Travel Writing in the Romantic Era. Truth, Transport and Affective Realism

This paper on Anglophone travel writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries emphasizes the neglected topic of its reception. It argues that much historical and literary commentary on such writing fails to understand how the genre was shaped and understood, not least in the literary marketplace. According to Romantic readers and critics, the most successful writing employed “affective realism”, a combination of philosophical analysis, empirical observation and literary techniques designed to engage the feelings of the (general) reader. The importance ascribed to this mixture complicates the present-day scholarly preoccupations with “otherness” and authorial identity, enables us to ascribe historical specificity to travel writing of the period, and to evaluate the effectiveness of its different forms.