothic villain and castle
- Mary Shelley: landscape consolatory, hostile, traumatic (anti-participatory)
Women writing landscape: dramatic, anthropomorphic, affective, people-focus
Science and sublime: conflation of interests (Goethe; Spallanzani)
Ecological implications: picturesque/sublime = intrinsic properties, relationships of nature (Gilpin on nature's laws; "Power in likeness of the Arve"; etc.; Emerson's nature symbolic)
Travelling vs. touring; influence of prior travel books; disappointment, conventionalization; progress
Document created April 14th 2005