Packaging the Grand Tour: German Women Authors Write Italy, 1791–1874 (original) (raw)
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Around 1800, the travel narrative bifurcated into two distinct traditions: the first-person travel essay or travel memoir and the travel guidebook. The article compares Goethe’s Italian Journey and Mariana Starke’s Letters from Italy as two texts that have shaped the discourse on how travel differs from tourism, how sights should be seen, and what accounts for an authentic travel experience. The article shows how both writers created the ‘edited’ tour that no longer focused on everything that could be seen. Starke created a truncated, but unified body of knowledge for her readers that became the blueprint for future guidebooks, while Goethe defined a unified mode of perception that still defines the travel memoir today. Keywords travel, tourism, cultural identity, Goethe’s Italienische Reise, Mariana Starke, travel narratives
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, 2016
This essay focuses on the interaction between the publication of female travel writing about the South of Italy in non-feminist 19th century British periodicals, and the circulation of a transgressive model of femininity centred on the concepts of mobility, vitality and visibility. The choice of Southern Italy, an anti-tourist destination that since the era of the Grand Tour had been considered dangerous for men, let alone for women, magnifies female heroic attitudes and contaminates female conventional domestic purity enhancing the concept of an unfixed female identity. The publication of a travelogue, a mostly non-fictional genre, on an innovative and reactive medium, was a manifest act of transgression with respect to fixed social order, which gave visibility and credibility to a different model of femininity, an anti-Angel icon. A new form of narration displays adventurous women able to cross the private sphere and to write/publish authentic accounts of their transitional experience in a public, male-dominated sphere.
This essay examines one of the first and foremost works written by British women travel writers to eighteenth-century Italy, Lady Anna Riggs Miller’s Letters from Italy (1776). It analyses Miller’s travel account in both literary and linguistic perspectives, focusing on the strategic modes the traveller deployed to fashion an identity and to display her cultural capital. By adopting specific narrative, stylistic and rhetorical techniques, and simultaneously professing spontaneity and modesty, Miller flaunted connoisseurship and authority. In this way, she managed to achieve her professional and social objectives. Linguistically speaking, she intended to self-fashion through the adoption of foreign words and expressions, particularly Italian ones, but these are frequently undermined by spelling mistakes. Detailed study of foreign-language misappropriation and reception enables an understanding of Miller’s double status not only as subject, but also as object of humour, a factor that distinguishes her text from others in the corpus of female-authored Grand Tour narratives.
Leisure Studies, 2002
This article explores a philosophical question concerned with the nature of the desire that moves one to travel, to engage with and know the world in its difference. Drawing upon French feminist theory I take up the Hegelian tradition of theorizing desire as a social relation that structures the everyday dynamics between self and other, self and world. Desire is also profoundly embodied, affective and unconsciously mediates our travel relations and experiences in culturally speci.c ways. Yet, within the leisure and tourism literature desire has rarely been theorized beyond the notion of individual motivation or an ideological conception of consumer wants as the product of false consciousness. In contrast this paper develops a textual analysis of the metaphors and narratives of travel that mediate the (western) feminine subject's desire to move into the world and engage with difference. As part of this method I draw upon excerpts from my own travel diaries to examine how different trajectories of desire structure the movement of feminine subjectivity within phallocentric culture. The journey of desire is inevitably incomplete, uncertain and produces moments that profoundly disturb and decentre the self. These liminal or heterotopic moments in travel afford us the possibility of glimpsing other modes of desire and hence different ethical relations between self and other, self and world.
Although tourism is often defined as characteristically modern, this article examines a series of Classical and early medieval texts (produced between the first and the fifth centuries C.E.) that challenge this view. After defining tourism as travel in the pursuit of enjoyment, the article demonstrates that touring for the sake of curiosity and desire was a familiar element of Roman life and a common component of popular discourse. Writers in Antiquity recognised curiosity and desire as catalysts for human movement. They characterised travellers as curiosity-seeking sightseers, a representation that was not without ambiguity as both male and female travellers were criticised for exhibiting restless behaviour if they lost sight of their entrusted primary tasks en route. Even so, there seems to have been a common perception in Roman Antiquity that travellers often felt a desire to see for themselves what they had previously only heard or read about.