Journal Article

‘Travels for the Heart’: Practices of Mobility, Concepts of Movement and Constructions of Individuality in Sentimental Travelogues

Neumann, Birgit

2012

Overview

My article sets out to explore the complex intersections between mobility, sentimentality and gendered identity in 18th-century sentimental travelogues. Practices of mobility, I argue, are central to the range and the limits of human agency, entailing and, indeed, producing ideologically charged notions of gender, nation and class. The focus of my paper is on the European travelogue. Considering that the 18th century was an age of global exploration, one could in fact argue that these travelogues were quite restricted in their spatial scope. Imperial explorations and the travel literature they spawned were certainly crucial to English people’s concepts of space and concomitant notions of nation and Britishness. European travelogues, by contrast, could hardly offer their readership the thrill of the new; by the middle of the century Europe was well-travelled and the noteworthy places to be visited by every serious Grand tourist have been described all too often. Yet, perhaps exactly because of the limited geographical scope, the predictable itineraries and the repetitive spatial structure, European travelogues offered manifold opportunities for explorations of the self and for self-conscious engagements with mobility. Indeed, while much of 18th-century literature concerned with global exploration was deeply steeped in Enlightenment empiricism, the European travelogue evolved into a site for writers to explore the expressive and personalized potentials of autodiegesis: “In this branch of the genre,” Katherine Turner points out, “narrative ingenuity, even authorial oddity, become crucial components of the text’s interest. “

• Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG
• Subject: 18th century / Aesthetics / Authorship / Bildungsroman / Cosmopolitanism / Emotions / Erotica / Gender / Gender identity / Heroism & heroes / Identity / Ideology / Individualism / Intersectionality / Literary characters / Literary criticism / Literary devices / Literary influences / Literary translation / Literature / Mobility / Morality / Narrative structure / Narrative techniques / Narratives / Personal experiences / Plot (Narrative) / Travel literature / Writers