Reading and Writing Travels
Maximilien Misson, Samuel Waring and the Afterlives of European Voyages, c .1687–1714
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9737305 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richard Ansell (0009-0006-2478-9634, University of Leicester, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 133 |
| Issue | 565 |
| Pages | 1446-1477 |
| Publication date | 2018-12-31 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The English Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ehr/cey369 |
| OpenAlex | W2904045448 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
Travel writing often underpins studies of how people in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland understood themselves and the wider world. Scholars have focused on the representation of foreign encounters in print, however, with little attention given to how readers used travel books. Most histories of travel similarly deal only with experiences abroad, with few considering the return home. This article uses one work, Maximilien Misson’s New Voyage to Italy, and one reader, Samuel Waring, to explore the ‘afterlives’ of travel and travel books, closing the gap between the history of travel and the study of travel literature. Waring, a gentleman from Ireland, accompanied Misson to Italy in 1687–8, taking notes that reveal the origins of an influential book. He returned to A New Voyage to Italy in the decades afterwards, generating valuable evidence of contemporary engagement with travel writing. Waring’s notes and drafts hint at the reception of Misson’s book and place it within a body of ‘travels’, particularly in English and French. This transnational dimension complicates arguments about travel literature and national identity, but Waring instead encourages scholars to examine the role of books in self-fashioning. He used his reading, memories and souvenirs to present himself as a gentleman, a connoisseur and an example to his family, discussing Italy with returned and armchair travellers. The afterlives of travel and travel books provide a more complex understanding of how, and to what social ends, people with lived or vicarious experience of ‘abroad’ built understandings of the world beyond Britain and Ireland
Aesthetics · Art · Identity (music · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Representation (politics · Sociology · Travel writing · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · History · Law · Travel Writing and Literature
| Citations per year | 0.43 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2025 (7) |
| Highly cited | No |