Cultura e letteratura inglese

Travel writing as an act of mediation

“An untrodden and unmapped ground - Travel writing was considered as a minor genre until the last decades of the 20th century, when it gained increasingly commercial success and started to be extensively studied by scholars, who found it relevant to postcolonial studies”. [Carl Thompson, Travel Writing]

• A recent, modern branch of critical study which flourished enormously;
• It was considered to be a set of works/authors but there was no extensive study of focus on that;
• Around 1970s scholars got interested in Travel Writing, mainly from a postcolonial perspective.

Travel writing is considered to be a heterogeneous field, a genre mixed with other disciplines (literature, art history, archaeology, architecture, social history, philosophy, anthropology, geography, economics, sociology, history of science, history of ideas, religion).

Main tendencies in travel writing studies

• Historical: interested in the development of travel writing across history or in a specific historical period;
• Influential: analyses the influence of travel accounts on society or other types of literature, particularly novels, poems and art works;
• Cultural: focuses on the implications of travel writing as a tool to know and create an image of other cultures, an act of mediation (postcolonial issues – see Edward Said, Orientalism);
• Women’s Studies: when and how did women travel, what were their travelogues like? Women had a certain freedom as travellers and could express themselves and gained an economic independence thanks to travel writing.

Definitions: two predominant approaches

1. A narrow and exclusive approach

According to some critics travel writing is just the travel book, or travelogue. It is a retrospective, first-person prose narrative of the author’s own journey. It has an autobiographical character (“memoir”). Guidebooks are not travel writing. Limited to “modern travel books”, written from the 19th century onwards, exclude any earlier materials.

2. A broader and inclusive approach

Other critics consider “travel writing” or “travel literature” as an “umbrella concept”: travel writing “is not a genre, but a collective term for a variety of texts both predominantly fiction and non-fictional whose main theme is travel”. [Jan Born, “Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology”, in Perspectives on Travel Writing, ed. G. Hopper, T. Youngs, 2004]

The first approach is quite limited, while the second one is too broad: talking about travelogue is quite tricky, but it becomes important the framework into which we consider those works.

List of novels about travel

• Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594)
• Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
• Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
• Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
• Robert Louis Stevenson, The Treasure Island
• Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
• E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, A Room with a View

Travelogue as a genre

Travelogue as a genre – “the boundaries of travel writing are extremely blurred: it is difficult to define where “travel writing” ends and other genres begin, such as autobiography, ethnography, nature writing and fiction. It borrows freely from the memoir, journalism, letters, guidebooks, confessional narrative, and […] fiction”. [M. Kowaleski (ed.), Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel, 1992]

Another interesting insight is taken from Barbara Korte’s (German scholar) “English Travel writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Exploration, 1999, p.5.: “there are numerous accounts which let their travellers roam the world freely and which illustrate the genre’s particular potential to assemble a wealth of observations, experiences and reflections”.

Scholars agree that the representation of a travel experience into writing is never a straightforward report but undergoes a process of recreation (even if travelogues sometimes seem to be spontaneous).

Formal features

• Defined by a narrative core (a subject abroad);
• They tell the story of a journey – “travel plot”;
• Autobiographical stance: the voice narrating the journey may appear quite distinct from the “real” author;
• Language: hybridity in text modes and style (heterogeneous matter);
• Experience of otherness.

Travel writing involves the Other (autobiographical experience of otherness); “polyphonous” arena compounded of different voices. They are the report of “an encounter between self and other that is brought about by movement”. [Thompson, Travel Writing]

“Accounts of travel participate in acts of (inter)cultural perception and cultural construction, in processes of understanding and misunderstanding. These processes are undergone by the traveller on the journey and later experienced by the reader.” [Korte 1999, pp. 5-6]

What does this imply? Intercultural perception: you perceive yourself in relation with another culture and you construct your own and other’s culture (process of understanding of the other and yourself).

Traveller as cultural mediator

The development of the author-traveller’s self during and after the journey (experience that makes you change from what you were before leaving, a development which takes place during the travel). The negotiations and clashes between the author-traveller’s own culture and the new cultural context where s/he operates. The performative act of writing implies a manipulation of all autobiographical material, since it has to cope with the limitations of language, the reworking of memory, and the author’s choices in organizing his or her experiences.

“Even in a form with the apparent immediacy of a travel journal or diary, a writer necessarily picks out significant recent events, and organises those events, and his or her reflections on them, into some sort of narrative, however brief. Travel experience is thus crafted into travel text, and this crafting process must inevitably introduce into the text, to a greater or lesser degree, a fictive dimension.” [Thompson, Travel Writing, 27]

“Thus, a travel book is a literary product, which displays a constant interplay between fact and fiction, truth and invention, revelation and construction, information and entertainment”. [Silkstrom, The Idle Traveller, 167]

Different kinds of travelogues

There are different kinds of travelogues:

• “Object-bound” accounts / “informational accounts” (diplomats telling us about who they met or what they saw (basic informative quality, early travelogues mainly informative);
• “Subject oriented” / “experiential accounts” (interest in the traveller’s self/autobiographical, 18th century travelogues).

