The Uses of Travel
Science, Empire and Change in 18th‐Century Travel Writing
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12880652 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Morgan Vanek (0000-0002-2857-4044, University of Toronto, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue | 11 |
| Pages | 555-564 |
| Publication date | 2015-11-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Literature Compass (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1741-4113 • E-ISSN: 1741-4113 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/lic3.12280 |
| OpenAlex | W2173213001 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 20 |
This essay surveys recent critical approaches to 18th‐century travel writing, with an emphasis on a seeming contradiction in the way the field treats the possibility that the traveller might be changed by the experience of travel. On the one hand, the traveller's vulnerability to external influence seems to represent a threat to British imperial authority, particularly in studies of scientific travel in the service of empire – but on the other hand, recent studies on the novel's debts to travel writing insist that the traveller's capacity to change is fundamental to any argument for travel's edifying potential or contribution to civic improvement. To resolve this divide, this article will argue that reading 18th‐century travel writing for the moments in which the ‘changeable’ traveller appears in a positive light might help to open new avenues of research on the form and function of change in 18th‐century records of scientific observation. Looking ahead, this essay proposes that future studies in scientific travel might draw inspiration from recent research on sympathetic travellers as agents of empire, and continue to investigate how the traveller's capacity for change could add nuance to our history of the scientific observer as – in Captain Cook's terms – a ‘disinterested’ “eyewitness to a fact.”
Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Computer security · Contradiction · Empire · Epistemology · Function (biology · Literature · Political science · Reading (process · Sociology · Travel writing · Vulnerability (computing · Computer Science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology · Travel Writing and Literature
Travelers and travel liars, 1660-1800
Tobias Smollett
Travel Writing and the Natural World, 1768–1840
Imperial Eyes
Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France
Romanticism and Colonial Disease
China and the English Enlightenment
Eighteenth‐Century Indians’ Travel Narratives and Cross‐Cultural Encounters with the West
Science and the Atlantic World in Early American Literary Studies
Travel literature and the evolution of the novel
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |