Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789-1914

Taylor & Francis

Showing how specific rhetorical strategies used in nineteenth-century British travel writing produced fictional representations of continental Europe in works by Ann Radcliffe, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and Bram Stoker, Katarina Gephardt argues that nineteenth-century writers envisioned their country simultaneously as distinct from the Continent and as a part of Europe. She suggests that their imaginative geography of Europe anticipated Britain\u2019s ambivalence about European integration. > The nineteenth century was the heyday of travel, with Britons continually reassessing their own culture in relation to not only the colonized but also other Europeans, especially the ones that they encountered on the southern and eastern peripheries of the continent. Offering illustrative case studies, Katarina Gephardt shows how specific rhetorical strategies used in contemporary travel writing produced popular fictional representations of continental Europe in the works of Ann Radcliffe,.