Time: Mar 26, 2021 10:15 AM Warsaw
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Tourists, Wanderers, Explorers: Quests and Journeys in 18th and 19th Century British Literature and Culture
Since Homer’s Odyssey and Vergil’s Aeneid movement in space has been characterised as quest, owing to the wish of the hero either to return home or to found a new home. Pausania’s Greciae Descriptio was more in tune with the genre of the modern travel book described in Charles Batten’s classic analysis. The individual traveller, excursionist, explorer, comes in the wake of Romanticism: the Romantic traveller is also the aesthetic traveller, often engaged with negotiating his visual / psychological response to landscape, as theorised by Richard Sha. In this context, it is quite revealing to focus on Dickens both as travel book author, and the writer who gives performative value to travel in his fiction. Is Dickens finding a new democratic haven in the United States, as proposed in American Notes? Or is he back to the old home, of which he knows all the defects, bribes, cynicism, violence? Also Pictures from Italy will be examined, as a text chiming with the mass-visual culture of the XIX century. Trollope’s North America follows a different agenda, inasmuch as the writer is bent on correcting Dickens’s ”mistakes”. Thus, the borderline between travel and quest becomes less defined, owing to the ideological, spiritual and cultural luggage each traveller is loaded with. Not to dwell just on the record of these writers’ attitudes, I propose to highlight the elements of their experience that still seem valuable when examined through the lens of our cultural memory, dwelling on whatever our culture has salvaged and preserved, not only as heirloom from the past, as a picturesque curiosity revived by our mass-visual culture, but also as a stern warning, relevant to the present condition.