| Description |
xi, 453 p. ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (p. [414]-440) and index. |
| Contents |
Introduction -- The birth of a fashion (1) : empire and exile -- The birth of a fashion (2) : high hopes restored -- From fashion to ritual : itineraries and incentives -- The pleasures and challenges of subjectivity : from dreams, humour, and self-consciousness to autobiography -- Between dreams, desires, and realities (1) : Switzerland and the romantic 'North' -- Between dreams, desires, and realities (2) : the 'Orient' and Spain -- Between dreams, desires, and realities (3) : the 'Orient' of the Maghreb and the Old Levant -- Women travellers and autobiography -- The wish to guide and to inform : the genre under pressure -- Nature, science, vision -- Intertextuality and the quest for literary energy -- From avatars to decadence and future directions. |
| Summary |
In the first half of the nineteenth century most leading French Romantic authors wrote travel books. This book is the first study exclusively devoted to surveying the travelogues they produced and the reasons for, and significance of, this trend. Whilst 'the journey' was one of Romanticism's central images, suggesting as it did a dynamic, expanding, and evermore complex world in which artists' lives were increasingly experienced as wanderings and endless quests, the fashion for Romantic travel books was more marked in France than in Germany or England. Chateaubriand, Stal, Stendhal, Nodier, Hugo, Lamartine, Nerval, Gautier, Sand, Custine, Quinet, Mrime, Dumas, and Tristan all wrote one or more travelogues, including at least four masterpieces--Hugo's Le Rhin (1842), Nerval's Voyage en Orient (1851), and Stendhal's two Rome, Naples et Florence (1817 and 1826). The book explores the reasons for this difference from England and Germany. These include French foreign and cultural policies, as well as the particular needs of Parisian publishers. It puts forward the case for the collective achievement of these Romantic travel books, compared to those of most later writers in nineteenth-century France. A distinctive feature of the survey is its belief in the value of concentrating on the text of these books as published by their authors, as opposed to manuscript and peripheral material. -- Publisher description |
| Subject |
Travelers' writings, French -- History and criticism.
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French literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.
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Romanticism -- France.
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French literature. (OCoLC)fst00934688
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Romanticism. (OCoLC)fst01100133
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Travelers' writings, French. (OCoLC)fst01155743
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France. (OCoLC)fst01204289
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| Chronological Term |
1800 - 1899
|
| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc. (OCoLC)fst01411635
|
| ISBN |
9780199233540 (hbk.) |
|
0199233543 (hbk.) |
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