Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel-Writing, 1770-1840

The decades between 1770 and 1840 are rich in exotic accounts of the ruin-strewn landscapes of Ethiopia, Egypt, India, and Mexico. Yet it is a field which has been neglected by scholars and which remains outside the literary canon. In this book, Nigel Leask studies the Romantic obsession with these "antique lands", drawing on a wide range of 18th- and 19th-century travel books, as well as on contemporary scholarship in literature, history, geography, and anthropology. Viewing the texts primarily as literary works rather than "transparent" adventure stories or documentary sources, he sets out to challenge the tendency in modern academic work to overemphasize the authoritative character of colonial discourse. Instead, he addresses the relationship between narrative, aesthetics, and colonialism through the unstable discourse of antiquarianism, exploring the effects of problems of creditworthiness, and the nebulous epistemologicial claims of "curiosity" (a leitmotif of the accounts studied here), on the contemporary status of travel writing.

... addresses the intersections between space and time more fully than any other recent book on Romantic travel ... Leask's detailed study contributes valuably to the body of criticism on Romantic travel literature and, more broadly, to criticism on Romantic conceptions of place and space., At every turn, this book admirably resists overgeneralization and reductionism., This is a timely, engrossing, and important revisionary account of Romantic period travel writing; for textual/theoretical journeying, it is the most accomplished ars apodemica to date., Leask's approach is characterized by scrupulous attention to detail, ingenuity, and subtlety., Leask ranges more widely than any of his predecessors ... Leask admirably rises to the challenge by widening his scrutiny beyond works composed in English ... an admirable and original synthesis of much rarely explored travel material.