The course examines travel, exploration and wandering in “new worlds” as well as in Europe during the long eighteenth century, an era of great geographical expansion and major political, social and aesthetic changes in Britain. The selected readings, which include extracts from travel accounts, journals, letters, novellas and poems on four continents, Europe, America, Africa and Australia, do not simply record experiences but also play a part in shaping the world; at the same time, travel writing is shaped by the encounter with the foreign place and the Other and affected by issues of power, gender and class. Through our close reading and discussion of the selected texts, we will focus on constructions of gendered and racial difference as well as on the interplay between fiction and life writing. Travel will form the lens through which we will view eighteenth-century and Romantic debates on topics as diverse as colonization, the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, religion, science, and progress.
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2018