“It seems to me that the reader of a good travel book is entitled not only to an exterior voyage, to description of scenery and so forth, but to an interior, a sentimental or temperamental voyage, which takes place side by side with that outer one; and that the ideal book of this kind offers us, a triple opportunity of exploration – abroad, into the author’s brain, and into our own.” [Norman Douglas, Experiments, 1926]

Purpose, function and aim of the travelogue

• To be useful (must teach, say something to the others who can’t travel or are going to embark for a journey);
• To give delight (can’t be boring, must appeal and excite);
• Docere et probare (to teach and give evidence);
• Delectare (to give delight);
• Movere (to raise emotions).

From the end of the 18th century (Romanticism) there is a shift from a focus on outer reality to an interest in the traveller’s inner world (from an object oriented to an increase in experience-oriented approaches). Lord Byron was very important for the way in which the experience of writing is changed, and travellers look and talk at and about things.

Renaissance travel writing

Travel as a means of education: Grand Tour (experience of young aristocrats embarking for at least one year abroad which established a net of connections with the peers abroad from the same social class.

• 1570-1620: “advice to travellers” (political education, diplomacy);
• From 1620: politics, aesthetics, sciences, technology, mundane (Italy is a country which offers pretty much all of this).

*At the end of the Elizabethan era, we have a change in the purpose of these travelogues: aesthetics and sciences.

The traveller as a hero: Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, 1594, Lawrence Sterne, Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, 1768.

In the Grand Tour, travel is strongly bound to literature until the beginning of the 19th century (Napoleonic wars – mass tourism 1820). Writing becomes part of the pedagogy of travel. What the traveller saw had to be translated into a text, and organised within a frame of narrative, where the journey could be described as well as the places, the people, the works of art.

In the Renaissance there were rules, it became properly an art of rhetoric: Ars Apodemica (the art of writing about travel). German texts are the first ones to offer a method to write about travelling. These writings can be read as milestones in the formation of modern scientific methodology, but also as discourses on social practices of the period.

Earliest texts on travel writing: 1) Roger Ascham, “The schoolmaster”, 1570 and 2) Francis Bacon, “Of Travel”, 1601.

The Grand Tour: travelling to Italy

(Important Renaissance phenomenon)

Modern way of travelling as a “mass phenomenon” can be located in later middle ages, precisely in the 1300 when the first Jubilee was established by Pope Boniface VIII.

The Jubilee is the holy year in which the pilgrims going to Rome or Jerusalem could have a reminiscence of their sins.

Venice becomes an important point for pilgrims who are travelling to Jerusalem.

In the later Middle Ages, various social groups used to travel:

• Kings, courtiers, aristocrats, diplomats;
• Students and scholars;
• Merchants;
• Missionaries;
• Pilgrims (Rome and Jerusalem).

*closer to the modern travellers.

In the Renaissance, on the other hand, travelling becomes a means of education (the Grand Tour). Writings about travel start flourishing (i.e.: how to travel, what to see, and what to avoid):

• 1570-1620: “Advice to travellers” (political education, diplomacy);
• From 1620: politics, aesthetics, sciences, technology, mundane.

The Grand Tour paradigm

“The Grand Tour was, from start to finish, an ideological exercise. Its leading purpose was to round out the education of young men of the ruling classes by exposing them to the treasured artifacts and ennobling society of the Continent. Usually occurring just after the completion of studies at Oxford or Cambridge University and running anywhere from one to five years in lengths, the Tour was a social ritual intended to prepare these young men to assume the leadership positions preordained for them at home. “Grand Tour” began as a French phrase – le grand tour – but it was appropriated by Britons of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries whose wealthy nation had created ‘a substantial upper class with enough money and leisure to travel’”.

*many other kinds of journeys, undertaken by many sorts of people for many purposes were going on. J. Buzard, “The Grand Tour and after (1660-1840)”, pp. 38-9

Britons were the ones who can be identified with this phenomenon, they established this specific paradigm. However, we have many kinds of journeys, the Grand Tour is not the only way to travel around Europe (i.e.: merchants and pilgrims). This paradigm will be substituted later on, after the Napoleonic wars, that is to say mass tourism.

