13 - Nineteenth-Century American Travel Essays: Aesthetics, Modernity, and National Identity

Summary

With a focus on the nineteenth century, this chapter shows the ways American essayists responded to the new possibilities of national and international travel in the modern age. Modernity offered the ideal conditions under which American travel essays could proliferate: developing infrastructures in transportation, communication, and the publication and distribution of books and periodicals; the growing commercial and imperial reach of the United States; rising literacy rates, which ensured a market for these texts; Old World tourism as a marker of elite and then middle-class identity; the status of Europe as a site of professional training; transatlantic networks of reformers; missionary activity in Asia and Africa; and hemispheric travel in the Americas. Travel writings were popular, a sign that they were performing significant cultural work. The tourist’s or expatriate’s provisional relationship to other peoples and places lent itself to the genre of the essay; this emphasis informed many travel essays. In rendering the interactions between consciousness and place, Americans pushed the boundaries of the genre, as travel essays blended with journalism, fiction, and autobiography.