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Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel-Writing, 1770-1840

'From an Antique Land'

Nigel Leask author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:10th Jan '02

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Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel-Writing, 1770-1840 cover

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. * European Romantic Review *
At every turn, this book admirably resists overgeneralization and reductionism. * European Romantic Review *
This is a timely, engrossing, and important revisionary account of Romantic period travel writing; for textual/theoretical journeying, it is the most accomplished ars apodemica to date. * The Byron Journal *
Leask's approach is characterized by scrupulous attention to detail, ingenuity, and subtlety. * The Byron Journal *
Leask ranges more widely than any of his predecessors ... Leask admirably rises to the challenge by widening his scrutiny beyond works composed in English ... an admirable and original synthesis of much rarely explored travel material. * Studies in Travel Writing *
Wide-ranging and discriminating ... Leask's book is refreshingly comparative, and boldly breaks new ground ... He unsettles a number of orthodoxies which have cramped our understanding of what happened when Western Europeans travelled outside the boundaries of their own civilization. * David Womersley, Times Literary Supplement *

ISBN: 9780199247004

Dimensions: 236mm x 163mm x 25mm

Weight: 644g

348 pages