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The first book of its kind to study the Romantic obsession with the "antique lands" of Ethiopia, Egypt, India, and Mexico, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing is an important contribution to the recent wave of interest in exotic travel writing. Drawing generously on both original texts and modern scholarship in literature, history, geography, and anthropology, it focuses on the unstable discourse of "curiosity" to offer an important reformulation of the relations between literature, aesthetics, and colonialism in the period.
This book investigates how the concept of 'curiosity' functioned as a central, unstable discourse within Romantic-era travel writing to shape colonial perceptions of non-Western regions. Nigel Leask, a scholar of Romantic literature, synthesizes primary travel accounts with interdisciplinary research from geography, history, and anthropology. He argues that the aesthetic framing of travel writing during the period between 1770 and 1840 served to mediate the complex power dynamics between the observer and the observed in the context of expanding imperial interests.
What You Will Find
Scholars in the field of Romantic studies and post-colonial literature frequently cite this work as a foundational text for understanding the intersection of travel writing and imperial ideology. Readers often note the academic density of the prose, which demands a high level of familiarity with both literary theory and the historical context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Page Count:
354
Publication Date:
2002-03-21
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0199247005
ISBN-13:
9780199247004
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