The Legacy of the Grand Tour: New Essays on Travel, Literature, and Culture

by Lisa Colletta (Editor), James Buzard (Contribution by), Chloe Chard (Contribution by), Clare Elizabeth Hornsby (Contribution by), Laura Olcelli (Contribution by)

Overview

The topos of the journey is one of the oldest in literature, and even in this age of packaged tours and mediated experience, it still remains one of the most compelling. This volume examines the ways in which the legacy of the Grand Tour is still evident in works of travel and literature. From its aristocratic origins and the permutations of sentimental and romantic travel to the age of tourism and globalization, the Grand Tour still influences the destinations tourists choose and shapes the ideas of culture and sophistication that surround the act of travel. The essays in this collection examine a wide variety of literature—travel, memoir, and fiction—and explore the ways travel and ideas of “culture” have evolved since the heyday of the Grand Tour in the 18th century. The sites of the Grand Tour remain a powerful cultural draw, and they continue to define ideas of taste and learning for those who visit them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611477979
Publisher:	University Press Copublishing Division
Publication date:	12/09/2015
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Lisa Colletta is professor of English and director of the Communication and English Program at the American University of Rome.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Grand Tour and its Legacy, Lisa Colletta
Chapter 1: ‘Fog in the Channel’: Joking, Laughing, and Traveling
Chloe Chard
Chapter 2: Ellis Cornelia Knight as Artist, Writer, and Traveler in Late Eighteenth-Century Italy
Clare Hornsby
Chapter 3: Violet Ida Chomley: “not the ‘Grand Tour’ but the ‘Downward Path’”
Laura Olcelli
Chapter 4: Three British Travelers in Egypt: Sophia Lane Poole, Lucie Duff Gordon, and Emmeline Lott
Elisabetta Marino
Chapter 5: George Eliot On and Off the Beaten Track: “Recollections” of Germany and Italy
Andrew Thompson
Chapter 6: D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Tour of Fascist Italy: Sea and Sardinia and Etruscan Places
Judy Suh
Chapter 7: Postcolonial Valediction: Bitter Lemons of Cyprus and the Legacies of the Grand Tour
James Buzard
Chapter 8: Consuming Italy: From Goethe’s Italian Journey to Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love
Shannon Russell
Chapter 9: Ripley’s Tour: The Grand Tour as Confidence Trick in The Talented Mr. Ripley
Lisa Colletta
Chapter 10: See Rome—and Die: Legacies of the Grand Tour in a Roman Cemetery
Nicholas Stanley-Price
About the Contributors

Editorial Reviews

Colletta contends that the “[a]nxiety about authenticity that runs through so many travel narratives” can be explained if we see the traveler as a would-be anti-tourist (xv). The essays that form the collection persuasively support this claim, making The Legacy of the Grand Tour a valuable source for scholars not only of that eighteenth-century phenomenon, but of travel writing, cross-cultural encounters, and the nature of cultural memory. It will prove essential reading for scholars of the canonical writers to whom individual essays are devoted, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, George Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Laurence Durrell, and Patricia Highsmith.. .. All in all, Colletta and the other contributors to The Legacy of the Grand Tour have created a fascinating tour of narratives that should lead the reader not only to discover neglected authors and re-evaluate canonical ones, but to question our own modes of travel-writing, tourist activity, and self-representation as travelers and consumers of places, spaces, and experiences.

Papers on Language and Literature

Enhanced with the inclusion of a ten page Bibliography and an eight page Index, "The Legacy of the Grand Tour: New Essays on Travel, Literature, and Culture" is an impressively informed and informative work of originality and scholarship that would augment any academic library Literary Studies and Travel Literature reference collection and supplemental studies reading list. Exceptional and instructive, it should be noted for personal reading lists that The Legacy of the Grand Tour is also available in a Kindle edition.

Midwest Book Review