Nineteenth-century urban space emerged as a category conceptualized through a web of contradictory discourses and visual practices. It was at once a cosmopolitan space and a national space, at once ...owned by an explicitly male gaze and traversed and looked at by women. And it was immediately both covered and shaped by an expansive print culture already in place, a culture whose most widely disseminated forms, the newspaper and the novel, embodied and at times analyzed the contradictory perspectives that composed the urban imaginary. Ever since Benedict Anderson’s influential work on the cultural construction of nationhood, scholars have understood these
Introduction Brigitte Bailey
American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824–62,
03/2018
Book Chapter
In 1844 a nineteen-year-old farmer’s son, printer’s apprentice, and aspiring poet – Bayard Taylor – sailed for Liverpool with two friends and with commissions for travel essays from theSaturday ...Evening Postand theUnited States Gazette. Taylor grew up in a society that linked European travel with cultural aspirations; as he says, “An enthusiastic desire of visiting the Old World haunted me from early childhood.”¹ However, his limited means led him to design “a more humble method of seeing the world that would place within the power of almost every one what has hitherto been deemed the privilege of
Irvingʹs Landscapes Brigitte Bailey
American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824–62,
03/2018
Book Chapter
In the period when modern tourism developed, from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries, a variety of “higher purposes” fueled its language and practice. These purposes included not ...only the investment of “religious awe” in nature but also the formation of class, gender, and national identities – the focal points of this study. Despite the modest claims of William Gilpin, the eighteenth-century English popularizer of “picturesque travel,” tourists’ perceptions of aesthetic order became the vehicle of their constructions of ideological order. Italy’s status within the culture of tourism as the land of the eye, the home of the
The Protected Witness Brigitte Bailey
American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824–62,
03/2018
Book Chapter
The beginning of the sustained influx of American tourists into Italy – in the 1820s and 1830s² – coincided with the peak of what C. P. Brand calls the “Italianate fashion” in England. As travel ...became possible again after the Napoleonic Wars, this English vogue resulted in a wave of visual and literary representations of Italy and things Italian.³ The widely diffused nature of the fashion, which spread through elite and popular culture, suggests that the encounter with Italy was a vehicle for the ongoing construction of a national subjectivity. “Italy” represented aspects of experience defined in opposition to “English
Perhaps more than any writer examined in this study, Harriet Beecher Stowe was an internationally known practitioner of a nation-producing genre by the time she traveled to Europe. Like Margaret ...Fuller, she grasped the possibilities of a popular print genre for reforming national subjectivities; her abolitionist novelUncle Tom’s Cabin(1852) was the most politically important and widely translated American novel of the nineteenth century and prompted her first European tour, in 1853, during which she was lionized in England.³ Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, she conflated travel writing with the novel; both wrote substantial descriptive passages based on their travels into
Conclusion Brigitte Bailey
American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824–62,
03/2018
Book Chapter
As the twenty-year-old Charlotte Forten describes her visit to the annual Boston Anti-Slavery Fair, she highlights two experiences: seeing some of the famous men associated with the movement (Wendell ...Phillips, Charles Sumner, and Ralph Waldo Emerson – “it wasgloriousto see such a trio” 274) and seeing the items on sale at the fund-raising Bazaar. Of the “many beautiful articles” contributed by supporters of abolition she singles out a cluster of tourist materials, a package sent by a famous British writer on travel, art, and aesthetic perception: Anna Jameson, author ofThe Diary of an Ennuyéeand books on
Fuller and Revolutionary Rome Brigitte Bailey
American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824–62,
03/2018
Book Chapter
Margaret Fuller was unusual among American travelers in the late 1840s in her decision to remain in Rome throughout the revolutionary period of 1847–9, in the depth of her personal and political ...immersion in Rome, and in her ability, honed in her U.S. writings, to function as a transnational public intellectual, as Charles Capper has argued, whose dialectical and cosmopolitan approach to culture and politics shaped her dispatches to theNew-York Tribune.² Her equally dialectical work as a gender theorist inWoman in the Nineteenth Century(1845), to return to Christina Zwarg’s point,³ led Fuller to understand the power
