Rev. of Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790-1870 ed. Kevin Hutchings and Julia M. Wright and Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel: Expeditions and Tours in North America, 1760-1840 by Robin Jarvis (original) (raw)
Related papers
Storytelling: Global Reflections on Narrative, 2019
This is the story of my transatlantic life experience as an American pursuing a PhD in the UK for five years in dialogue with some British travellers that have comprised my scholarly inquiry for over ten years. Some travellers include: Morris Birkbeck, who left England for Illinois in 1817 seeking agricultural opportunities; he published his travelogue in 1818 inviting others to join him. William Cobbett, a well-known social reformer and outspoken critic of Birkbeck, Published his travelogue in 1818. William Faux responded to Birkbeck’s call; he criticized America for the practice of slavery, but enjoyed the plantation comforts slavery afforded. Frances Wright wanted to “fix” America’s slavery problem but otherwise saw the nation as a utopia; she travelled as a 20-something single woman and published her glowing report in 1821, returning in 1824 to implement a slavery-solution. Frances Trollope, vitriolic critic of American manners, ended up frustrated in Cincinnati after following Frances Wright and not getting what she bargained for. These travellers responded in print to each other, or knew each other personally. The chapter will offer research alongside reflections on travel, identity, nation, and privilege. As a storyteller and performer, this essay is based on a performative-dialogue delivered at the inter-disciplinary.net Storytelling conference of 2016 where my twenty-first century traveller-self spoke before an audience with a cast of traveller-characters.
History, 2021
This article explores the vocabularies of Amerindian languages published as part of the travel accounts written by explorers, traders and colonial policymakers in North America over the eighteenth century. Starting with the renowned Voyages by the Baron de Lahontan, the analysis takes as its endpoint the journals of the famous expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The aim of this study is to foreground what these lexicographic compilations reveal about European encounters with societies categorised as radically different from-and less civilised thanthe traveller's own: an 'otherness' sometimes exploited as a mirror and term of comparison that challenged the observer's ethnocentrism. Drawing on existing scholarship about the cultural history of Euro-American encounters in the modern age, this study puts forward an original analysis of the temporal conceptualisations underpinning vocabularies of 'savage languages', in terms of both historical diachronicity and time as a culturally constructed frame of human experience. This focus on the lists of words and phrases included in travel accounts, journals and relations makes it possible to question the relationship between the recording of linguistic evidence and travel narratives, and explore the complex negotiations between empirical observation and pre-existing cultural categories and stereotypes. A close reading of these often-neglected primary sources helps us to identify recurrent conceptual tropes and assign a central role to the historicisation of the Amerindian within wider processes of cultural construction of a global Europeanness. Giulia Iannuzzi, ‘Qu'il est question d'une langue sauvage’: Phrasebooks for European travellers in eighteenth-century North America, History (July 2021): 356-383, doi: 10.1111/1468-229X.13138, ISSN:1468-229X.
European Romantic Review, 2015
in the pages of the dozens of periodicals published in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Future researchers will owe a debt of gratitude to Jarvis for having collected this material and made it accessible and intelligent to us. Yet while Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel is a thus a great compendium to be mined by scholars for years to come, it is not the most dazzling of reads. To be that, we would have needed a much deeper and more sustained engagement with the socio-political and historical context-both in Britain and America-that produced the very reviews that Jarvis has so meticulously collected in his book. It is in this respect symptomatic that we are rarely awarded an insight into actual American travel narratives, reflecting actual journeys, by actual travelers, visiting an actual continent. Jarvis is right to suggest that reviews-like travel narratives themselves-can often be a useful indicator of the reviewers' (and travelers') own ideological perspectives and biases: "reviews are rich and under-utilized texts, interesting as much for their patterns of approval and disapproval as for the flashes of personality that show through the pall of anonymity, restricted admittedly in terms of the social background of their authors, but intellectually and rhetorically diverse in ways that have yet to be satisfactorily described and analysed" (52). Jarvis did a great job in describing the reviews he has gathered, but much of the work toward a comprehensive, historically-contextualized, and TransAtlantic analysis of American travel narratives still remains to be done.
The article analyzes the literary representations of Native Americans in Euro-American travelogues of the Antebellum era, as manifested in Washington Irving's A Tour on the Prairies (1835) and Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1843), focusing on how these two authors both utilized and transcended the then popular modes of narration on American Indians. It is argued that, despite the limitations imposed by their respective agendas (Irving's desire to come up with genuinely American mythos, equivalent to that of his European contemporaries; Fuller's involvement in women's rights), these two narratives may be seen as rare examples of works whose authors represented the American West and its native inhabitants without entirely succumbing to the aesthetic conventions and prevalent ideologies of the period.
2009
Until the 1980s, the countless reports, logs, narratives, letters, classical odes, directions to travellers, instructions for colonists, guidebooks, sermons and autobiographical pot-boilers produced by mariners and merchants, adventurers and ambassadors, gentlemen rakes down on their luck, Puritans seeking the promised land, aristocrats seeking fool’s gold, paid hacks, penniless humanists, disgruntled settlers, tavern bores and oddballs with itchy feet between, say, 1500 and 1650 were textual regions that barely existed on the map of the literary canon and remained largely untrodden except by colonial or maritime historians and amateur antiquarians. But since the 1980s, “[s]tudies of travel writing, colonialism, and post-colonialism have moved from a virtually invisible periphery to the very centre of the humanities” (Hadfield 2001: ix). This sea change is due to a combination of factors: the postmodern expansion of the academic discipline of English Literature into Cultural Studies...
Syllabus Exploring America and the World: French (Pre-) Revolutionary Travel Literature
2017
In France, a vast travel literature emerges throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, which is part of the European “politics of world exploration” (Despoix) that comes to map out multiple inter- and intracultural “contact zones” (Pratt). It also contributes considerably to the production of a particular world knowledge which comprises both traditional figures of comparing the ‘Old’ and the ‘New World’ (such as the 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes') as well as new scientific taxonomies and classifications belonging to the fields of geography, biology or botany. (co-taught together with Prof. Dr. Kirsten Kramer)