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A Continent of Pictures: Reflections on the “Europe” of Nineteenth-Century Tourists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

James Buzard
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Abstract

Nineteenth-century English and American travelers in Europe elaborated an “authenticity effect,” a rhetoric whose figures testify to the authenticity of sights seen and experiences undergone. Largely through the adaptation of picturesque conventions, visitors' gazes produced a touristic “Europe” consisting of distinctive, essential features that marked foreign places off from familiar domestic society. Acting out the evolving division of culture and society, the tour abroad defined home (England or America) as the increasingly anomic domain of work and compromised social existence, abroad (the Continent or “Europe”) as the compensatory realm of culture and, therefore, of human feeling, meaningfulness, and wholeness. In this figuration of (foreign but accessible) cultures as wholes expressing their essences in particular, instantaneously perceptible arrangements of parts, nineteenth-century tourism bridges Romantic-symbolist aesthetics and the professional anthropology of the early twentieth century. Placed at the center of the century-long bridge, the young Henry James wrote a series of travel essays in the 1870s that both forecast his later fiction and reveal the disquieting implications of the picturesque perspective. (JB)

Type
Special Topic: Literature and the Idea of Europe
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 1: Special Topic Literature and the Idea of Europe , January 1993 , pp. 30 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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