Important figures and notable works

• Richard Lassels (1603-68) The Voyage to Italy (1670) is considered to be the work who first used the term “Grand Tour”: “undertake a Grand Tour of France and the Giro of Italy”. He was a tutor of aristocratic families;
• William Thomas (1524?-1554) The History of Italy opened the way to Italy itself. Dedication to the Earl of Warwick: Italy “flourishing in civility”, encouraging wise and learned men to read the book and grasp what profit they may gather by travelling there. He also wrote Principal Rules of the Italian Grammar, with a Dictionarie for the better understanding of Boccace, Petrarcha, and Dante, gathered into this tongue (1550). He compiled a grammar to understand Italian poets and provides the tools for British travellers to learn a language and a place in terms of knowledge;
• Humanist Roger Ascham (1515-1568), former tutor of Queen Elizabeth (he taught Greek, Latin, and modern languages);
• Francis Bacon (1561-1626) philosopher and promoter of the experimental sciences, he wrote an essay on travel (considered to be one of the few first essays on travel with some specific instructions on travelling);
• Owen Feltham (1602-1668) On travel (1623), a short essay written in form of aphorisms which gives important to experience travel (only wise people can profit from travelling, not the fools, because they would only become fooler).

“Because the Grand Tour was expected to mingle with the social and political elite wherever he went, we must include among the aims of the Grand Tour the cultivation of a certain trans European class, consciousness, a ‘horizontal’ identification that linked the superior classes of Britain with their counterparts on the Continent and imposed upon the traveller a sense that he shared with these counterparts a common responsibility for the welfare of Europe as a whole.”

J. Buzard, “The Grand Tour and After” (1660-1840)

Itinerary for a British young man

Itinerary for a British young man (it could last from 1 to 5 years, depending on the wealth of a person):

• Calais – Loire Valley (considered to be the place where the purest French language was spoken) – Paris;
• Geneva (city very appreciated for naturalistic and cultural reasons like Calvinism) – the Alps – Turin or Milan – Florence (for at least 3 months);
• Venice – Rome, or vice versa;
• Naples;
• Return: Austria, the German university towns, Berlin, and Amsterdam.

Italy was considered the exciting destination and sometimes it was visited at the end of the journey.

Educative and preparatory function = classical education: “Since all our religion, all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above the savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean, a man who has not been to Italy, is almost conscious of an inferiority from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.” Samuel Johnson (1776)

Embarking for Italy has to be accomplished according to Johnson, the great man of letters of the English Enlightenment.

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776) → “A young man sent abroad to complete his studies was apt to return more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of any serious application than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home.”

→ Issue of religion: Protestantism vs Catholicism (immoral)

The Schoolmaster (1570)

• The work is addressed to Richard Sackville (posthumously published);
• Sackville in the preface says that it is dangerous to be taught by teachers who are not emphatic and teaches in a way that can kill the taste of learning;
• The Schoolmaster is a book about teaching Latin and how and what educators should be and do;
• He deals with travelling to Italy: important moment for learning the classics;
• Italy now has changed; the present manners and values differ from the past.
• Comparison between the traveller and Ulysses;
• In Italy there is no true religion;
• The young traveller, like Ulysses, defends himself from danger and he must be governed by wisdom;
• He must avoid temptations (the herbe Moly was given by Mercuy to Ulysses as an antidote to Circes’ potion);
• The traveller must not be exposed directly to another culture, otherwise he will be transformed by Circes;
• “Inglese Italianato, è un diabolo incarnato” famous saying at that time: some travellers might lose what they used to be and have;
• Italy was by then considered like a place of vice; Venice, in particular was associated to the New Babylon;
• Ascham defines the person who has undergone this transformation as a “marvelous monster” using bestiary connotations (metaphoric meanings): belly of a swine (vulgarity, greediness), head of an ass (he loses his intelligence), the brain of a fox (cunning but not fair), the womb of a wolf (violent during intercourse).

Travelling becomes unsafe for Protestants

• 1559 treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis;
• 1545-1563 Council of Trent (18 years council that the catholic church organized to counterbalance the European reformation).

• Italy was the seat of the Pope; Ascham is talking about the experience of travelling to Italy during the period in which the Council of Trent was going on, and later, just finished. The first manuscript, which was written before the council of Trent, was written with a different tone, less aggressive, not very critical against Italy. After the council, the manuscript was revised and rewritten in a harsh way.

Getting transformed by the experience of travel

Getting transformed by the experience of travel – Thomas Nash (play writer and satirist), The Unfortunate Traveler (1594)

“He that is a traveller must have the back of an asse to beare all, a tung like the tayle of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a bog to cate what is set before him, the eare of a merchant to heare all and say nothing.”

He talks about the transformation of the traveller; he must change into a number of animals because he must acquire some characteristics to adapt himself to the place where he is.

Hybridity

Hybridity – “hybrid”

• Has its origins in biology and botany;
• A key term in 19th positivist discourse, mainly to describe physiolog