Description
This essay discusses the Romantic obsession with "antique lands" and how this obsession was reflected in travel writing. It argues that the instability of the discourse of curiosity was a key factor in this obsession, and that this instability was a reflection of the changing relations between literature, aesthetics, and colonialism.
The first book of its kind to study the Romantic obsession with the "antique lands" of Ethiopia, Egypt, India, and Mexico, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing is an important contribution to the recent wave of interest in exotic travel writing. Drawing generously on both original texts and modern scholarship in literature, history, geography, and anthropology, it focuses on the unstable discourse of "curiosity" to offer an important reformulation of the relations between literature, aesthetics, and colonialism in the period.
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