French Romantic Travel Writing

This book provides a pioneering overview of the travel books produced by fourteen French Romantic writers in the first half of the nineteenth century. Their journeys ranged from Peru to Russia and from North America to North Africa and the Near East. A number of these books are acknowledged masterpieces of Romantic prose, and this study shows how their literary qualities enabled these writers (in spite of some self-indulgence) to explore fruitful approaches to theportrayal of other cultures. The book is especially concerned to show how writing such works became something of a rite of passage for French Romantics and why they published more of them than their English and German counterparts. This proves to have much to do with the demands of French culturalpolicy as it competed with British expansion after the defeat of Napoleon.