A Critical Reader of the Romantic Grand Tour Tristes Plaisirs

by Chard, Chloe

• ISBN13: 9780719044984
• ISBN10: 0719044987
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-12-30
• Publisher: OXFORD UNIV PR

Summary

Chloe Chard assembles fascinating passages from late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century accounts of travel in Italy, by Northern Europeans, writing in English (or, in some cases, translated into English at the time); it includes writings by Charles Dupaty, Maria Graham, Anna Jameson, Sydney Morgan, Henry Matthews and Hester Lynch Piozzi. The extracts often focus on the labile moods that contribute to the ‘triste plaisir' of travelling (as Madame de Stael termed it): moods such as restlessness, anxiety, exhaustion, animal exuberance, sexual excitement and piqued curiosity. The introduction considers some of these responses in relation to the preoccupations and rhetorical strategies of travel writing during the Romantic period and introductory commentaries examine the ways in which the passages take up a series of themes, around which the five chapters are ordered: "Pleasure," "Rising and sinking in sublime places," "Danger and destabilization," "Art, unease and life," and "Gastronomy, Gusto and the Geography of the Haunted."

Author Biography

Chloe Chard lives and works in London.  She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research (Australian National University) and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Tasmania.

Table of Contents

Preface * Introduction * I: Triste plaisir * II: The tropes of travel: how to avoid languor in language * Pleasure * I: The foreign and the familiar * II: Tourism: the management of pleasure * Rising and sinking in sublime places * Danger and destabilization * I: Indolent delicious reverie * II: Disease, debilitation and delusions of revival * III: Banditti * Art, unease and life * I: Odd spectators * II: Sculpture studios; socializing with works of art * Gastronomy, gusto and the geography of the haunted * Bibliography