Travellers and Travel Writing in Context

Dr. Sandra Vlasta 

Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

 

 

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Fields of Research

The proposed project focuses on travel writing and travelling authors from the late 18th to the early 20th century. To date, texts such as Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), Goethe’s Italienische Reise (1816-29) [Italian Journey], Sand’s Un hiver à Majorque (1841) [A Winter in Majorca], Dickens’ Pictures from Italy (1846), Lewald’s Italienisches Bilderbuch (1847) [Italian Picture Book] or James’ Italian Hours (1909) have been analysed mainly within the respective literary studies, i.e. in English, German or French studies. The proposed project, on the contrary, suggests a comparative approach and a reading of the texts in their cultural, political, social, and literary context. A number of aspects will be at the centre of attention:

  1. an intertextual view, i.e. the relations between the various texts will be analysed;
  2. an imagological approach that focuses in particular on the travellers’ self-perception and their perception of other travellers;
  3. a postnational approach that reads the texts against the background of the nation state;
  4. eventually an approach that highlights the function and the reception of travel writing in the literary scene of the time.

Positioning of the Research within Mobility Discourse

  • Mobility: the authors of the texts in question are travelling writers; in their texts they describe (besides other issues) their experience of travelling.
  • Medial representation of mobility: travel writing and travelogues are a medial representation of (particular forms of) mobility, though of course one has to ask who is mobile and when, and who writes about it?
  • Aspects facilitating and resisting mobility: travel writing and travelogues negotiate the (political, cultural, social) relations between, on the one hand, the journey and travelling and, on the other hand, the home and being settled.